Lighthouses in the Light

As I try and wrap my mind around some of the things that I learned or that impacted me at Catalyst, I always come back to this one idea. It is a quote from Rob Bell, in one of the Catalyst podcasts.

from memory
"If a church were to be instantly removed from their community, would anyone outside of the church morn (or miss) the church"

The idea is that churches are not reaching out enough to their community, and I also take that to mean the world. If we have no impact on the people around us then it suddenly becomes about us and not what we are called to do which is GO.

Donald Miller put it like this. "He said we are like lighthouses in the light." nobody looks for a lighthouse in the light, nor could anyone find one unless they were on some kind of tour of lighthouses. We are called to be lighthouses in the dark were people are hurting and need a savior.

Sure a couple of people will come to a church because they need it, but the rest of the culture thinks that churches hate them and they receive more love from the drug dealers and bars.

I am not saying that we need to be handing out bibles in bars and the like, but we do need to be loving on these people. Without somekind of relationship, our evangalism is useless.

What does all this mean to me? Genessa and I are going to be doing some very specific things with some of our money to make a global impact (be looking for this blog). As leaders at Keypoint we have the opportunity to change the way NWA feels about churches and Jesus. We are going to begin to develop ideas to reach out to the people of NWA.

Yesterday when I was talking with the staff at KPC about Catalyst and this idea. It sounded great. All we had to do was decide that we wanted to do it and the rest would be down hill. Today it sounds hard, real hard, maybe a lonely road, hard to measure success and draining. But it is also what we feel called to do, I don't want to be anywhere other than where God has called me to be.

Shine on,
Tim