I haven't figured out how often I want to post on here. I would like to come up with a regular schedule for that, but knowing me I'll do everything but the schedule I land on. So maybe it's safer to just not have a plan right now. I'm one of those creative, unorganized types if you haven't figured that out from my first post lol.
A lot happened yesterday and not so much today so I'll probably talk more about yesterday. Yesterday the capital "C" Church just blew me away! My church is going through a rough time these past two weeks. We've lost our lead pastor and our executive pastor. It's a big church with multiple pastors. It wasn't an instance of our pastors choosing to serve somewhere else. It was more of one of those moments that makes your heart hurt, anger boil, and really challenges your already shaky ability to trust. Originally our church staff, governing board, elders, and remaining pastors didn't know how our church would react. An emergency meeting of church leaders and members was called. I'm a member, so I was there and saw this first hand. One of our pastors read out from the stage the statement that was later posted on our church website of the incident. I could feel the waves of disbelief and numbness wash over us all. We were all listening hard and I think we were all listening for the same thing because when he got to a certain part of the statement we all jumped to our feet. That part was "We remain utterly committed to the mission of transforming unconvinced people into wholehearted followers of Jesus." It was like a bomb went off in the auditorium! A 500 strong crowd jumped to its feet and cheered and clapped. I saw the looks on our pastors' faces. This was not the reaction they had been expecting at all. It was a moment that I will treasure. I was and am so proud of my church. Our main concern was the mission that God gave us. We weren't a crowd of people mindlessly following some charismatic leaders. We were truly changed, on fire people with hearts beating as one for the gospel of Jesus. From that moment, our church has been stronger, closer, and more unified.
Of course, that was the leader and member meeting. Our church averages an attendance of around 5,000 people on our weekend services across our 4 campuses. I was serving this weekend on speaker support, so I got to attend all 3 of our services. I'm so proud of my leaders. They got back up on that stage for every service and read out the statement. We were not going to sweep this under the rug. We were going to be honest, transparent, and address the truth. I was holding my breath, daring to hope. At the same moment, same part of the statement about being committed to the mission, the people in that auditorium jumped to their feet and cheered, just like we did in that leader/member meeting. It happened every single service. What's more, we had more people attend this weekend than I can ever remember! We were parking cars in the field next to our building because we ran out of parking spaces!!! Our intermittent lead pastor shared with us that many local churches had been praying for us. Two of them even driving around in our parking lot during the week, praying. An outpouring of prayer and support came from our partner churches and local christian schools. What you would expect to kill a church, instead made us stronger and pulled together the capital "C" Church. I could feel it in the air. Jesus is here, taking something horrible and turning it around for good for His Church (Romans 8:28). We're still grieving over this tragedy, but we don't grieve as people who have no hope. We're bursting with hope. I can't wait to see what Jesus is going to do next!
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