A Confession

As most of you probably know, I am a pastor, and perhaps my biggest job is communication in various ways. Today I was reading some random thoughts about communication and it hit me... If something is important enough to communicate, you need tospend time preparing for it and not get stuck in a rut.

Let me put it this way: In the last 4 years, Eden UB Church has made some pretty drastic changes. I came in there at the age of 19 and did'nt realize I wasn't "supposed" to change anything for a year or two. We have changed the time of our worship service (flipped it with sunday school), gone from very tradtional unrehersed music to more of a blended/contemporary style with lots of practice. We've ceased having Sunday night preaching and now we have a Bible study. We've changed a lot.

But I am really starting to feel like we're dropping the ball. We didn't change for change's sake. We made these changes to be more effective in our mission to make disciples for Jesus. In the early times of change, I spent hours working and planning transitions, but now, I am relying more and more on taking the easy way out of it. It's not just me- its a trap we all fall into.

Think about it. Eden used to only have one or two congregational songs per service. Now we have three or four. But at first we used to do a different order of service every week to keep it interesting. Now we do the same order, we just switch out songs. It has been so easy to do this because instead of FOCUSING ON JESUS, WE'VE FOCUSED ON SOMETHING ELSE.

Why do we as Christians or church leaders sometimes settle for mediocraty when Jesus deserves our very best? It does't make sense to me. When I get together with the others on our worship team and plan the services together and pray and search the Bible, you can tell the difference in the Sunday worship time.

Why do we get stuck in a rut? SO, JUNE 14 WILL BE TOTALLY DIFFERENT at Eden UB Church! I will be gone this weekend at National Conference (I'll be blogging about that on here each day), but the first Sunday I'm back, we're gonig to do things in a fresh way.