The Church. Something that we have struggled with from the
very beginning. It’s almost been like Jesus painted a gorgeous picture of a
mountain.
We looked at it and said, ‘What if we put a couple trees
over here? It’s still a picture of a mountain.’ And then another said, ‘We need
to change the color of the sky. There we go-that’s better. Still a picture of a
mountain!’ And another says, ‘There’s plenty of room to put our name on the
bottom here next to the artist’s signature. It won’t mess with the picture.
It’s still a mountain.’
We had a very unique opportunity with the opening of a new
church. In my mind there was no history, no debt hanging over our heads, no
drama-just a clean slate. This last Sunday we spent a lot of time talking about
the church and about how some people think our church is 7 months old, but in
reality we are about 2,000 years old. And so even though we would like to think
our church has a clean slate and there are no struggles, we realized that the
church was made of people.
We have had so many visitors come to The Rescue Church-it
has been truly amazing. What we have found (a.k.a. DUH moment) is that people
have history, people struggle with debt, and people have plenty of drama. The
problem we have found is that we took a beautiful picture of what the church
was supposed to be and conformed it to what we liked and then forced people to
understand it…and LOVE it!
God continues to work on my heart as being the pastor of The
Rescue Church. We decided to take the picture of the church and make it
painfully simple. Take away the manmade additions and just look at ‘the
mountain’.
What did Jesus tell us to do? Are we doing it? Let’s start
there. Do you love Jesus?
Let’s start to capture our love for the mountain again.
Let’s take away the things that we’ve put in the way of that love. We will
never claim to be the perfect church, but we will forever claim to be a church
that loves Jesus. From the beginning, The Rescue Church has talked about Jesus,
and though many things will change, one thing will never change, the Book will
be open and Jesus will be proclaimed, by the grace of God, through the power of
the Holy Spirit. The result? That’s for God to know.
Much Love-PC
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