Changes
This past week I began the process of re-visioning and dreaming about the future of my ministry and the assignment God has given Community Baptist Church. Space does not permit me to share everything that I am learning and since I have not presented any of this information to my leadership team I want to share just some broad strokes of what I sense God doing.
First, after an unusual week- Wednesday and Thursday of this past week I experienced a nearness to God I have not experienced for quite some time. During some prayer and Bible study times God began to unveil for me some principles that I believe can transform our ministry. Then Friday and Saturday my wife and I took several of our teenagers and two young adults to Vancouver, WA for the NWBC Student Conference. Watching yet another generation of teenagers who are unashamedly passionate about their relationship with God I was humbled. I was reminded that I too once shared a similar passion. But ‘church,’ ‘ministry,’ and the business of pastoring had gotten in the way. I hungered for a freedom to sing and participate in worship as these young people around me were experiencing. I was forcefully reminded that if there was a problem, it was not that God’s passion for me, or for this world had changed, but that something inside of me had changed. And since the problem was in me, no one else could come close to a solution.
I had been working on a message from Exodus 15 all week. That song of Moses and the Israelites helped uncover for me some primary choices that our church must make in order to be where God needs us to be.
First, we have to recover a God-sized vision of who God is. We have reduced God to a slightly larger version of ourselves. We need to recover some of what John experienced on the island of Patmos- see Rev 4.
Second, we have to learn to express that which we claim to feel. The words of our songs are not the problem- whether they are worship choruses written last week or the great hymns of the faith written in the past 300 years. The problem is we just don’t mean what we sing any more. We have allowed our stereotypes to restrict our expression. When I was courting my wife I would go hours without sleeping if I had the chance to spend time with her, I would go without eating; I would do whatever it took to find ways to spend time with her, to express my feelings for her. When it comes to spending time with God we seem to have many other priorities and many other activities that require our time. When it comes to truly expressing our feelings in worship we are hesitant, we are afraid others will be offended, we have an entire list of excuses that seem to keep us from expressing what we feel. I can’t help but wonder if we really glimpsed the nature of God how our worship would change. I also wonder if somewhere we have communicated to the lost world around us that we are much more excited about our favorite sports teams than we are about God who has rescued us from an eternity of darkness and absence!
Third, we must renew our commitment to tell the world about Jesus To tell the world about Jesus will require us partnering with believers- regardless of the name on their building. To tell the world about Jesus will require a costly commitment- in every part of life.
So, in broad strokes this is a new direction for our church. What it will look like, what forms it will take, and what kind of changes it will require are still to be determined.
The change MUST begin with me.