We recently sold our kids playhouse. You know the one that has been sitting back there doing nothing for a couple of years now.
Sure from time to time the kids went back there and played, but for the most part it would just sit there empty, alone filled with spiders and cob webs.
As I am writing this I am sitting at our staff retreat, waiting for everyone to gather for our nightly devotional.
Over the next few days we are discussing what is next for the work in 2013? How do we become better disciples to make disciples? What will the church look like in this new year?
I think often we have this really fun, useful thing. It offers us so much and yet we never take the time to enjoy it for what it is. Instead we just let it sit there and collect cob webs and spiders.
Often we treat a church plant like a playhouse. It’s fun for a while, but only as long as we don’t have to do anything to major with it.
Think about it: in a playhouse you can pretend to clean without really cleaning. You can pretend to cook and do the dishes without having to really work.
If we had to work it would cease to be a playhouse and would just be, well, a house!
Planting a church isn’t something we do or play with. It is a way of life. It really shouldn’t even be called church planting because the church already is; it should just be called living, Missional living.
And even though church planting is fun most of the time, there is a lot of hard work.
For many, when it gets hard, that is when they stop “playing.”
That is what we are dealing with this week. Times get hard, but we can’t stop doing what we have been called to do.
We aren’t playing. This is real life and we have a real task.
It’s time to stop making playhouses and start living a life of Christ, for Christ.
Justin Cherry 