This evening following Vespers I was approached in the lobby by a seven-year-old girl on her new pink kick scooter, she stopped right in front of me, waved and said "Hi, Pastor Jon!" while her dad, whose brother Rico was a famous matinee idol, walked up to me and said, "She'll be grade one when school starts in June...I can't believe how swift time flies!" "Oh yeah," I said, "you see those teens over there? They were your daughter's age when I first came to GCF."
I've been with GCF for nine years come May.
One of the things I most enjoy about my work at GCF, although I'm not directly involved in it, is our ministry to children. I love watching them grow up and see the church partnering with parents to provide programming that ensures their continual journey in faith. I see it as a great opportunity to lay a foundation upon which they can build their entire lives while we build a new generation of Christians who will continue the work we have begun wherever they find themselves in the world.
They remind me of my own spiritual roots where the earliest seeds of my Christian faith were planted. Like them, Sunday worship and Sunday School were regular and integral parts of my family life. It was there that I learned Bible stories and simple prayers and sang in the children’s choir. While my faith grew that way, I know that for others, you came to faith out of curiosity, some nudging or longing for truth and deeper meaning to life. God uses both. Others came out of necessity; following some tragedy like an illness or personal devastation. My guess is that our reasons and our longing for God are as varied as our individual personalities and needs. Some have been on the journey for a long time; others are just getting started. Either which way, you just found yourself yearning for the holy-- that's grace at work.
As I think about Christianity in light spiritual growth, the question I always ask is: How do we continue the process of maturing and advancing persons on their spiritual journey?
I think at the heart of it, spiritual growth has to do with one’s capacity to love him or her self in a way that inspires constant renewal and personal transformation coming to fruition by evident love for others as we love our selves all of which find their beginnings with the love and grace of God.
It also begs theese question for each of us:
What am I doing to nurture my soul? What am I reading? How am I praying; and what am I doing for self-care? Who am I listening to and where am I drawing strength? How am I being challenged to think, act, and be in a new way? Where is the tension? With whom am I sharing my story? How and where am I being useful within the entire kingdom?
Faith is not stagnant but ever moving and we are ever being stretched. What we try to do in the ministry of spiritual growth is provide opportunities for learning and transformation.
An appetite for spiritual growth is a mark of our commitment to one another so that the body can be built up so that we as a community can be God’s presence in the world. And sometimes this is the hard part. Sometimes it is easier to go off and help others than to do the inner work of one’s own self-reflection and personal engagement. It is difficult but it is necessary.
"Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but id did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell and great was its fall!”
I realized that our church has become so comfortable in our new ministry center since it was inaugurated in 2006. While we do have programs that encourage individual growth, we have grown accustomed to growth being program-based. Discipleship has become a program, which shouldn't be, so has Children's education. Even worship and preaching have become somewhat programmatic. While the church calendar is filled with activities, we have reached a point of lull. The church has to rise just as Paul called, "O sleepers, awake!"
The Church must not be lulled into a sense of complacency at this point in her life. The church is a community of individuals who must stop warming pews. It is time to move. Now is the time go deeper and wider; to remember how we got here in the first place. What it was that drew us to commit our lives to God in the first place? Instead of thinking about what cannot be done; now is the time to be thinking about what can be done because of all that we have heard. And all that we have seen. And all that we know for sure. Now is the time to live out the power of our new identity and life, even as we remember the legacy upon which we stand.
We will do many wonderful things. Lives will be transformed as we are being transformed. There may be times when we as a congregation may be shaken by doubt and fear; differences of opinion and sheer fatigue. Attendance may decline or decline anytime, people's faith may be battered, storms will come. But those will be the times we need to remember that we are building a house on Rock.
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