Spring is a celebration of new life. I’ve been pruning old dead branches in order to get ready for the new life that is coming.
Spring is a celebration of new life. I’ve been pruning old dead branches in order to get ready for the new life that is coming.
Lately, I’ve been inspecting my plants trying to decide if I should pour my resources and time into them in an attempt to revive them.
I am not sure if I should give up on the old plants and simply go with new ones.
Some of my old plants have roots that are so tangled, hard and lifeless that I probably just need to remove them, pour in fresh soil, and plant something new.
Wow! I think I may have just figured out some of Jesus’ parables about the Kingdom and the Church.
Perhaps we are pouring a lot of time, effort, and resources into some old programs, classes, and activities that will never be productive. We may need to honestly consider starting something new and fresh so that growth has an opportunity to occur.
At a recent Director of Missions meeting, we were considering the fact that possibly as high as 80% of our churches in our state are plateaued, declining, or dying. Within a decade or so, if there is not a major turn around, we as Southern Baptists will be a pale shadow of what we once were.
Personally, I am not ready to accept a slow death. I believe by allowing God’s Spirit to infuse us, we can still experience growth and life.
I shared with our Director of Missions a strange dream I had the other night (Granted I had taken a dose of arthritis medicine that tends to make me have weird dreams, but the dream still haunts me.).
In my dream, I was standing in front of a church and I was holding two bottles.
In one hand I held a bottle of Lubriderm (a lotion for old dry skin) and in the other hand I clutched a bottle of baby lotion. As I stood in front of the church, I stared at the bottles and tried to decide which of the two lotions I was going to apply.
Suddenly the focus of my dream then shifted to the parable Jesus told about old wine skins not stretching to accommodate the new wine of the Holy Spirit which would bring new life and change.
I awoke from the dream with the thought that babies are elastic. They grow. On the other hand, old things tend to become brittle, unflexible ing, and slowly die. To live we must create. To live we must produce something new.
Joe McKeever, DOM from New Orleans, listened to my dream and, doing what he does best, immediately produced a cartoon depicting his understanding of my nocturnal vision.
Joe pictured me delivering new wine to the church via a tank truck. My expression is troubled. A man is present, giving direction and urging caution.
The reason for our concern is that these next years are likely to be difficult ones. We must start new churches, new works and new classes. Doing so will create great stress.
Change is seldom embraced or appreciated. We tend to become territorial and defensive rather than pliable and flexible. But folks, if we don’t create, we will slowly die. We must constantly be reaching out to new people and starting new ministries.
Two questions we must consider are, “How do we create without destroying and how do we expand without strife and division?”
With these questions in mind, I have invited Fallas Holloway from the Louisiana Baptist Convention Church Enrichment division to meet with churches in our area who want to get on a track that will lead to life and vitality.
The plan is to work with 6 to 10 churches and lead them through a 6-month program designed to help them become a growing church. The process will be duplicated as often as needed until all churches, desiring to go through the process, have had an opportunity to do so.
Let’s grow together, because in a dying world, we need to be living