AGORA Experience with St. Paul's Lutheran
St. Paul’s Lutheran, Minnetonka is in transformation. We find ourselves on an exciting and challenging journey, endeavoring to follow a path where we see God leading us without a concrete sense of the destination. One of the places the path has led us is to Agora Ministries. Many of us have felt a hunger or calling to share our ministry with another congregation.
Since that appears to be what Agora is all about, our Pastor Louise approached Pastor Cherian to discuss possibilities. As I suspect often happens with Pastor Cherian, we found ourselves simultaneously in the midst of Mission Awareness Training and Discipleship Academy. Agora has a clear stated purpose and a strong, intense agenda, but what you actually get out of it may be quite different than the stated purpose. The stated purpose of Mission Awareness Training is to “equip congregation members to use diversity as an opportunity for community building and expanding the kingdom of God”. Our small group had a broad range of experience. Many of the staggering examples and information presented resulted in responses ranging from shock to “well, that’s obvious”. What really happened was that Agora’s presence provided the underlying fabric upon which a gathering of believers in the presence of God shared and discussed opportunities for serving our community with newly found focus.
The Vision for Agora Discipleship Academy is “to prepare and inspire newer Americans and people born in the USA to follow Jesus in their personal lives and to become leaders in Christian communities who will minister to ALL people.” The plan is to gather a group of believers “that don’t look very much like each other” in the presence of God to study scripture and to share what God is up to in one another’s lives. One of the exciting things that is really happening is a movement from an intellectual understanding that we are all equal in God’s eyes to the experience of that equality as well as the richness of insights and awareness that come sharing Christ’s story within such a diverse group. In this October we have participated in the “Creating and Sustaining Congregations with Diversity” Agora seminar, led by Dr. Craig Van Gelder. When I try to express my experience at the seminar, I keep visualizing the experience of reading scripture. There has been nothing new in scripture for over 2000 years, but every time I read it, something new-to-me is revealed. The seminar managed to weave together a large number of scriptural references and approaches to “being church” within a cultural and historical perspective that brought clarity to quite a number of experiences that I had never understood.
The three nuggets that I found to be the most revealing were “the mystery of the already and the not yet”, the church centered view of mission vs. the kingdom centered view, and the concept of envisioning God as a sending God vs. a relational God. Each of these nuggets has been my thoughts and meditations repeatedly since the seminar. The final part of the seminar consisted of discussions with and between active Agora congregation partnerships and some of their members. Initially, this seemed a little out of place, but then it … almost magically … seemed to knit everything from the day together.
In summary, the Agora experience at St. Paul’s is clearly an important part of what God is up to in our congregation. Even though our involvement has been over a relatively brief interval, those of us who have participated directly have been enlightened, educated, equipped, and encouraged in our journey toward embracing and engaging diversity and growth. Vince Jacobson, President, St. Paul’s Lutheran