Praying for Your Endurance
Dear CG Leaders,
Thank you so much for your ministry in these trying times. I am personally encouraged by the extra mile you and your wives are taking to care for our members. Again, please let me or the pastors know if there are specific ways we could serve you.
Over a decade ago when I began to study more about church planting I remember hearing that there’s a difference between churches who offer small groups and a church of small groups. For the former it’s an optional program, but for the latter, it’s the organizing structure of the church, the engine for ministry from and to the body.
The thing is, though, it’s not always so clear where your church falls on that spectrum … that is, until catastrophe strikes and the church is literally scattered. Like now.
There’s no doubt that we’re in the middle of an unprecedented hardship, both for our society and for the church in America, and that means we are experiencing real loss and isolation and sometimes worse. But in God’s kindness, I believe our church is well-suited to make it through this pandemic, largely because of your ministries.
As I think about everything, I keep coming back to the cross — to the ways of God to always be doing more than we can see. If we had been around Golgotha on that first Good Friday, there would have been nothing good about it. The Son of God was crucified! Could there be anything worse than that? And yet we know that in the cross, in what appeared to be the worst thing, God was actually accomplishing the best thing. The pinnacle of divine revelation, in its real-time, was unseen for what it was. Such is the way of the cross, turning the wisdom of the world upside, shaming the strong, but to those who believe, the power of God and the wisdom of God (see 1 Corinthians 1:22–25).
So then, how might this theology of the cross apply to us in this coronavirus global pandemic?
Simply that God is doing more than we can see, because that is what God does. And we trust, because of God’s promise, that what he does is always for our ultimate good (see Romans 8:28). And our calling right now, more than anything else, is endurance. We endure in faith. We hang in there, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
That is what I’m praying for you, and for us. Endurance. Encourage one another with these words.
The pastoral team is already at work with our plans for reopening in June, God willing. It won’t be full-throttle back to normal for a while, due to extra safety precautions, but we’re excited to do all that we can to get us back in our building together.
And after you have been quarantined a little while, the God of all grace, who has called us to be the church physically gathered together in worship, will himself bring us together for worship again. And he will do even much more than that (see 1 Peter 5:10–11).
Gratefully,
in Christ,
Pastor Jonathan
