Nathan frequently tells me to get my head out of the future. It’s really good sometimes to focus on the present, and it’s really good sometimes to focus on the past. I’ve spent a lot of the last three years here learning about where we’ve been and how we as a church have been formed in our mission and witness.
I’ve also spent a considerable amount of time in the last three years looking at where we are today.
We have so many past moments of questioning whether or not we should stay open, whether or not to shut our doors and close as a church, and each time we voted to stay open and continue forward in our ministry.
I don’t think we’re coming to another one of those conversations.
But I do think it tells a very specific story about who we are.
We’re tenacious.
And we’re stubborn.
We are steadfast in our faithfulness to God’s calling.
There’s no secret to the fact that the church is in a much more stable place now than it has been for at least a decade, and this isn’t something that happened overnight. We worked hard for it. But that also means we can start having those much harder conversations that we haven’t had the staying power to discuss.
It means we start looking to see where God is calling us to go next.
It means we start praying—hard—to listen to where God is pushing us to follow.
It means we start thinking about the present and the future and how the two are intertwined.
This is going to be an ongoing conversation and discussion and time of intentional prayer as we move through this year and into the next. It’s a time for us to reset our focus fully on God and what our next steps are as a community in Christ.