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May 4, 2008
Ephesians 2:8-10
2008 Annual Report
Before I say anything else in this report I want to say “thank you”.
Thank you to each of you who have faithfully served the Lord through this Church.
Many of you have served sacrificially.
All have served throughout a year full of change.
That is tough to do.
Change is always accompanied by resistance.
And yet we have kept the course.
I’ll say more about the year of change during this report.
But for now let me say it again in the tradition of Gomer Pile.
You old timers will recall his classic line spoken with a southern drawl.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Thank you for inviting me to be your Pastor.
I know that Dorothy and I are PFA’s.
And you have graciously and lovingly taken us in.
But I guess technically even God is a PFA since He was not born here.
Thanks be to God our Perfect Father Above.
As I began preparing this year’s report I did what I always do.
I read last year’s report.
I tend to forget, from one year to the next, what the previous report said.
I should never let that happen.
So I am taking you back for a few moments to last year.
I shared a powerful Scripture with you that is as true today as it was
last year.
It’s worth reminding ourselves of its truth.
“God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it. For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)
This is what I reported to you last year.
“No matter what we are facing, we can be assured God remains greater.
Just like the church in Ephesus, God has great plans for our future as well.
He has made us new creatures, a masterpiece, so we can do good things.
God desires we do the good things that He has planned for us long ago.
We need to consider our future.
God has called us to be His masterpiece.
A better translation for masterpiece is workmanship.
And the root word for workmanship has a multitude of meanings.
Here are a few of them.
Band together, commit, continue without any delay, exercise, fulfill,
perform, to have purpose, to rise up, to secure, to shoot out, to yield.
This is part of what we were created to accomplish.
God has created us anew in Christ Jesus.
Our work is a response to His grace.
In this coming year we will need to be His workmanship.
We will need to band together.
We will need more than a superficial commitment.
We will need to reply to God’s moving without delay.
We will need to exercise, and fulfill, and perform.
We will need to live with purpose.
We will need to shoot out.
But this will not happen automatically.
This will not be a natural experience.
It will happen only as we are intentional in our obedience.
God has good things planned for us.
These good things have been in the works for a long time.
And it appears that God is taking us to a new place.
He is revealing to us a new area of grace in which to live.
But we have a choice.
Do we go where He leads?
If we go with Him we face new challenges.
Challenges that will stretch us.
Challenges that will demand we put our lives on the line.
Challenges that will thrust us into the heat of spiritual warfare.
We are the work of His hands just as the Christians in Ephesus were.
We must not forget what happened to that Church.
Jesus had something against them many years later.
They had lost their first love.
They had fallen from the works which they did at first.
They were not who they were created to be.
Some obstacle confronted them and they caved in.
It limited who they were in Christ.
Will Jesus say the same thing about us some day?
“You started strong.
“You reached the lost.
“You stood with me at the right hand of the Father.
“But I don’t see you there anymore.”
That would be tragic.
It is totally unnecessary.
Whenever we settle for a life of mediocrity God asks, “What are you doing here?”
Whenever we decide that the average is good enough God asks, “What are you doing
here?”
Whenever we settle for simply existing God asks, “What are you doing here?”
We cannot be a people of conquest if we are unwilling to enter the battle.
We can talk all day about what God has promised to do through His people.
But we will never live in those promises until we act on them.
What is the point in being God’s masterpiece if we just hang on the wall doing
nothing?
How will the lost be saved?
How will there be room for those who sense God’s tug on their lives?
When we act on God’s promises there will be an impact.
Our insistence on following God will meet the world’s resistance.
There will be a spiritual collision.
I pray it will be with the world and not within the body of Christ.
Are you ready for the spiritual collision that is about to occur?
This is our moment to respond faithfully to God.
Seizing this moment is our willingness to bear the initial impact.
It will not be easy.
Satan will try and discourage.
He has already begun his work.
But so has God – in and through us.”
Do you remember me saying any of that last year?
We knew we were on a threshold of change.
We were facing a level of change that we hadn’t encountered for a long time.
We were right to anticipate many changes.
There were both practical and spiritual reasons for these changes.
God was growing and blessing His Church.
And last year I shared these thoughts on change.
Lead the change--Increased size means compounded complexity resulting in greater difficulty. But be willing to take the risk. Endure the pain of change. Be willing to pay the price. Help people through the change. Add Staff and expand the organization by developing capable lay leaders.
I had no idea at the time how true those words were.
And the changes we have encountered are all intertwined.
It began with the acknowledgement of how close we were to the 200 Barrier.
