Dear Conference Family,
This article starts what I hope is a semi-regular series on who we are and what we are about here in the Rocky Mountain Conference (RMC). Several months ago, the Conference Executive Committee voted to support some updates and changes to our mission, aspirations, and priorities. These were shared with those who attended the town hall meetings last fall. However, since many more of you read NewsNuggets than attended those meetings, I thought it would be good to share here what we presented in those meetings more widely with our Conference family.
That to which we aspire, hold as values and practical priorities, are those things that are unique to Rocky Mountain at this point in our history. Unchanged is our vision, allegiance, and motivation that we share with the rest of the worldwide Seventh-day Adventist Church.
We have presented these mission statements, aspirations, and priorities in a familiar way. If you’ve visited the RMC web site in the last few years, you’d have seen them displayed on the very bottom of the home page (rmcsda.org). Though we changed things quite a bit, they are still presented in a general format that should be familiar to you. This series of articles are written to explain what’s new and what’s been updated.
When I first arrived here, I was impressed by the Conference mission statement. It was developed over several months following discussions among pastors and leaders of the Conference.
I was so struck by the concise statement of mission in the phrase “Knowing Christ and Making Him Fully Known” that I want to keep that as our banner headline over all of it. So, you’ll see on our web site that very statement as our headline when you scroll to the bottom of the home page.
In the “Our Mission” section, we’ve broken that down into two statements. The Mission Statement is to “Enlarge the kingdom of Jesus Christ in our territory.” That’s our marching orders from Scripture. Though we can send missionaries to other parts of the world, our main focus should be where we live—our cities, towns, communities, and rural neighborhoods.
“Brighten the corner where you are” still rings in my ears from my early Sabbath School days. I do believe that we are all where we are for a reason. And I believe that our dear Heavenly Father would like nothing more than to have His children let others know of Him and His great love for them.
But it needs to be even more specific than that, and “Our Vision” focuses the laser to a very sharp point, to “Enlarge the territory Jesus has in each heart and enlarge our Conference family by welcoming new followers of Christ.”
To be most useful for our Lord means to be honest with Him every day. To become our best selves, we should continually be willing to surrender more and more of our lives, hearts, thinking, and activities to Jesus. When God said He was a “jealous God” it was because the one thing He doesn’t do well is to share a throne with anyone else. The more we surrender to Him, the more peace we will realize, the more power we will have for good, and the more like Him we become.
So, I should ask you, what are the unsurrendered parts of your heart? What are you holding back from Him? Are there habits, relationships, prejudices, or longings that are not in harmony with a heart that wants to be heart for God? If the Spirit is gently leading you to surrender more and more of the territory of your heart to Jesus, I pray you will follow where He leads.
I’m convinced that the ability of the church to enlarge the territory of this Conference field with new believers is directly related to our willingness to let Jesus take over more and more of our lives.
That’s because the more Christ has taken root in our lives, the safer and more attractive our churches will be. And, as it has been wisely noted in the past, while there may be little hard evidence a Christian can point to as irrefutable that proves Jesus is really God and that His appearance here on this earth is not a fable, the changed life of the Christian is impossible to impeach.
My final words in this introductory article are to invite you to live the Values shown under our Mission and Vision statements. If together we live lives with those values and are true to our mission, I believe there’s no limit to what can happen for Christ in our conference!
Until next time,
Pastor Mic
—Mic Thurber is RMC president.
