The glory and beauty of the Gospel is its simplicity.

Likewise, the most beautifully lived life is a life lived as a reflection and conduit of the Gospel.

I attended the M25 Conference, held in Kansas City, Missouri (just one day after the Chiefs groaningly lost their quest to be “three-peat” Super Bowl champions), and I want to take a few minutes to help myself by recounting some of what I experienced there. If you’re a jerrythinks regular, you know that I use this platform to help process my thoughts, as well as cement some things that are still a little wispy in my mind. In other words, this type of blog post helps me grab things from the air and nail them to the floor, proverbially speaking.

This is the first “M” conference I’ve ever been to. They happen on a 4-year cycle. I’ve been serving in the Church of the Nazarene for over twenty years, so I’m not sure how I’ve missed this good gathering of Nazarenes. At any rate, I’m glad I’ve now participated in what I heard years ago as “what the Church of the Nazarene does best.” That’s high praise for a conference, so I had relatively high expectations heading into this Monday-Wednesday experience.

Do you know someone who’s well connected? Someone who is good at making connections with people, networking, and fostering relationships that are interconnected across a nation? I would say that it seemed that nearly every person (thousands of them) at the M25 gathering was a well-connected pastor/leader/missionary/laity, with the exception of yours truly. I know that’s not entirely accurate, but that’s how I felt for much of the conference.

In contexts such as conferences with thousands of people present, I typically find that it takes extra effort on my part to meet, to mingle, to interact, and to seek out meaningful connections. And I’m happy to do it for the sake of more opportunities to serve more people through encouragement, through mutual support, and through the building up of the Church. All that to say that in a room full of people, while my default setting is to find a corner and wait it out, I decided instead to wade in and look for the connections God had for me. And I did. I found some.

I’m thankful for David and Yhoshua, and for Dale. I had never met these men before but was thankful to meet them and to connect together, gathering around the shared purpose of making disciples.

I enjoyed meeting Lonnie, a dude who doesn’t merely have one of the best heads of hair I’ve ever coveted, but a hero who has re-entered the pastoral ministry scene for the express purpose of ministering specifically to young adults. We share that passion in common, even if we are polar opposites on the hair spectrum.

As for the up-front speakers, I was entirely blessed by every single preacher who shared God’s Word with us carefully and powerfully. Stan Reeder, the Regional Director of the Church of the Nazarene in USA & Canada, Carla Sunberg, who serves as one of our General Superintendents, Lamorris Crawford, a former NFL chaplain, Kevin Jack who pastors Church for the One in Lakeland, Florida, and finally John C. Maxwell, global leadership guru. Every one of them brought God’s Word in the power of God’s Spirit. And without exception, as soon as they concluded their respective messages, I wanted them to run it back so I could hear it again. Thankful for the videos that’ll soon be uploaded. I guarantee that I’ll be listening to every one of those messages multiple times.

The thread that carried throughout the conference was the need for the Church to love all people everywhere, caring not merely about accomplishing a nebulous mission, but bringing the heart of Jesus Himself into every thought, every word we speak, every decision we make, and every interaction we have with every person we see; and doing so with humility, with compassion, with the very eyes of God that sees every person as preciously loved by God. When we do that, we dignify each person, and we engage the Gospel.

The conference, for me, served powerfully as a recalibration on our mission. The work of the Kingdom of God is to seek out the lost coin, the lost sheep, the lost son and daughter. Jesus Himself said that He came to “seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10).

While the word “evangelism” was peppered throughout the conversations and messages I heard, I did not bristle at it as I have in the past. This might surprise you, but not every person who claims to know God buys into the idea that those who claim to know Him are called to love people with His kind of love (agape), AND called to–as His Spirit leads and enables–speak His name and share the message of the Gospel with others. But this reality is precisely what has brought the Church in America to her knees. We are ineffective, impotent, ambivalent, withering, and anemic.

So the call going out to those in attendance at the M25 conference is not to “do better”. No, no, no. The call is rather to, if I may put it in my own terms, to “give up.”

In order for the Gospel to advance, we must give up the security of a sheep pen that holds 99 out of 100 sheep. There is ALWAYS a “one” in each of our lives that must be found.

We must give up our church culture that placates and pacifies religious church-goers rather than lives radically among our neighbors so that Jesus alone is seen and by loving well, we are afforded any opportunity to bring the peace, grace, and hope of Jesus to our world.

We must give up the notion that anything at all is worth more than Jesus Himself in our hearts. As well-known atheist Penn Jillette once famously said of Christians…

“I’ve always said that I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize. I don’t respect that at all. If you believe that there’s a heaven and a hell, and people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life, and you think that it’s not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward—and atheists who think people shouldn’t proselytize and who say just leave me alone and keep your religion to yourself—how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?”

Let’s say you had a friend who got diagnosed with a condition you have had. Let’s say you were given the antidote to that condition and that medicine had cured you. Let’s say that everyone who’s taken this antidote has been healed of that condition. What would keep you from sharing that medicine with that person who’s just learned they have this condition?

Again, that’s a simplistic view of the Gospel, but I’ll say again that the beauty of the Gospel is its simplicity. And I believe that despite the sickening state of the Church in America today, that beauty and that simplicity are still very much intact. The glory and power of the Gospel to change lives is as potent as it ever has been. If we will simply give our whole selves to the work of loving people in the name of Jesus and the work of His Spirit in ours and in their lives, and boldly uphold the message of the cross, I truly believe that even America can be saved.