The Most Selfish Place in America

Yesterday we talked about the changes that lay ahead for Eastside Assembly of God. Since 2002 we have been in this large building sitting in the middle of corn and bean fields. Now construction has started on a new Elementary school right next to us that will be completed in the summer of 2011. There will also be a new high school to follow two years later. The landscape around us is going to be dramatically changed. And with that change more people will discover our church. As new people come to check us out and hopefully decide to make Eastside their home, the church will change. In my last church when we experienced rapid growth we looked nothing like the church that was their before. But if there is one thing I have learned it is that church people, especially established church people, (notice I didn’t say Christians or believers) resist those changes. They have expectations that the church will be to their liking and if it isn’t then they are gone.

I am just asking this for my own examination – How selfish do I have to be to expect everyone in the church I attend to do things my way? What level of narcissistic thought has to be in place for me to insist that hundreds of other people’s opinions are not more valid than mine? There is no other organization, other than the church, that would tolerate or try to address such thinking. One of the things I talked about yesterday was that many of the things that are the root of conflict in our churches are not addressed in the Scripture – the reason is – God simply doesn’t care about those things. He doesn’t care that we sing hymns or choruses, He doesn’t care what color the church is, He doesn’t care if we have Sunday night or small group meetings, He doesn’t care whether we dress up or are casual, He just doesn’t care about those things, but we do! So because God doesn’t care we have to over compensate for that so we care even more. I wonder what our churches would look like if we just cared about the things God cared about. Because sadly, most church are so busy trying to maintain the unity that they are forced to let the important things that God cares about slide.

So at Eastside Assembly of God we are looking at four areas where God may need to change us:

1. We must change our lifestyle to reflect our faith.
2. We must change so that our desires give way to the Holy Spirit.
3. We must change so that we look to the future instead of the past.
4. We must change so that we see need instead of inconvenience.

If we can change these things in us God will be able to use us for some remarkable things in 2010!