It would have been around April or May 2011. We had made the decision to start Inspire Church Singapore, and the official launch date was to be 13 November. I was having one of my nightly prayer sessions. At that time this involved plastering the walls with large sheets of paper, a basket of markers and crayons, and Christian worship music videos playing loudly on the TV. As I stood there with the music pumping, looking at the paper on the wall, I saw a statement on the wall (someone we had invited over the night before had written it). It said "to seek and save the lost." For those uninitiated, this is a very general Christian term that finds its way into a lot of church vision statements and statements of faith. But it didn't sit with who we are, or who we believe God to be, or who I believed we were called to be as a church. And so I found myself reaching out with a large marker and crossing it out, and writing the words "Love Without Agenda" underlined, emphasised with block lettering and a few exclamation marks. Slightly smaller underneath I wrote "A Home of the Disillusioned." These two statements would become the central heartbeat of who we are as a community. If you have done any work on organisational building and vision casting, these would become known as our vision and mission statements.
What is interesting to me about vision is that it is a combination of our values and our beliefs, and how we see those working through action. A good vision that honestly represents who we are holds these three things in unity, and that becomes our culture. Culture is the intersection between what we believe, what we value, and how we act. We all see examples of really negative cultures where people believe one thing but do another. They might believe in inclusion but their values tell them to exclude, and their actions are anything but inclusive. They invite people in and then force them to change. So we can see how a culture, a behaviour, and a language can evolve that is not always in unity.
What was important to me was that the culture of Inspire Church was going to be honest and aligned. Our behaviour, our language, and who we were when people weren't watching had to not only be intentional, but had to be honest and transparent. If we were truly going to love without agenda, then that was going to impact everything. It was going to impact how we read scripture, what traditions we allowed to go forward, what routines we hold onto and which ones we have to let go of.
This idea of values and beliefs being aligned with vision, and that underpinning the culture of a space, is going to resonate through everything I write on this blog. I want this to be the introduction because the heartbeat behind what this page is about, who I am as an artist, who I am as a pastor, and who I am as a teacher, comes down to living without agenda. As much as we need resources, as much as things like an audience and influence matter, if those things come out of agenda and that kind of motivation, then that is a very specific version of a life. One that has never quite sat right with me. If I am given the chance to do something I know will make an impact on the world, on somebody's life, or on an environment, and I have to choose between that and something that is going to earn me money for a certain amount of time, I am slightly self sabotaging , in that I am always going to choose the thing that has the impact over the thing that is going to benefit me financially.
I see this, the pouring out of ourselves without a transactional value attached to it, as part of what it means to be truly human. So come on this journey with me. Enjoy the ride and enjoy where it takes us. We are going to explore art, creativity, and education. We are going to explore faith woven into everything we do. Whether you are explicitly Christian, explicitly atheist, or somewhere in the very large grey area in between. Or whether you are an educator here to see what I do as a teacher. You will find that my identity as a teacher is underpinned by my identity within art and creativity, and my faith, and this complexity enriches my practice.
Have an amazing week. I look forward to posting more of these.