Let me start out this morning by saying that we are very blessed. We started this church in a small conference room in Mesa last September. In November, we moved to Chandler with 4 people and a vision from God.
Today, just 5 short months later, we have a very wonderful place to come and worship our Lord, and we average nearly 50 per service. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t feel absolutely awed by the blessings God has given us.
I am in regular contact with several other local pastors. Some are from very big churches and some are from not-so-big churches. There are a few things, though, that they share in common with one another.
They all have years of experience. They have all planted churches in their pasts. And, they all truly care that this church succeeds for the Lord. They care so much that they are very free in giving advice and suggestions. (Boy! Do they ever give advice !!)
Seriously, I am very happy they do. When I was in the Navy stationed in the Washington DC area, it was my duty to make the weather forecast for the next two days. I will tell you that I consistently received congratulatory letters for being so accurate. I was almost 100% right all the time. I’m not bragging. Let me tell you how I did that. I took the weather forecasts that 50 of the local forecasters around me had already come up with, and I simply averaged them out. It was not my intelligence or acumen that showed how good I was. It was other people’s information that I used to help me. I put my own ego aside and used other peoples’ knowledge and information – not so that I would get glory, but that no planes would go down on my watch.
In the same way, I try and use as many of the other pastors’ information as I can to help this church out. Some of their suggestions can be deleted as soon as I see them, for they would not work in our church. For instance, one pastor said I should consider sending out a mass mailing of 20,000 brochures to let people know we were here. I threw that one out because if we mailed out that kind of mailing, and they all came, we wouldn’t have enough chairs for them to sit in! See, there’s a method to my madness.
Some suggestions look as if they’d work later on, so I keep them on the back burner. And then there are some suggestions that I know we need to look at and implement immediately. That is what I want to talk to you about this morning.
I have received the same warning from nearly every of them within the last month or so. They are all telling me that at this church’s age and size, this is where bad things start to happen. They are giving me their knowledge, based on personal experiences, so that we can keep those things from happening within this family. And, since all of them are saying the same thing, I have no other recourse but to see it as something God wants us to pay attention to.
Normally, I try to give a message that would enable you in some way to get a little closer to, or to get more information about Jesus. A message that might allow you to instill a bit more of Him into your daily lives. Today’s message is going to be a bit different. I am going to talk to you about how to keep a church from being torn apart at its seams. I am going to talk to you about CrossWinds Bible Church and how to help it survive the onslaught from the enemy.
I believe that God has had His hand in this church from the very first day. I believe that because I know me. I do not have any skills whatsoever to have done the things I have done, or said the things I have said without God giving them to me, as I needed them.
This may surprise you, but I am not the most gifted of speakers ….. (ahem, I am waiting for you to disagree) ….. I am not the most brilliant of men, and I am certainly not the most biblically knowledgeable person you could meet. But, I am focused, and I am willing to put me aside and concentrate on what I believe God is telling me to do.
Through these other pastors, God has given us advance warning of some of the things that can destroy a church, and He now expects us to safeguard our church against them.
I believe that too many churches let their congregations come in, sit, listen, enjoy some fellowship, then go home again – all without telling them what their duty and their obligation to that church is. This makes for content, albeit somewhat non-focused congregation, wouldn’t you agree?
A pastor asked a ten-year-old boy after service one morning if the boy knew why the church served coffee to the adults after church. The boy said, “Sure. It’s to make sure they wake up before they drive home.”
I would hate to think of this congregation ever getting in that shape. Each of you are a very special blessing to this church, and I will do all that is within my power to keep you informed as to not only what direction we want to be headed in, but in what God wants from each of us as we go there.
If we go to a church, we owe that church. We owe that church several things. If we are content to go there, we obligate ourselves to help financially support it. We owe it by trying to do what we can to help with any time and or talents that we might possess.
We also owe it enough to try and help build it strong for God, and that means to focus on what is best for God as the church grows, not just focus on what is most comfortable to us.
I believe that God calls different people to do different things. And sometimes, He may even call them to do the same thing, but in a different way. Why is that? It is because different people will reach others that nobody else can reach. And, the bottom line, no matter how you cut it, is that we reach people for Christ – period.
I have said from the beginning that this church will have two main goals. The first is to reach the unsaved and introduce them to Jesus Christ. The second goal is to teach those that are saved to a deeper level of faith in God. That kind of makes us a real evangelical church, doesn’t it? Our motto on the church web site is “Reaching Upward – Reaching Outward”. Self-explanatory.
I know a church that has a main goal of teaching the Word to those within the church. I know a church that focuses on turning out pastors. All of these churches are doing the work of God; they are just doing it differently than each other.
1. WE ARE CALLED TO HAVE UNITY WITHIN THE CHURCH
Now, that doesn’t just mean we are united with each other. You can be united without having unity. Take the old illustration of tying two cats’ tails together and throw them over a clothesline. You will find out very quickly they are united, but they certainly do not have unity! We can be united, simply because we are all a part of this congregation, but I am sure you can see that this does not mean we are all unified.
