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Each Thursday morning, from 8-10am, I have a standing Zoom meeting. There are very few things that I let interfere with this appointment, because it’s an important one; one that I need, and one that I really do enjoy. Each Thursday I meet with my band-mate… no, I am not in a band. Anyone who has heard me sing knows that can’t be true. This band isn’t a musical group, but it’s a Wesleyan-style very-small discipleship growth group. My good friend and fellow pastor is my band-mate. We’re working on adding a couple more band-mates, but for right now, it’s just us… This past Sunday, we launched our Fall Stewardship Campaign and I wanted to take a minute to share it with you if you missed it, or if you need to hear it again! And I want to start by giving thanks! Church, I give thanks for you today! I give thanks to our God because of each and every one of you, because we get the privilege of joining together here today whether online or in person at the church, we get to worship together, we get to share life together, we get to carry one another’s burdens and celebrate each other’s joys. I give thanks for you because of all you do in the name of the Lord to bring joy and peace and love to this world, to share with others what God has done in your life. I give thanks because together, we are the body of Christ, we are the church, and we get to bring glory to God through all we do, whether together or individually, whether here at church, or out there wherever we find ourselves. I hope you see how amazing a thing that is, and how wonderful it is to be able to give thanks to God for it all! Part of our Power of Thanks message series focus this Fall is celebrating the good things God is doing now, and preparing for the amazing things God will do in the future. Because we know that God has been, is, and will continue to call us, use us, and lead us in this great kingdom work as His church! As we prepare for that unknown future, we as the leadership of your church are asking you to join with us in praising God and trusting Him with that future. We exist as a church because of the grace of God, and we function because of the work, and the gifts given, by every person here. Because of who you are, what you do, and the heart with which you give, we get the wonderful privilege of doing this church-thing! In the mail this week, you will be getting a letter from the church to start our Fall Stewardship Campain. Each year, we ask those who call this church home to prayerfully commit to supporting the church financially in the next year. With the letter will be a pledge card. Now, this is where things sometimes get awkward. Oh no, I knew it, the church just wants my money. I hear it all the time from church folk and non church folk alike. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. We don’t want your money. We want you. We need you in fact. Without you, and you and all the other yous, we couldn’t do this great work for God that we do in our community. We couldn’t be a beacon of hope in a hopeless world. We could be the place that our community comes to for welcome, for support, to get their needs met, to find friendships and healing, to experience love and support. Without you, we can’t be the church. So we ask you to commit to that great work. It is God who calls us to commit our whole selves to that work, including our talents, including our time, and yeah, including our treasures. The truth is, we as a church cannot continue without the financial giving of our people. Without folks like you giving, and giving passionately, giving sacrificial, we can’t keep operating our building, and paying our staff, and running our programs, and offering support to those in need, and partnering with other churches and businesses and organizations to do even greater things for those around us to bring glory to God. Our pledge cards ask us to think through what we can and would like to give to the church in the next year. We use those numbers to plan our budget, to prepare for the ministries we feel led to engage in in the next year. No, your pledge card is not a bill. It’s a prayer. It’s a hope. It’s you saying, with God’s help, I will support the church with this amount of money. When you look at it, it may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things, but when you bring yours along with yours and mine and all of ours together, with a heart that desires to love God, then God can accomplish great things! So we ask you over the next two weeks, to take that card, and talk with God and your family about it. What do you give now? Can you continue that in the next year? Can you give more? Can you give up something in order to sacrifice for God’s church and His people? I can’t answer those questions for you. Only you and your family and God can. But what I can tell you is that when you trust God, when you commit your resources to Him, when you come together with others, God will do great things, God will be honored, and we will be blessed through it! I ask you to pray, and to make that commitment. When you do, send your pledge card into the church. If you don’t receive one in the mail this week, it’s likely we don’t have your contact information. But if you would like to join in, you can find a pledge card on our website. Send them in. Come join us for worship in person one Sunday in the next couple weeks and bring it with you. Let’s bring our prayers and commitments and resources together as God’s people, trusting Him, and working together to do this great work He has for us. And like I said at the start of this talk, I give thanks to God for each of you! I given thanks to Him for the faith you have, even if you think it’s small. I give thanks for the life you have, because through you, God is glorified! I give thanks for you because, with you, we are the church! And in that, there is great power!
I don’t know about you, but I do my best thinking while I’m driving (and my best overthinking at 3am, but that’s a different story!).
