Morning Lifers …

It’s Thursday morning and I am enjoying a quiet space in my office.  It is a busy time for us as a family with relatives and friends coming and going.  I feel a responsibility to be available for people who come to visit and at the same time be accessible to our dear church family.  There are no adequate words really, to express what I feel re: CLC.  I am first and foremost, grateful to God for His goodness in leading us here and then for the incredible love that you all have shown.

The reason for the post today is to ask you to pray for me and in the very same breath, to pray for our church.  I am feeling a flood tide of excitement about the prospects here, of opening our arms as wide as we possibly can to those hurting, broken and marginalized, within all of our reach.  I have this feeling that God would like to bless this ministry as He may never have done before.  I am not talking about the numbers game, finances or any of the other metrics that we are familiar with.

I am referencing a movement of God.

One of my oft-prayed prayers is that I could find myself in the middle of a movement of God that would be so much of Him that I would be unable and unwilling to make a church growth seminar out of it.  It would be simply sacred enough to bow our heads and say, “God did it all.”

That means many things …

It means that we seek the kind of growth that God does.  In the book of Acts I read “And the Lord added to the church , daily, those who were being saved.”  This is the sole numerical metric that God is interested in.  He is not interested in how many people gather for a given meeting.  I tend to be very interested in this and curiously enough, I get to thinking that I have something to do with it when the numbers are there.  That is pure, unadulterated pride and I am so weary of that.

It means that we are involved in that somehow.  I feel that there is an incredible grace dynamic at work in our church.  Never … NEVER, in my prior pastoral life, have I experienced the free flow of God’s grace in a church family.

I marvel at it every week.

There is a deep stirring within my heart for what God is doing even now.  What we see of an iceberg is nothing compared to what lies beneath.  The same is true when it comes to God.  We observe very little until it breaks loose.  What are you willing to do, to be a part of this?  That’s what faith is … to be involved in what God is doing … all in.

Bless you Lifers …