So Now What?

I'll tell you what, sometimes maybe I should just keep my big mouth shut! Here's just a few options that showed up after I asked "So now what?"
1. The church I grew up in just lost their Associate Pastor, a position I told myself I would probably take if the last guy quit, and then he did.
2. The idea of starting a new work or a sister/daughter church has been consistently reinforced for the past few weeks, from various angles and sources.

Now to clarify, I absolutely will not move on either of these two fronts without clear prompting from the Holy Spirit. I will not put my family through major life changes without the Spirit's "Amen." The waters are muddy right now, and I know for sure that God is not a God of confusion. He may call me to go and not tell me where but right now there are only options and no clear call to any of them. I am praying for God's clarity, will you pray with me?

This is a later edit: I got a call from a friend in Virginia yesterday and he told me that the church in his town that belongs to our denomination is looking for a young pastor to fill their pulpit. They would prefer a former youth pastor.... ugh. 2/1/07

Dazed and Confused

DISCLAIMER: This post is being written with the assumption that the three or four of you that read this blog know what has happened in my family in the past month or so.

Since we have returned to life at home since Sammy's sickness my sense of "normal" has been anything but. We never got a chance to get into a routine with a new baby and two big boys so that has been a big adjustment for us. However, the sense of loss of normality goes deeper than all of that. We returned from the hospital to an extreme home make-over, an incredibly encouraging thing. The fact that the church came together as the Church and provided for our needs as the first century Church did just absolutely blew me away, thank you to those folks will never be enough. I'll keep saying it though!
This is where it gets strange...
In the midst of all of this and all of the thinking I have been doing on rethinking church and ministry when I should be super-encouraged by the Church here, I am still not.
In our fellowship here there are two distinct groups: The church and the Church. I hope you notice the distinction in capitalization. One group is dedicated to the church small "c" much like any club member would be dedicated to their club, like the Elks or Masons. They are concerned about protecting its history and traditions and so limit the scope of its future. Then there are those that are the Church capitol "C." They are dedicated first of all to the Lord and His glory. To them the Church is the body of Christ not the organization, its past and future belong to the Lord. I love this group! There are some in the former group that dabble in the things of the latter and there are those who are firmly rooted in the latter but are forced to deal with the issues of the former. I say forced because we are not able to function in the legal sense as the Church is designed to function, although we have Elders they are not entrusted to make real decisions and take real action. If the Church was asked to move to Biblical Eldership it would stand up and cheer, if the church was asked to vote on it it would fail because we don't trust a small group of people to make decisions for the rest of the church Biblical or not.
This frustrates me to no end. I want more than anything for the church to dare to be the Church that God designed but we are too chicken. Scared of conflict and confrontation, we are scared into disobedience.
I am not satisfied with that, I don't want to live that way.

So now what?