Pastor Steve's Letter for July 2010
Greetings in Jesus' Name,
It has been a month since we eliminated the last of our debt. As believers, you were a special blessing for me as you prayed, worked, sacrificed and gave. Your belief system, values and faith showed in the effort. It was the little things that blessed me personally the most. I was allowed glimpses of struggle, decision, growth and sacrifice. I watched us grow together. We grew spiritually. Our faith was deepened and strengthened. We grew outside ourselves and began to look at others with new understanding. We accepted more of our imperative mission. We are looking at the importance of eternal souls.
We look at VBS last week with all the needs and possibilities. We are about half way to our goal of feeding the hungry in July. Some have accepted new mission challenges. God has yet to call our next children’s ministry leader or leaders. But here we stand in the middle of vacation times. Trying desperately to fit it all in before school starts. Decrying the lack of time and lost in our affluence. We are a good church, filled with good and blessed people with very little need. Often forgetting that Jesus taught how hard it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom. We are respectable and relaxed and tend to forget our heritage and our call.
Methodism began as a poor man’s movement in England and America, dominated by coal miners, farmers, and common laborers. John Wesley, Francis Asbury, and the early Methodists invented the camp meeting, those rousing field-preaching events of the 1700s. But as Wesley predicted, when people receive the gospel and are born again, they tend to develop good habits and a strong work ethic. Then they become prosperous. But with that prosperity came respectability. Methodism moved “uptown.” Education and refinement made field preaching seem uncouth. Moving us away from the needs of people caught in a society unable to give direction and meet spiritual need. As Wesley observed, ”Riches naturally beget pride, love of the world, and every temper that is destructive of Christianity.”
When the great reformer William Wilberforce was a child, he was deeply influenced by the Methodist movement. The teachings filled a personal, deep spiritual longing. As an adult he led the battle to abolish slave trade in the British Empire. He was also instrumental in beginning missionary and Bible societies, all done in the name of Jesus. Later his two sons, both clergymen, were embarrassed by their father’s radical evangelical spirit. They wrote a whitewash of a biography, “The Life of William Wilberforce,” toning down their father’s spiritual passion and evangelical leanings in order to make his parliamentary work more “respectable”. Is it possible we caught in the web of respectability, unable to focus our passion where the needs are?
Jesus won no awards for respectability. Observe that Jesus went to all the wrong parties (Luke 15:2) and missed all the right funerals (Matthew 8:22). He ate when he was supposed to fast (Mark2:18), came to dinner with unwashed hands (Mark 7:2-3), and once at the table gave his attention to all the wrong people (Luke 7:36-50). He let his disciples eat free-standing grain on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:1). He made a scene in the Temple (John 2:13-17). His own mother was embarrassed by His behavior (Mark 3:20-21). Not respectable, but He met people’s needs and changed lives forever.
I for one want to be like the blind man on the Jericho road, who was told by the crowd to shut up, and who kept crying out to Jesus anyway, because he was too desperate to be ashamed. I am now too desperate to be ashamed. May Jesus meet my needs and yours and lead us to meet others. It gets messy now.
In Christ's service,
Pastor Steve
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