In GENESIS, God was talking about the Tower of Babel. He said that since all the people talked the same language, there would be nothing they could not accomplish. So, He divided them using their language. Today, we would refer to that as all of them being on the same page, wouldn’t we? If only the American Church were as dedicated to unity as those pesky Babylonians!
I know people who seem to be good Christians, but they turn into an agent of Satan if somebody happens to sit in their seat in church! What’s up with that? I think the worst thing that can happen in a church is dissension. Let’s talk about dissension.
Dissension is when a person becomes unhappy with something in a church. Rather than talk about it and trying to understand why it is like that, they pretty much just demand that it be changed. When it isn’t, the dissatisfaction grows into unhappiness and then into anger.
Then, somewhere along the line, that person will engage others into their feelings by befriending them, and then ‘confiding’ in them about all of their unhappiness. Invariably, they will try and get those other people to join their ranks and complain because they seem to feel the same way about some things.
That is where the dissension starts to boil over. Do you see what has happened so far in this scenario? God has been taken completely out of the picture and Satan has been put in. The people involved have stopped focusing on what God wants for this particular church, and have only stayed focus on what they want. Now, remember what I just said about God having a different calling for different people – and that includes churches. Everyone within the church ranks must understand that this church, by God’s design, is a little different that the one across the street or the other one down the block. They can reach people we cannot, and we can reach people they cannot.
So, it all boils down to the fact that if you are in a church congregation, you need to know what their focus is so you can decide whether or not you belong in that church. Okay, now you are going to ask me what our vision is, aren’t you? Our vision is simply to do everything we can to increase the number of souls in God’s kingdom.
To do this, we will do the best we can to have the kind of service that “most” of today’s community can relate to. See, “most” of our community does not go to church and does not know very much at all about Christ. We will never be a “seeker friendly” church, I guarantee you that, but we will take into consideration our community when setting up the different formats we use here in this church.
What does that mean? Let me give you some examples. This church will never make a person feel out of place if they wear a suit and tie. On the other hand, we will never make them feel out of place if they come in a tee shirt and Bermuda shorts.
There are some people who would have a cow if they had to sit besides somebody in church that wore sandals and shorts.
This church will not just offer the old traditional hymns (which I love a lot of them by the way), and we will not just offer the modern contemporary songs. We will offer a blend of the two.
This church will strive to never become just a regular traditional church, but it will also never strive to trash all the tradition and become new age.
What am I saying? I am saying that any time we leave the middle and head toward either extreme, we start telling people to leave the church. How can we do this if we are supposed to invite them in? If we play nothing but contemporary songs, all of us who like the traditional hymns would feel out of place and leave. If we sang nothing but traditional, nobody who liked any contemporary would ever visit us more than once.
If we demanded people to dress up, we would exclude many from ever getting to know Jesus.
Do you see my meaning? You have the extreme on the left and the one on the right. In all we do, we shall strive to be in the middle – at all times.
What does that mean to us? I cannot have most everything in this church go the way I personally want it to, because if I do, that person to my left or that person to my right will not have anything of what they want. I need to be flexible enough to realize that the main reason I go to church is to honor and worship and praise my God. And, in so doing, I must want to create an atmosphere that helps others do the same.
In ROMANS, it says to watch out for those who cause division in a church. It says they are contrary to the teaching of Jesus, and they serve their own selfish appetites. It says for us to stay away from them.
In ZEPHANIAH, it says we are to work for the Lord shoulder to shoulder.
In ROMANS, it says we are to be devoted to one another, and in 1 THESSALONIANS, it simply says we should try and get along.
Nobody loves change in his or her life. We are all creatures of comfort and we love our comfort zones, don’t we? But, in growing a church for God, we have to understand that we are not growing one for ourselves. And if we expect to grow for God, we must be willing to sometimes give more than we take. And, we must always be willing to do everything in our power to never be a person who brings in or starts dissension in this church.
For the future of this church, it now becomes necessary that each of us become very honest with ourselves and ask ourselves this question:
“How willing am I to help follow the planned vision in a positive mode?”
Now, there is nothing at all wrong with a person saying that they cannot follow the plan of the pastor or the vision of the church. In those cases, they are to be commended for being honest, but in those cases, it might become necessary for them to find a church they can be positive and helpful in, rather than staying and eventually being evicted from the church family for working against it rather than for it.
There is an old Amway saying: ‘If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.’ A church that cannot change will soon rot and decay. God doesn’t want us to do what we’ve always done, because that eliminates changes for Him.
2. WE NEED TO KEEP OUR FOCUS AND NOT WAIVER
There was once a pastor who decided he was going to do something different for a change, so instead of a sermon, he gave everyone two sheets of paper. On one sheet, the heading read, “THE PROBLEM IN THIS CHURCH IS …..” and on the other sheet, the heading read, “WHAT THIS CHURCH NEEDS IS ….”
