10 Conclusions

I had a restless night last night as I played over and over the meeting that we had yesterday with our church board. (See last post) I came to a few different conclusions. 1) The board was and is overwhelmingly supportive of what God is leading us into. I'm excited for that. 2) We in the church are possessive of others. We claim people as our people, our church etc when in fact none of that is true. It's God's people, God's church. 3) We tend to think of the church as a local thing rather than a global thing. Instead of church universal (body of Christ) we think of Church located at 123 Main st. 4) We should call this a mission or ministry rather than a church to avoid the confusion and the competitiveness. If we say we are going to start a ministry, people are excited. If we say we're going to start a church people get defensive. 5) Buying into the vision is important. Our pastor has been sowing the vision of a new church start on the northside of Defiance for 10 years now. If people feel like we're competition, then mayby they haven't bought into the vision. 6) A vision empowers people to take chances on God. If it doesn't, then it's not a vision it's just another marketing plan. 7) The "sinners" aren't the ones who gave Jesus the most problems it was the church. Not, necessarily out of meanness, but rather out of zeal for the Lord. Change is hard. 8) Somehow, the church universal needs to begin to understand how to work in symbiotic relationships. Much like a flower and a bee need each other to survive, the different congregations need to discover how they can partner up and enable the other to survive and thrive. We need to discover how we can be a resource for each other. 9) Success should still be defined as helping someone get one step closer to God. 10) Prayer is THE most important thing we can do in this process and we must find ways to guard our prayer times, encourage prayer times and teach others the value of prayer.

There's 10 for now.