Failure, Friends, Faith & the Future
I haven’t blogged much about church stuff recently. Outwardly, I am spending most of my time looking for a job, doing contract work, and miscellaneous career development stuff. However, inwardly, my mind and my spirit have been churning a million miles an hour.
One of the requirements for us to move forward with out long-range church plans is to be able to help people with little or no relationship with God or the Church to cross over the line of faith and begin to grow that relationship. Emily and I have both been far less effective at this than we need to be for what God is calling us to do. I have honestly spent countless hours awake at night mulling over this issue. Should we be more aggressive? Are we not being intentional enough about finding people? Is our own faith so anemic that it isn’t worth sharing or is ineffective in building a desire in others? Do we just need to pray more and better? Are the reasons even our own issue or are the purely external . . . such as a person’s attitude toward faith and the church. Are we just making excuses for our failure, or is there something really there?
Trust me, this is no simple issue for me. I have an extremely strong sense of calling and clear vision for what God is doing in us . . . but feel like we are falling far short in one of the most important areas. I ask God constantly why I feel like he’s called me to something I don’t have the ability to do. There’s the rub. I’ve heard a million times, “God doesn’t call the qualified, He qualifies the called.” This has to be a God thing if it will be anything at all.
This morning, I read a blog post by a guy who planted and pastored a fast-growing church in a rural area. At one time, reports were that as much as 80% of his church was people who had been genuinely unchurched, instead of transfers from other churches. He went through a tough time in the spring and is no longer pastoring the church. He has a long road both behind him and in front of him, but his perspective even now has dramatically changed. Although he doesn’t share specifics, he infers that his new non-church perspective reveals that his previous efforts were not as successful as he once thought. People in the community generally still hate “church” as much as before he started that church.
Although I have not been anywhere near where he has been, I identify and feel much the same way. We now live in an area where people aren’t so much hurt by the church, but have little or no relationship at all with the church. There’s not as much hurt or disdain in people here, but total indifference. Our lives need to help them realize the value and need of a relationship with God. No amount of convincing and arguing will ever accomplish this. No great Sunday Morning Show will accomplish this. “Door-to-door” annoyances certainly will not accomplish this. Genuine friendships and trust-building care is the only way we will accomplish this. Trust is not built in a single conversation. It’s not even built in a few days. Trust building takes time.
We have now been in our new location for over three months. We have not spent our time cramming the Gospel down peoples throats. We have been meeting people in our community and building friendships–real friendships. We are making friends to make friends–not to make targets for evangelism. As friends, our greatest desire is for these people to share in the life-giving hope found is Jesus Christ–but they will be our friends even if they do not respond to our faith. Some of those friendships have grown to a point where we can openly share what God means to us and where we see our lives going. These friends are learning to trust us with their lives. While we may not have the short-term results we want for our greater task, we believe the long-term result will be lives genuinely transformed by the power of the Gospel at work in our lives and the lives of people around us.
I honestly do not feel like we are just making excuses for falling short on evangelism. I think we are being genuine and allowing God to use it. Although it is frustrating that we are not seeing results the way WE want to see them . . . I believe God will honor it down the road with something very real and very exciting. The Bible doesn’t talk about making converts. It talks about making whole-hearted worshipers–disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.
