Staying Healthy

Trust me. I'm not real worried about keeping myself healthy. Just ask Desi. I eat all sorts of terrible food. As I am writing this I am eating some cream cheese and chives crackers and washing them down with some pink lemonade. So like I said, I'm not worried about being healthy right now.

What I am going to talk about is trying to keep the church healthy. Yesterday, I talked about the things that are happening at Sojourn. And I said that I would explain why we are making these changes in our plans. I'm going to give you the first two now. The last two will come later; they require a lot more exlanation. So here you go...

There are four key areas in which a church must be strong in order to be healthy. And yes, these are in a particular order. And it's because of a lack of a couple of these things that we are not launching weekly services at Sojourn.

First is relational. You must be relationally strong. Well, what does that mean? For Sojourn, it means that relationships are at the center of everything we do. Our relationships with the people we work with, the people we meet on the streets. And especially our relationship with Christ. And every relationship matters. We have a saying here that "we are all about people". We are in the business of people. We want to love people. We want to welcome people. We want to help people fall in love with their God, who is madly in love with them. So for us to be relationally strong we have to love people well. To be honest, we lost a little of that when we started the preview services. We went from meeting in Toby's living room, having coffee and bagels, to having church services. At that point we became, as one person so well put it, "all business". We lost the focus on relationships and became focused on pulling off a good service. Obviously that's the opposite of what we are here for.

The second aspect of a healthy church is being spiritually strong. Now, this one is a little tricky. The reason why is because it's a process. Being spiritually strong isn't a statute you achieve and then move on to part three. This is something you have to keep in front of you and keep working on. Being spiritually strong is sort of like growing spiritually. What makes this one difficult to measure is that on any given Sunday you have people there who are all at different place in their spiritual journey. You have some people who gave their life to Christ a long, long time ago. And there are others who are hearing Jesus' name for the very first time. At least, there should be people like that in you service. The easy way out of this one is to simply ask the question, "Are people in the church growing?" Yes, that's a great question, but you can't stop there. Why are they growing? Are they growing because of the leadership of the church, or are they growing despite the leadership of the church? We feel that we are doing the right things now, and have future plans to keep people growing in their spiritual journey. Right now we have our weekly gatherings. Starting the end of October, we are beginning community groups(small groups). So we are putting these things in place to be sure we are constantly growing.

So that's it for now. Again, we feel that we are strong, and getting stronger is these two areas. Tomorrow I will finish this up, and that's when we'll get into the real meat and potatoes of the changes that are happening at Sojourn.

TTFN. Ta ta for now..