He had them fill them out and hand them in. The next Sunday, he gave the results. On the sheet that listed the PROBLEMS, such things were listed as:
1) Should not serve coffee in church
2) Should serve more coffee in church
3) Should have shorter sermons
4) Should have longer sermons
5) The music we have is terrible
6) It’s terrible that we don’t have more music like what we have
On the sheet with the heading of WHAT IS NEEDED, things were listed like:
1) need to spend money on more chairs
2) We don’t need to spend any more money at all
3) Pitch all the songs we sing - start over
4) We need a new preacher!
Now, I am not sure where that last one about the preacher came from, and maybe I don’t want to know, but do you see any similarities on those two lists?
Neither of them mentioned Jesus Christ. And, as I read those lists, it became quite apparent to me that what that church’s problem is was a lack of focus on Jesus. And, what that church needs, is more focus on Jesus.
If we do not have focus, we can have no vision, and in PROVERBS, it tells us that those who have no vision will perish. We are only human, and sometimes we get really busy and get too wrapped up in the everyday details of building the church, so it will always be a goal of ours to continually focus on what God wants in this church for His edification, not what we want in this church for our comfort.
And the only way, in my opinion, to keep that focus is to always be aware that the only reason we gather in this place is to pay homage, to worship our Lord God through His Son, Jesus Christ.
There was a church that needed a pastor, but they were small and couldn’t afford to pay very much. The only one they could afford was a 74 year old pastor. He and his wife moved into the very small and very old one bedroom, one bathroom parsonage next door and he began to ready himself for his first sermon.
Come Sunday, he got up and spoke for exactly 30 minutes. Later that afternoon, the elders came by the parsonage and praised him with many praises, then asked him how everything was going. He told them the bathroom was too small and when he and his wife were getting ready for church, it was very difficult. The elders just kind of let that zoon over their heads and they bid goodbye for the day.
The next Sunday came and the pastor got up and again spoke a very good sermon for exactly 30 minutes. Later that day, the elders again came by the parsonage and told him how glad they were they hired him. Then they asked how it was going. The pastor again told them about the very small bathroom, to which they again let it go over there heads.
The third Sunday, the pastor got up and preached for 2 hours and 45 minutes. Later, the elders came by and asked him why he talked so awfully long. He apologized and told them that the bathroom was so small that he accidentally put in his wife’s false teeth that morning and he said, “…and you know, when they get started they just don’t stop.”
That afternoon, the crew came by to start building their new bathroom. I think we will all agree that this man was focused on getting his new bathroom. I am sure that somewhere in that is a lesson we could all learn from.
3. WE SIMPLY NEED TO HAVE FAITH
An architect has faith in his creation even before he draws up the blueprints, and a farmer has faith in his harvest even while he plants the seeds. This church needs to have faith in our growth for God even before we have all the seats filled up.
In 1 SAMUEL, we read that Samuel had absolute faith in our Lord. He told the Israelites to stnd there and get ready to see what God was going to do right in front of their very eyes. Then, he called upon God to send thunder and rain where none had been, and God did. The Bible says the people stood there and watched with awe. That means they stood there with their mouths gaping and their eyes wide open … because they saw the fruits of true faith.
I have that kind of faith in this church. I know this is of God. Remember I told you earlier that I don’t have any of the skills and talents, apart from God, that would let me do the things I have done in this church? There is another reason I know this is God’s house.
I have a passion. Diana can tell you that she has never seen me have such a passion, too. She recognizes it. It can be nearly overpowering at times, but it is always positive and born of love. Let me tell you what my passion is…
My passion is for the drug addicts that do not know Jesus as Savior; for those addicted to the world that do not know Jesus as Savior; and for those sitting in this church today who may not really know Jesus as Savior.
See, my passion is to do everything I can possibly do, whether it is personally comfortable for me or not, to make sure I introduce everyone I can to the real Jesus. Not the one that people can just read about in a book, but the One that changed my heart. The One that let me hurt if others around me are hurting. The One Jesus that can offer God’s amazing grace to even a wretch like me.
CLOSING
And, there is something we need to understand that I don’t think many do. We often hear people say if they had the faith of the apostles we could do a better job. We do have the same amount of faith as they did, so let’s make a conscious decision this morning to use that faith, not to build the church that is the most comfortable for us, but one that is the most glorifying to God the Father.
As we go into our time of invitation this morning. I am going to ask that you go into yourself and ask yourself whether or not your visions of what you want in a church are enough of what this church is going to offer so that there can be true and loving harmony within the church.
The second thing I am going to offer you a chance to step up to the plate and really give your life to Jesus. To make Him the Master of your life. And thirdly, I am going to give you a chance to become members of this church.
INVITATION
CLOSING PRAY
CLOSING SONG
