The Awakening
As many of you know, I’m the pastor of Fellowship Church in Holden, Massachusetts. I love what I do and personally I wouldn’t want to do anything else. One of the things I’ve been pondering in recent days is this wierd balance between striving to be an excellent organization and truly building a community of people who love each other. I know there’s room for both.
Truthfully, the one I have strived the most for is the latter, because this works best with my gifts, but because of the influence of my predecessor I’ve written about here, I’ve also worked more recently on striving for excellence. The team at FC has done an amazing job in this area over the last few months, really giving their all to do things right.
Now all of a sudden I get this feeling that there are several people who are linked to “the FC” who are going through some real stuff (not that theres not a better word), and I have this desire to help these people through these things through our community. I just don’t know how. Even tonight, this thought keeps me awake later than I should be awake.
So this is the dilemma I’m working through as a young pastor: FC has to continue to reach new people and lead them into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ, and we have to make sure we are taking care of those people who are already immersed in our community.
A constant balance – An all-nighter?
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This is a brutal balance…
You are just one guy with a finite ammount of energy, time, and enthusiasm. The question is, where do you use it?
Too far in the institutional direction and you’ll have a soul-less, though excellent, system, filled with broken people who haven’t been taken care of.
Too far in the other direction and you’ll have nurtured, taken over people who are part of a mediocre system.
On the one hand, Jesus didn’t seem much to do about with creating systems. He just loved people.
But I find myself wondering: Did he realize that creating systems would come easier to His followers than loving people, and know this was where he really needed to model what to do, because the other stuff would work itself out?
Is the case where the folks went to the early apostles claiming that there widows weren’t getting their fair share relevant here? The apostles didn’t stop what they were doing– they delegated.
This seems to connect to the parable of the talents. It seems like wherever we have riches, we’re expected to invest them. The apostles were gifted in a handful of areas, and they focused on these. If they let these gifts lay dormant while they did other things (such as personally organize the feeding of all the widows) it’d be like burying the riches rather than investing.
In this light, it seems like you ought to go where your gifts take you and trust God to provide somebody with different gifts to take care of the other stuff.