Waski_the_Squirrel
Resident of the least visited state in the nation.
Edited to add: This is a bit rambling, but I'm tired, it's really late, and I just finished writing an entirely new sermon from the one I had planned to give tomorrow in church.
I was asked to fill in the pulpit at my church tomorrow. (We're a small church and the regular pastor works in the oil field. He recently took a new job that requires him to be on call one weekend every month.) I had a sermon roughly planned out, but I stumbled across a statistic while I was writing it: about 3000 churches close every year.
It clung to me and I just couldn't finish the sermon. I ended up staying up late (it's 1:00 am right now) writing a new sermon. Late nights are hard for me, but I just couldn't stop thinking about why churches close, and I felt compelled to write a new sermon that comes out of 1 Peter 5.
I won't bore you all with the details of the sermon, but I realized that I could start out with the words from one of the church's founders:
I was struck by the joy in everything he wrote. I suspect he was a fun man to be around. He wrote these words in 1924, but he was one of the charter members of the church. Our church began meeting in people's homes. These homes were sod homes in the first years of the twentieth century. About 1910 the church began to meet in the local school. We didn't have an actual church until 1914.
These were people who chose to meet to worship God. They met because they loved God and enjoyed the fellowship, not out of a desire to stamp out sin or to convert the heathens or to stop moral decay. As I've read these early documents, I have been struck by how much sincere joy there was. In so many elements of the Christian faith today, this seems to be missing. We seem to be drifting toward "censoriousness."
Has anyone read "The Scarlet Letter." This book was about a society built on censoriousness. Worship wasn't about joy. It was a society built on duty and punishment of sin.
I've been involved in a lot of churches and I realized that what attracted me to my current church (over some others I tried first) was that this church houses a community of believers who are happy to come together and worship. They don't dwell on our small size (and high average age). They don't dwell on the evil in society. This is a group that still remembers the joy that formed the church in the beginning.
Have I found my church home? You bet!
I was asked to fill in the pulpit at my church tomorrow. (We're a small church and the regular pastor works in the oil field. He recently took a new job that requires him to be on call one weekend every month.) I had a sermon roughly planned out, but I stumbled across a statistic while I was writing it: about 3000 churches close every year.
It clung to me and I just couldn't finish the sermon. I ended up staying up late (it's 1:00 am right now) writing a new sermon. Late nights are hard for me, but I just couldn't stop thinking about why churches close, and I felt compelled to write a new sermon that comes out of 1 Peter 5.
I won't bore you all with the details of the sermon, but I realized that I could start out with the words from one of the church's founders:
I was struck by the joy in everything he wrote. I suspect he was a fun man to be around. He wrote these words in 1924, but he was one of the charter members of the church. Our church began meeting in people's homes. These homes were sod homes in the first years of the twentieth century. About 1910 the church began to meet in the local school. We didn't have an actual church until 1914.
These were people who chose to meet to worship God. They met because they loved God and enjoyed the fellowship, not out of a desire to stamp out sin or to convert the heathens or to stop moral decay. As I've read these early documents, I have been struck by how much sincere joy there was. In so many elements of the Christian faith today, this seems to be missing. We seem to be drifting toward "censoriousness."
Has anyone read "The Scarlet Letter." This book was about a society built on censoriousness. Worship wasn't about joy. It was a society built on duty and punishment of sin.
I've been involved in a lot of churches and I realized that what attracted me to my current church (over some others I tried first) was that this church houses a community of believers who are happy to come together and worship. They don't dwell on our small size (and high average age). They don't dwell on the evil in society. This is a group that still remembers the joy that formed the church in the beginning.
Have I found my church home? You bet!
