Preach the Word...

In this post I want to talk about a special part of my life over the past year. A lot has happened in the last year that has provided me with the opportunities to strengthen my faith and my love of the Lord. I want to make it clear that I am in no way perfect and will never profess to be. I have tried to grow closer to the person that God wants me to be and this post will reflect back on that endeavor.

January of 2009, my wife and I decided it was time for us to leave the congregation we had been worshipping with since we got married. I had been worshiping there since my move here for college. It was a difficult decision, but had been in the making for the six months prior to the final breaking point. My wife and I were concerned with the lack of structure in some of our son's classes. He loved going to class, but on many occasions, the time was spent playing with toys with little Bible being discussed if any at all. This was not acceptible to us. We want our son to grow up loving the Bible and having a desire to study the Bible.

I want to take a minute before anyone says that it is the responsibilities of the parents to teach their children, and I agree 110%. I also believe though that Bible classes should teach the Bible also.

We raised our concerns with the elders over the congregation, but did not see any action to change the situation. As we talked back and forth about leaving, other situations began to arise. The breaking point came one Sunday in January when one of the elders stood up and slandered the names of some of our good friends from the pulpit. We decided we could no longer worship in that place.

It happened that the good friend whom had been slandered had also been talking with me about the need for an active congregation of the church in the area where we lived. God had opened a door of opportunity for us to reach out into our community and preach the Word. In total we had about twenty people who began worshipping with us in our homes. The services were very uplifting, and for the first time in a long time I began to feel alive again. I was no longer sitting in a pew with hundreds of others. I was in a close personal setting, and I was working.

I did most of the leg work to get our congregation recognized as an entity with the state as well as get a tax ID and tax exempt status. My good friend took care of getting our bank account open, and we began looking for a space we could rent until we could afford to build a building. We knocked on doors, which our young children loved doing. We prayed for people we had never met, took food and flowers to families who were struggling that we had never met. We worked in our community.

Along the way, some of our number decided to move on to other congregations. Building a new congregation takes time and is a lot of work. For some, the growth wasn't coming fast enough. Their enthusiasm ran out and they moved on. At the same time, we grew from a family who began to worship with us. It was very exciting.

We were able to rent some space at one of the local schools and this provided a place to invite others to come and worship with us. With the building, we decided we needed more consistency and structure. I began preaching full time for the congregation and my good friend began leading singing full time. The other men filled in the other areas that we needed workers. Our women were great at teaching our classes and the space at the school provided a chance to have those classes. We had families come and worship with us and even had one come back and visit a couple of times.

Some of our members suffered illnesses, others experienced family growth and others began to experience dissatisfaction with the slow growth of the congregation. All the while I tried to provide spiritual nurishment and sermons that applied to each of our lives. Perhaps in later posts I will provide some of my topics and add some notes.

2009 was a difficult year financially for our country. In November of 2009, the financial strains began to appear in our contribution. It became apparent that something was going to have to change. I want to make one point here, we did not have any paid staff. I was not being paid to preach, keep our finances or any of the other tasks that I performed. At the same time, no one else was paid either. Our expenses were in the space, which was our largest expense, as well as our website and our insurance. We decided that each family would try to find ways to contribute a little more than we had been. In reality, most of us were giving all we could give. Each month when we paid for the rent and janitorial staff, we shrank our bank account. By March we were down to our last month.

Our bank account held just enough money to cover the expense of the space we were renting. The men held a meeting and we discussed our options. We had two, go back to meeting in homes or search for another congregation we could join with to strengthen both groups. After two weeks of prayer and discussing with our families, we made the decision to find another congregation to worship with.

Perhaps in a better year we would have been able to survive, but financially we were done. So was the last year a failure? No! We were able to heal from the hurt some of our members had felt over the previous year. I was able to expand my study of the scriptures and spend a year preaching the Word to a great group of people. Most importantly, we were able to go back to work and get into the communities in which we live and touch those lives.

The past month has been difficult for me. I am now again sitting in the audience listening to the sermons, instead of giving them on a regular basis. Even in this, I have found the chance to grow my knowledge. I still have the opportunity to preach and will be preaching in a couple of weeks. It happens that the congregation we have been worshipping with is looking for someone who can preach on a regular basis. Perhaps the Lord is opening another door for me to Preach the Word.