A big part of that Barrier was lack of sanctuary space.
And from there a snow ball formed that has grown in size.
Let me list the changes we anticipated in this year.
There are even some we did not fully anticipate that resulted from changes.
They are not in any order of priority or chronology.
Change #1: Move from a part time to a full time paid youth pastor.
Change #2: Exploration of a S.A.V.E. - S.I.T.E. (a future location to house our congregation and ministries. It must be a location with
SUITABILITY, ACCESSIBILITY, VISIBILITY, EXPANDABILITY which offers
SALVATION, INTERCESSION, TEACHING, EVANGELISM).
Change #3: Move from a paid custodian to volunteers for custodial service.
Change #4: Multiple morning services.
Change #5: Scheduling of ministries and involvement of more volunteers.
Change #6: Change in attitude from small church thinking to large church thinking.
All these changes are interconnected.
They have all been pressing in on us.
The pressure is uncomfortable.
It means things aren’t the way they used to be.
Things aren’t as simple and straightforward as they used to be.
We don’t like that.
One change leads to another and another.
Do you remember why we picked up this snow ball to begin with?
I do.
There was only one reason.
We wanted to continue to say to our community, “There is room for you.”
To whom have you said that lately?
Let’s not forget the number of times folk struggled to find a seat.
We don’t have that struggle right now.
Look around you and you see lots of space.
The other service does the same.
Our motivation was not just to offer convenience and choice.
It wasn’t because we were lacking activity on Sunday morning.
It wasn’t because we had so many volunteers that we needed to double
ministry opportunities.
We were not going to be able to continue reaching new people without
change.
We saw by instinct what Jack Welch was paid hundred’s of thousands of
dollars every year to discover.
Jack Welch was the Chief Executive Officer of General Electric.
He wrote, “When the rate of change inside an organization is slower than the rate of change outside an organization, the end [of that organization] is in sight.”
We ought to be excited about the challenges we are facing.
We ought to be thrilled that we are experiencing change.
We do not change just for the sake of change.
We do not change to make us feel like we are accomplishing something.
We change because our Mission Statement demands it.
Let me remind you who we decided to be several years ago.
We are: A Community Devoted to Jesus that Affects the Eternity of Others One Day at a Time by: Living Graciously every day, Living Generously every day, Living Genuinely every day – Fueled by the Word of God and the Worship of God.
There is a concern that I hear being repeated.
It is phrased something like this.
We don’t see and know who is attending the other morning service.
That is a concern that our leadership is trying to address.
It is a concern worthy of our attention.
It is as important as the comments I heard when we had one morning service.
The comment I heard then was, “I come to church and I don’t know people.
“There are so many new people I can’t keep up with them.”
Both issues have the same concern.
People are longing for relationships.
We long for them within the Church Body.
We miss the familiar relationships when they are missing.
But I am going to leave you with one more quote.
This quote is from Gordon MacDonald.
He wrote a book I received from a good friend on my birthday.
The book has an interesting title – Who Stole My Church?
It carries a subtitle, What to Do When the Church You Love Tries to Enter the 21st Century.
That is part of the change we are experiencing.
Gordon MacDonald says we need to look at our world with fresh eyes.
When we do we will ask this question:
“What has to be done to reach out to lost and struggling people and bring them the love of Jesus?”
He goes on to give his perspective on the bottom line in change.
“Down through two thousand years, you have only one unchanging thing in the church: the gospel of Jesus that calls people to forgiveness of sins and to participation in a community of people who want to serve each other and go forward to make a statement about God’s love in their world. But the ways in which people organize themselves to actualize this one unchanging thing is changing all the time. Almost nothing can stay the same for long if you want to connect with people and introduce them to Jesus Christ.”
You will notice there is something lacking in this report - statistics.
Not because they are not important.
One of our Board members has made a comment about our meetings this year.
“We spend too much time discussing attendance, buildings, and cash.”
I agree.
These things are important but they should not dominate discussion.
We think these are the things that will address the changes we face.
We are wrong to think that way.
Yes, we do need cash, buildings, and attendance.
We wouldn’t have much of a church without them.
But they are not what the church is about.
The church is about Disciples making Disciples.
I plan to incorporate into our Board meetings the question I quoted.
Each meeting must be filtered with this question.
“What has to be done to reach out to lost and struggling people and bring them the love of Jesus?”
Or, “What have we done to reach the lost and struggling this month?”
Every report and discussion needs to be filtered with that question.
We must remember this for this coming year.
Would you be willing to make it the filter for your life on a personal level?