Pensamientos para hoy (afterthought for today)

Measurable Performance Objectives

At Essex County College where I teach Comparative Religion we are required to evaluate our courses according to Measurable Performance Objectives or MPOs. MPO is just a fancy way of talking about evaluation of goals. Anyone who is responsible to oversee a program knows that to be able to evaluate the program you need to have measurable goals. MPOs can help measure the success of a teacher or a business.

Being able to measure the success of the church is also important. Yet, before we can evaluate the success of a church, we need to set goals and objectives. Each ministry of the church needs to set goals and objectives so that at the end of the year, when we report to the congregation, we can show how we met our goals and objectives. Yet an even more basic and fundamental question must first be answered before we can set specific goals for our ministries. We need to know the purpose of the church. We need to be able to clearly state why our church exists. What is the purpose of the church? What does God want us to be doing? In the next several weeks I will be writing about the purpose of the church. Only when we know what the church is and for what purpose it exists can we have any meaningful conversation about goals and objectives.

The Bible tells us that one of the purposes of the church is to be a temple for God's presence and glory. The church is the place where God's glory dwells among his people. The Bible says that "the church which is [God's] body, the fullness of [God] who fills all in all. . . the whole building being fitted together is growing into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit (Ephesians 1:22-23; 2:21-22)."¹

What kind of impression do people have of the church? When they think of church (and here I mean the people inside the building not the building itself) do they think of God's presence dwelling among us? When people think of our congregation, do they think that we are the place where the all-powerful ruler of the universe is present? As God's dwelling place, his church is to be a place of holiness and a place that reflects his power, majesty, and glory. God's presence must be visible and tangible and evident in our midst or we don't pass the MPO. When we gather together as God's church, we must be able to clearly see God's presence among us or we have failed to meet one of the basic purposes of the church.

Praying that God will fill our church with his glory,

Pastor Steve Lorenz
February 18, 2011

¹ Ephesians 1:22-23; 2:21-22, NASB (New American Standard Bible). Unless otherwise noted all Scripture quotations taken from the NASB.

Jesus is the greatest teacher who ever lived. One of Jesus' techniques was to relate spiritual ideas to common everyday life. Pensamientos (afterthought) is an attempt to follow Jesus' method of teaching. Its title is in Spanish because we recognize the importance of multi-culturalism. We hope to translate some of these messages into Spanish soon.

Find more afterthoughts at Pensamientos (afterthoughts).

You can read recent sermons by Pastor Lorenz at Featured Sermon.