Happy Ground Hog’s Day and happy Good Things Happening At Our Church Day! We are celebrating this day because of my Facebook friend, Sally Coleman who invited us to sycnchroblog about the good things happening in our churches. Well, I guess I should have read about this a little more closely, not because I don’t have anything good to say about the church, but because I am on a church fast. (See previous post.)
I want to weave back through the years and mention the positive experiences that I have had at the churches I have been a part of through my life.
My Formative Years
The Friendly Church was a little nondenominational church that my parents sent my brother and me to on Sundays. I professed faith in Christ there and was overwhelmed by the love of the adults who encouraged me.
Savannah Avenue Baptist Church is where I made known my call into vocational Christian service and where I met my wife. That makes it real important!
Green Valley Baptist Church is where I was ordained and where I grew so much. These people had a much stronger belief in the reality of God than I had ever witnessed.
Pastorates
New Life Baptist Church was my first pastorate. I loved the scrappy way they reached out to the disenfranchised of the community.
Temple Baptist Church is where I developed some lifelong friends and expanded my ministry to community efforts and began to relate well across faith traditions and ethnicities.
Waukegan Bible Church / CrossPoint Church is when church became the most real for me and where I saw huge changes and make some great friends.
Post Pastorate
New Song Church is blessed with one of the best communicator/musician/pastors I have met.
NorthBridge Church is similarly blessed with one of the most winsome young pastor communicators.
North Point Church is one of the most flexible churches I have seen and they have one of the most congenial senior pastors who allowed me some great ministry opportunities.
The Living Room was just that… wide open for great discussions and I still have friends from there.
Now I am in this church fast phase, though not for much longer. It has been good to stand back from the church life and the church system for a while. It has helped to discover my heart to a greater degree and it has caused me to be kind of lonely at times. I think that is a good thing too.
So, here is to God’s dream of the church and its many manifestations. We have gotten some things right and gotten some things wrong. Such will always be the case. May we never come to regard our human outworking of the church as sacrosanct, realizing at times, we need to hear form the prophet types about the blind spots in the church system. May we also realize that church as we have known it is not the source of all our problems and God has been using it in all of it imperfect forms for a long, long time. Lastly, may we realize that church history is not over, but is still being written and the church will take on new forms that may be very different looking than those of the past and present, and that is as it should be.
Time out from the church wars!
Grace & Peace
