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This isn’t your average household fridge, it’s commercial size….and its packed to the rafters! This is what it’s going to take to feed the over 95 people attending the “Conversations that Count” seminar tomorrow! We’re looking forward to a great day and asking God to equip us to have meaningful spiritual conversations with those around us. See you there!

In the middle of March we hosted what I thought was a really great workshop on discovering your spiritual gifts and finding ways to serve that fit your gifts but also your passions and personality. Moses Lee taught us how to identify who we were created to be and find the best way to serve the church and the city. This kind of service brings great joy and fulfillment, not the drudgery and guilt we may have traditionally been exposed to when we heard the word “service” in the church.

I’ve been thinking more about this over the last month and have paired it with some advice I received a long time ago from a career counsellor. He said that in your 20s you should just try lots of different things, in your 30s you begin to figure out what you are good at (and enjoy) and what you are not so good at (and do not enjoy), and in your 40s, you finally find a great fit and are learning how to be most effective in that chosen career path. He told me to stop trying to find the perfect fit when I was so young and to simply be okay with this period of “trial and error” in my life. To embrace this period of figuring out who I was and to enthusiastically jump into a variety of opportunities, valuing the opportunity itself but also the things that the experience would inevitably teach me about who I am. I really appreciated that perspective at that time in my life and again now.

Many of us are trying to figure out where to serve in the church and how best to invest. But though I obviously very highly value the workshop we had here last month, I think at the same time, we can’t expect that now we will know exactly where to plug in. Even when we know our gifts and our passions, we have to simply dive in and try different areas of ministry. It’s only by trying something and finding out, “Yes! This is so ‘me’!” or “well, maybe this isn’t the best fit but I did learn this about myself and these things about ministry in general” will we ever find our best fit. We can’t sit at our desks, analyzing a spiritual gifts test and waiting for a revelation as to where we should serve, but we have to simply get out there and start serving! I believe Moses emphasized this in his workshop as well for which I’m thankful.

All over the place we see needs (certainly they exist within the Grace community and around our city) and though we can’t respond to every need that comes our way, we can jump in and serve even when we don’t know if this will be our long term fit. We’ll only ever know by trying!

I recently heard a sermon (don’t worry, it wasn’t Dan’s and this is not a really passive-agressive way of telling him) where it seemed like a self-help solution to life. The preacher said that so many people are turned off from the religion of their past because of its strict rules and rituals (agreed) but that true Christianity was not one of rules but of a life of love and compassion. He used a verse from the Bible to back up his point – “faith expressing itself through love” – but in using that verse, focused only on the expression of the faith (on the life of love), and not on the faith itself. (Side note: Has he not in this simply created another rule to live by? This time its simply couched in verbiage that is acceptable to our culture – love not duty, compassion not ritual. But love and compassion without the faith which it all comes from, is really just another rule – and therefore another way by which we mistakenly think we can earn our acceptance before God.)

I find this fascination with the bottom-line pervades our Christian culture. We want to get to the point – “ok, tell me what to do!” we exclaim at the end of a sermon.  We jump past descriptions of the Gospel, past studies on the nature of God, past deeper looks at the person of Christ and ask, “what does this mean for me?” or “how should I now act?” Don’t get me wrong, these questions are crucial. If we don’t ask them, we are missing out. I’ll be one of the first in line to say that our faith in Christ should radically change our lives and if it doesn’t, we have a problem. But if we ask these application questions too quickly and jump straight there before really dwelling on the former, will we not also lose much? We will miss out on simple awe and wonder, on true worship and meditation, on a deep internalized motivation, on insight into the deeper things of God. And while we can potentially see changes in our lives without those things, I doubt those changes will be long-lasting.

I want to be someone who loves to see the Gospel radically change my life. But I don’t want to side-step everything that will get me there and by so doing, miss out on the point. Christianity is not about application or about a lifestyle, that is simply a healthy and vibrant expression of a much greater reality of a life gripped by the realities of who God is and all he has done for us. Let us spend much time there first.

In the hopes that we would be people who long and search for the deeper things of our Christian faith, we’ve been taking a look at some of the misconceptions we hold about theology and how they skew our approach to it or even repel us from studying theology completely. Last time we challenged the misconception that theology is impractical. I think misconception #2 would be that theology is for the professional, the pastor, or the missionary but not for the average Christian.

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Packing my bags for a couple weeks spent in seminary classes, I thought, “why on earth am I doing this?” Many people I knew who had studied theology of any kind weren’t people I really wanted to be like. Many of them seemed to see God as merely an intellectual pursuit, the Bible as a textbook, and, at least from the outside looking in, were spiritually stagnant and dry. But coming away from that experience and even to this day, 2 years later, I still hold to the fact that those were some of the best weeks I’ve spent. Contrary to what I feared, the more I studied of the deep things of God, the more I found myself able to love and worship him for who he is. I found myself in awe of his nature, his ways, and my salvation. I found theology to be completely inspiring! Not only that, but so very practical.

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