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| Me- literally building something |
We are building a community, a culture, a church. We are creating systems and budgets. We are learning a ton along the way. One of the more important things we have learned in our three months of being new church planters is that we care way more about building than destruction. What we want to be about is creation not ruin.
That may seem like a fairly obvious thing, but as we’ve begun to connect with people in the community I’ve found that sometimes I lazily lapse into describing what we are about by describing what we are not. Boring, lecture, old, irrelevant. Those are words that I am ashamed to admit I have used in describing church. It’s lazy because I know that all of that can be true, but I also know that there are many, many vibrant, engaging, fresh, relevant traditional churches out there.
It is also true that I would not be here, not have the deep relationship that I have with God, if it weren’t for the traditional churches that I have been a part of over the years.
It is easy to react against all the ways that the church has disappointed me or let me down over the years instead of seeing the work we are doing as a continuation of all the beautiful and holy moments we have been blessed to experience in and through traditional churches.
This has been a theologically profound learning for me. It came courtesy of some of the things one of our lead team pointed out at a dinner not so long ago. He reminded me that I believe in the God of what’s next, the God who is always creating something anew, not just in an intellectual way, but in a way that must infuse my very being. This then shapes not only how I speak about what we are doing, but even how I think about it.
We are building something grounded in the history and tradition of the church. We hope to create concrete ways to serve God and to form a community that supports one another in our spiritual growth and is a place where we can work to shape our lives by these holy learnings.
Please pray for us as we continue to learn and build.
-Eilidh
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