Today, I took my son to the airport for an early flight, very early in fact. On my way out of the airport, I wasn’t paying much attention and ended up in the return lane to the terminal. On this pass, I took the arrival instead of the departure lane. Just a few moment earlier, I had been in a traffic jam trying to edge into a place to let my son out, get his bag from the trunk without getting run over by other motorist in the departure section. Now, just moments later I was driving through the arrival section and there was no one, that’s right, not one car in the whole section. Everyone was leaving, no one was arriving. Of course, the time had something to do with this condition. But, it made me think about the church.
A missional church is one that is much more like the departures than arrivals. We even have a word that focuses on arrivals. We sometimes call folks gathered congregants. What if we referred to them as departurants. As Sweet says in So Beautiful, we need to reboot our operating system. But, one reboot only solves the problem for just a few days, maybe a week. I have a program that scans my computer once a week on Sunday morning about 3 am. I am always amazed at how many files the system has created that is now clogging up my system and the speed at which it runs. Clean and reboot frees up the system to run as it was designed. Surely, that would work with the church, don’t you think? Sweet also points out that “reboot” is just a more Googley way of saying “repent” which has quiet a Gutenberg appeal to it.
What if we learned to reboot our arrival mentality in favor of a departure mentality. What if we rebooted our attitude of the ingrained “worship of worship,” that we have developed for our gatherings, or worse yet, our worship of our own brand of worship. What if we were more intentional about what’s happening out there than in here even on Sunday, so much so that we can hardly wait to get back out there. What if Gutenbergers made an intentional effort to become Googleys, is that even possible? What if we learned to reboot at the moment we become a departurant until to some degree it becomes a way of life.
It doesn’t take long for our arrival mentality to regain prominence over our departure mentality. So, “Reboot,” I say unto you, “Reboot!”
