What a blessing this weekend has been. It will be so hard to sum up all of the things that have gone on. In my last post I mentioned that Dr. John Armstrong spoke at the Friday night event. I just want to attempt to condense what he said about the church universal and our church specifically.

1. We need to be inspirational. We need to build our Sunday mornings to charge the faithful up to face the world the rest of the week. I feel that our services are pretty good at this. Our times of song and reflection are good, our adherence to the Word in the preached word is there as well. If I was assessing our body, I would say that we are safe on this action item. Although life always allows room for improvement.
2. We need to be invitational. We need to open the church to those who are not Christians. This is a tough one for me and many others. Now a casual reader may not understand what I am talking about, but this is really counter cultural in many ways to most of Christendom. We like to see church as our fortress, our safe haven. Parents look at it as a place where they can drop their kids off and not worry about them being exposed to the cultural sins that are running rampant in the schools, malls and neighborhoods. They don’t want their children exposed to those who are drug users, or those that smoke or curse. We create this environment that says, “you can come here, but act differently so that you will fit into our cultural requirements. You better behave. And don’t even ask to be involved in anything, unless you just want to sit in the pew.” Because everything we do in the church is under a heading where the word ministry follows a title, you have to be a Christian to participate. He drew the example of an usher. Do your ushers have to be saved? This is so completely counter cultural to the established traditions and practices of the church. We need to have a spirit of invitation, a spirit that says we want you to be here. We want you to be in this building. We can do this while also not compromising on the preached word.
3. We need to be missional. We need to view our lives as a mission, and our church as a mission. Not rely on the pastor, or our missionaries, or our staff to do the mission work. We need to be invitational to get the non believer in our lives, and then we need to be missional to show them the love of Christ. We need to present the gospel in this missional period of relationship. I know that there is a friction between those who adhere to the gospel as relationship and the gospel as truth. I would guess that the answer lies in a mix of both. Isn’t it amazing that as the theologians continue to debate, the Holy Spiris continues to draw men to himself. Where it isn’t our effort or knowledge, or sales techniques that save man, it is our being vessels used by God to deliver that gospel that saves. We need to be missional in our relationships, but to declare the truths in them at the same time.

I am sure that my summary lacks many of the points that Dr. Armstrong made, but I hope I caught the spirit. What a privilege to meet the man and spend some brief time with him in the van ride from the airport (even if it was late), and what a greater privelge to be ministered to by him on Friday night. I was not able to listen to him at other times over the weekend because of various responsibilities, but I will be getting the tapes and listening to them.

So this brings me to Saturday night and Sunday morning with Dr. Chappell. Let me sum it up and just say WOW and I’ll expound on that at a later time. I've got to get going to our big finale event at the church tonight. We are having a big dinner and then watching a video retrospective and then singing some great songs. Blog at you later. Oh and if your reading, let me know.

Thanks