So today, Monday, as I was driving home from a meeting, my thoughts turned to yesterday’s message from Ruth chapter 2. And something hit me that I hadn’t seen before about the characters in our story. They’re all in the business of Hope-Dealing (not to be confused with dope-dealing). Well, I want to report on a risk that we took at Christmas that proved to be well worth it! We held an online Blue Christmas service, on Monday, December 21. We had just over 80 people that joined us for this service of lament and hope. The following day, I “boosted” the post. That means that I paid to make it an ad that would show up on a selected demographic’s News Feed. I chose to target 18-65 year olds within a 50 mile radius of Coopersville. I set a budget of $25 for a six day ad. I had been in a lot of trainings that say that boosting ads reaches a lot more people than simply posting things. So I prayerfully took the risk and made the ad live. I am happy to report that it was a risk worth taking. One of the benefits of boosting posts is that Facebook will give you detailed insights as to how the post performed (i.e. who it reached, how who clicked play, how long they played for, and demographic information). Over the six day period that the ad was live, 1342 people watched the service all the way through. Did you read that? 1342 people, from within a 50 mile radius experienced our Blue Christmas Worship Service! They heard about a God who doesn’t run from our pain, but who sits with us in it, who invites us to cry out, and who offers hope in the midst of pain. 1342 people! Congratulations Church! This is amazing, and the risk was worth it! There is no way that 1342 people would have showed up in person, but they did click play and were able to her about God’s great love!
I am so excited to see what new risks we can take for God and the sake of the world this year! Do you have an idea? A God-inspired idea that may just pay off in future glory for God? I’d love to talk with you about it. I’ve already had a couple people share some thoughts, and we’re going to be doing some more things because of them. I can’t wait!
What God-inspired risks can you take this week? One of the hardest things for us as humans is to know how best to use our time. I don't now about you, but I'm really good at wasting a lot of time doing nothing...at least nothing of much importance. Netflix binging hasn't helped with that, either. So, as followers of Christ who are called to greater things, how do we redeem our use of our time? Ephesians 5:1 tells us that we are to "be imitators of God." Well, that's all well and good, but what does that actually look like? How to I imitate God? We do that by following the example of Christ. So what's that, you may ask? After Jesus was baptized by His cousin, John the Baptist, in the Jordan River, the Holy Spirit led Him out into the wilderness/desert for a period of forty days. While He was there, He didn't eat or drink anything- NOTHING at all for almost 6 weeks! And during this time, both Luke and Matthew tell us that the devil came to Jesus and tempted Him with several things- power, luxury, and food. After 40 days, any of us would be starving, and probably willing to do just about anything to fill our bellies with something. Satan comes to Jesus and tells Him to prove He is the Son of God by turning some stones on the ground around Him into bread to eat. What is a jerk? Webster's dictionary defines a jerk as a stupid person, or a person who is not well-liked or who treats people badly. Google has a more succinct description: a contemptibly obnoxious person. Or, as I said on Sunday, a jerk is often just "a big meanie-head!" We all know someone who would be described by those definitions; someone who is just a jerk, and we really don't like being around them, whether they are at our jobs, in our families, or part of our church. But this week, we're not looking at how to get THEM to stop being jerks. We're looking at how WE- Me and You- can go about not being a Jerk! I remember very well the first words my daughter learned how to say, "No!" followed very soon by "mama!" (I would have preferred a different order on those, but...) She picked up on the whole talking thing very quickly, just like most of us do. Talking comes naturally to us humans. But talking well, in ways that are holy, that build people up? That takes more work. So we need to learn how to do it, and how to do it well. It takes practice. It takes grace. And it takes a willingness to look at ourselves humbly and honestly, because what we say, how we say it, and why we say it matters! I was driving in the car this morning listening to yet another discussion about the death of the beloved lion Cecil in Zimbabwe this month. The amount of hatred being spewed against the man who killed this majestic animal, for sport, was immense. I get it. It was very terrible what this man has done. I'm not sure how I feel about hunting for sport as it is, let alone all the lengths it appears he went to to bag this mighty beast. But as I was driving down the highway listening to the radio hosts talk about how we should all be appalled and up-in-arms about this atrocity, my mind was quickly filled with other images. |
AuthorCori Conran is the pastor of The United Methodist Church of Coopersville, a wife, a mother, and an avid amateur at lots of things. Archives
December 2021
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