2003 State Of The Church Address

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In His great mercy He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (1 Peter 1:3, p. 899).

As I’ve already mentioned, living in the past blurs your vision of the present and future. It skews your sense of reality and distorts your sense of identity. It’s hard to know who you are (much less live up to your God-given call) when you can’t see straight.

I have the distinct advantage of coming into this church from an entirely different vantage point than most of you—I didn’t go through the things of the past—so I’m able to see some things that some of us may have lost sight of. I’ve shared some of my thoughts in this area with our Elders and Governing Board.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that God’s vision for Port Crane C&MA is that we serve this community as “a place to find hope.” Those of you who have really good memories will recall that the passage God directed me to preach from when I came to candidate was 1 Peter 1:3-5. It was no accident or cute coincidence—I believe that it was prophetic in nature. Peter’s words in 1 Peter 1:3 resound in my ears as God’s “marching orders” for this church. He has given us new birth into a living hope—a hope that we are to demonstrate and invite others to experience. If there is one thing that our community needs, it is a message of hope. The only thing better than a message of hope is a message of living hope! I believe that God has determined to bring that life-changing message to our community through our church. “A place to find hope”—this is who we are!

So, Where Do We Go from Here?

“Look at the nations and watch—and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told” (Habakkuk 1:5, p. 698).

Bringing the message of living hope to a world that is steadily plummeting into hopelessness and despair is something that is much bigger than we can accomplish on our own. It is our unique, God-ordained identity, but it will only be realized by God’s Spirit empowering God’s people to do extraordinary things. It will require moving our focus from the past to what God says about us NOW and is doing in and through us NOW. And it will require some other known and unknown adjustments in order to align ourselves with His plan. Obviously, I do not know what is unknown, so I will only speak to a number of the known adjustments that we will have to target in 2003:

A Commitment to a Corporate Lifestyle of Dependency

I believe that the place that we need to begin is by making a commitment to a corporate lifestyle of dependency. What I mean by this is that we desperately need to experience a fundamental paradigm shift in the way that we go about our day to day living. We need to live in such a way that we are conscious of our dependency and serve as living illustrations to the world around us of our dependency upon God for everything. It’s something that I’ve talked about on a number of occasions: moving the truth from our heads to our hearts; from truth that is merely understood to truth that is experienced.