When I was a kid my mom taught me how to play with a trompo. That is basically a spinning top but you use a whip to keep it going. In the decades since my childhood I have seen only one other kid playing with that kind of whipping top. It seems that they are not very common. And especially in our success oriented society that is not too surprising. They are a little bit tricky to control but again it is fun to see how long you can keep them from slowing down and tipping over. And one of the fascinating things about spinning tops in general is, the faster they spin the more stable they are. If they are not in motion they fall. They are made to rotate.

A roly-poly toy is in a way the exact opposite. With their round bottom and their low center of gravity every motion out of the stable position is compensated and the toy goes back into its state of origin. These little friends are made to stand still. And they are very good at it.

I am fascinated by the infrastructure of military camps. In a way they are like little cities. And quite a number of people just work there to keep the machinery running. It doesn’t matter if they cook, clean, produce things like electricity, or fix broken stuff. But they have one distinct difference to cities. Everything going on there serves the mission. Of course they have cooks. But only because soldiers need to eat to do a great job. Of course someone has to take care of the waste. But only because soldiers cannot use their precious time for tasks like that. They need to focus on the mission and they need people to cover their backs. And of course things break and have to be fixed. Soldiers need great equipment. But they are experts in using the stuff and they need other experts to maintain it. In a perfectly working base everybody serves the mission. Directly or indirectly. Nobody is missing and nobody is dead weight.

Cities lack the mission. It is easy to find two people living in the same town who don’t have anything to do with each other. And it is even important that cities and countries in that sense lack a mission. In the history of Europe for example we find a couple of examples where nations tried to work on a common goal. In that case it usually was world domination. Or at least a war of some kind. And one thing is quite obvious: On the long run concentrating on one goal totally wrecks the economy. For a short period of time it can be the engine increasing the wealth of the country but it will burn out quickly. While military camps are only present as long as the mission lasts cities are built to stay. Base camps work better the more they can focus on the mission. They are like spinning tops. Cities are more like roly-poly toys. They try to always rest in a stable position. And when the mission of the army gets out of focus their camps turn into cities. Again a lot of settlements in Europe were former Roman bases.

When I look at churches I often see the desire to be stable. And I get it. It is always good to know how things are. Better to work with an oak than a tumbleweed. But the followers of Christ were never called to become a city. (Yeah, I know, city on the hill and all. But the point there is the being seen part not the city part.)  We are not called to be stable and in essence self-serving. We are called to serve the people, the world. We have a mission. And everything we do should be pursuing that purpose.

A friend of mine told me a while back that Microsoft hat at one point the internal mission statement “sun down”. Basically everything anybody at Microsoft did was measured in how much it decreased the market value of the company Sun Microsystems in areas where both companies were competing. (If you don’t know them, you can see how well that went for Microsoft.) “Sun down” is an easy enough statement. All personal was able to learn that in a second and then act accordingly. But what is the mission statement of the church?

I think a lot of people will have an initial response just like mine. I thought “Mathew 28 of course. ‘Go into all the world…’ and so on.” But then I stumbled over something else. A couple of times in the Gospels Jesus summarizes big chunks of the Bible with single statements. And one of those was “Love God with all your heart and your neighbor like yourself.” That is what it’s all about. Later he added something to the Old Testament. The only thing in a way that is different between the two parts of the Bible. He said “Love each other as I have loved you.” (Using himself as an example was of course impossible before.) Do we see a pattern emerging? That is the mission. We shall love everybody the way Jesus loved us. (And yes, Mathew 28 is included in that.)

And when we take the “love everybody like Jesus” and let that be our mission, we can look at everything we do in church in that light. Does this serve in a direct or indirect way loving others? Is the love for people in our neighborhood what makes the church go round? And then we should make some adjustments. Because we were never called to build big church communities. What we do cannot and should not be self-serving. I know that the organizational stuff and such has to happen. But again in a love-others oriented church that becomes necessary to be the legal foundation of what we are doing. And in that it serves the mission. Because like a spinning top focusing on what Jesus told us to do will stabilize us. We were never made to stand still. So let’s stop trying to.