Hey MABC family,
On our way home yesterday Sherry and I were talking about how quickly the past year has gone and that Christmas is just around the corner followed by a new year…2025. Wow! Well, yesterday we essentially started 2025 as a church family. With the fiscal year starting in November and the approval of new team chairs for the coming year, 2025 is on. What are the hopes and desires of you sitting in the pews on Sunday for our church? What do we want 2025 to look like for MABC?
Let me ask you a more telling question. What do we want MABC to look like in 10 years? For those of you who are here now, what do you want your legacy to be? In our business meeting yesterday, you heard that we are going to be celebrating our 100th year anniversary. Will there be a 105th? A 110th? You heard me say yesterday that the Lord doesn’t like anything that hinders the witness of the church as we talked about dishonesty, hypocrisy and self-serving in the account of Ananias and Sapphira. What is our witness right now?
We emphasized the necessity and importance of being honest with each other and with God. If we are being honest, the average age in our church is up there pretty high. With the current make up of our church, without an infusion of a younger people, is there another 10 or 15 years in MABC’s future? Hard words to hear. Lee Kircher, author of the book “For a New Generation,” says that we must have a mind shift in our churches today. Here is what he says:
Thinking of our churches as being potentially one generation away from extinction is not being overly dramatic. Someone has said that we are either living out the birth of a new vision or the death of an old one. The members of the church must decide which it will be.
We need to think carefully about all the things that we do. It has been said that we need to think of church as a hot-air balloon. The things that we do in church are like the sandbags that hold the balloon in place on the ground. Think about everything in church from music, décor, programs, social media, even down to the images we put on the screen as sandbags. If we wanted to soar as a church, which of those things need to change or be jettisoned all together to allow that to happen? You all went through “Simple Church” with Pastor Dick and one of the great quotes in that book is that “if the goal of the church is just to keep things going (status quo), then the church is in trouble.” Everything that we do should be geared toward finding the lost and giving them hope and life that is only found in Jesus.
I will have a couple of more thoughts on this topic next week but may have given you more to think about than you like right now and to be honest, you may not like anything I just said. I get that! Part of my role as a pastor, just as it was as a college head coach, is to do an end of the year review and look at everything being done. What needs to change in order to be better and more effective either on the football field or in the community is the goal for doing that. And that includes me! I listen to some of my sermons and think “Man, I gotta kick it up a notch! I need to do better!” I don’t want to have to answer to Jesus for not presenting His bride in the most favorable light for the Kingdom. How about you?
Pastor Rick
