One of the things that you hear a lot among pastors is that they each want their church to be a “New Testament church.”  This is usually code for “my church is dying and it’d really help if we could add a lot of new members in one day that tithe.”

Sad. Not sad because pastors would like more members, or even that they’d like those members to give, but sad because we’ve allowed a verse like Acts 2:41 to become the standard that measures what the early church was like.  Yes, they had 3,000 people join the roll that day, but the bulk of the church growth took place daily as the followers of a risen Lord lived lives that were, as Acts 2:42 says, devoted to each other.

They learned together, lived together, ate together, prayed together.

They saw signs together, served the needy together, praised God together, celebrated together.

Any church that lacks that cannot call itself a New testament church, no matter how big it is or how fast it got there.  Let me see if I can explain why it matters like this:

Yesterday I tweeted this: “Hype relocates. Hope reforms.”  The point I was making is that hype – while not an altogether bad thing – can’t do anything more than move us.  We use it to escape for a period of time, but eventually we find ourselves back where we were.  Realistically, of course, we don’t end up where we were, because hype will always leave us wanting more, and since the latest and greatest thing will eventually become the oldest and slowest thing, hype becomes the tail that the dog always chases but never quite catches.

In a service, hype moves our problems just beyond reach…temporarily.  But ultimately, hype fails.  It doesn’t make excitement a bad thing, or slick marketing a bad strategy.  It just makes hype what it really is: the wrapping that makes us want to open the present.

I think a lot of churches would do a better job of reaching the lost in their cities if they gave hype a try, as long as they understand that it can only take them so far.  And that’s where hope comes in.

Hope has the power to reform us.  To change the way we see the things around us.  While hype fascinates us, hope fills us.  When hype fails, hope holds firm.  Not because hope in and of itself is so great, but because our hope is in something – more specifically, Someone – that can be counted on to deliver (Hebrews 11:1).  Hype leaves us wondering, but hope leaves us watching.  While one can often lead to empty promises, the other always leads to expectation.

Sure, the best of all worlds is hype that leads to hope, but that will only happen when those of us who follow Jesus actually follow Him together after the lights fade and the fog machines are unplugged.  If we can’t do that, then the thousands that joined on one day will be the thousands that leave when the next big thing comes to town.

And that, my friends, isn’t a New Testament church.

It’s a 21st century one.

If you know me, this will come as absolutely no surprise: I’m not very handy when it comes to fixing stuff.  In fact, I’m so bad at it that someone who overheard my phone conversation with Wendy the other day actually laughed when they heard me tell The B99 that I was in the process of fixing our microwave!  Literally, I got off the phone and they looked at me and asked (in a tone that mocked me more than they probably meant to), “You’re fixing a microwave???”

It made me realize just how funny it must have sounded.  Me, the consummate un-handyman, saying out loud that I was fixing anything.

“Well,” I rephrased, “let’s just say I’m attempting to fix the microwave.”  This seemed to sound much better to the person, and all was right in the world again.

I could go into all the details about how I fixed a microwave door that was sagging on its hinges because the original weld had broken, but that’s not the point of this post.

(I think I will add a post at some point explaining how a simple rivet was a cheaper solution than what all the other websites told me to do, and it might end up being as popular as the post on how I got my coffeemaker to stop making me what to kill myself.  Another time, though.)

The point of this post is that now, every time I open and close the microwave door, my eye automatically goes to that one rivet and…I…

…smile.

I think about the fact that I fixed it.  I think about how the fixed door makes Wendy (my better 99%) smile when she opens it.  I think about, well, the power of redemption and how God must smile when He looks down on all of His children who were broken and now are being fixed.

Philippians 1:6 says that we can be “confident of this, that he who began a good work in [us] will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”  How excited does God get over broken sinners being healed through the redemptive work of Jesus? “He will take great delight in you…he will rejoice over you with singing.” (Zephaniah 3:17, emphasis added)

You and I are broken microwave doors, and Jesus is the rivet, and every time God looks at you or me, his eyes are drawn to Jesus, and He smiles.  Our redemption brings him joy, and when we live our lives with the purpose of carrying that redemptive message to the broken world around us, we bring more joy to our Father’s heart.

That’s our purpose at The Gathering.  We live near God in order to be sent to those far from Him, and that, in turn, brings a smile to his face and glory to his name.  Walk with redemption in mind this week and let’s see God smile when we gather together with a bigger family this Sunday!

It’s funny how being a portable church plant can make some things easy and yet other things become much more difficult. When you hold your services in a coffee shop, it isn’t hard to create a warm atmosphere.  But finding space for a full band or figuring out where to have a baptism service?  Seemingly simple tasks like that become increasingly challenging when you’re portable.

That’s where we found ourselves in the week heading up to our first baptism service at The Gathering.  After holding our first baptism spontaneously in the fountain at the square a few weeks back (if you haven’t seen that video, it’s worth two minutes of your time), we had decided to actually get permission this time to baptize four more people at the square this past Sunday. You won’t be surprised when I tell you that we were denied because of liability issues, but I was.  Even after suggesting we’d sign a waiver releasing any other parties from responsibility, the answer was “no.”

That left us a few days out from what could be one of the most impactful services in the short history of our church and with no idea how or where to pull it off.  These are the things most churches take for granted.  They just fill up the old baptistry and dunk people!  Plan B turned into buying a 300 gallon watering trough from Mauney’s Feed Mill in New London, which would be wide enough for me to get in the water with the people being baptized, and deep enough that if they sat down, we could baptize them easily (except for the really tall ones, which you can see ran out of room in the video!).  Plan B got even better when the fantastic folks at Mauney’s heard what we were using it for and just told us to pick it up, use it, and then bring it back.  Saved us about $250 right there, and so when I sat down Saturday evening and saw that the weather on Sunday was going to be 84° and sunny, I couldn’t stop smiling!  God was indeed coming through!

It was raining when I woke up Sunday morning.  Hard.  Hard enough that I checked the radar map on my phone as I drove into the coffee shop to set up for service.  I couldn’t believe what I saw.  The entire screen was filled with a big circle of yellows and oranges and reds, and there was no end in sight.  Forecast was for 100% chance of rain until 11, and then a 75% chance after that.  That’s when I asked God to punch a hole in the sky.  I wish I could say my prayer was more fancy than that, but it wasn’t.  I just asked Him to make a fist and punch it through the clouds so that we could baptize the people that He had drawn to Himself and to our church.

It rained all the way to the church.  It rained the whole time we set up.  It rained when we started the service.  It rained while Phil and Jen led us in worship, right up until the LAST SONG.  It was during that song that I noticed it wasn’t raining as hard and so I checked the radar map again, and I found that we were right on the edge of a hole in the storm.  It literally looked like someone (gee, I wonder who?) had punched a hole into the storm!

God was moving on our behalf, and He was just getting started!  As worship ended, I knew that God wanted to set free people who struggled with 2 things: addiction and cynicism.  I know, a pretty weird combo!  But we watched God break people and begin to set them free, and it was so powerful that 4 of those individuals ended up being baptized spontaneously simply in response to what God had just done in their lives moments earlier.

It was raw. It was real. It was exactly what we needed.

How does God break addictions?  He fills the addicted so full of Him that they can’t squeeze in anything else.  How does He break cynicism?  He makes a display of His grace through 8 individuals who are so hungry for Him that they would step into a 300 gallon Rubbermaid tub in the back alley of a building in downtown Albemarle in order to go down in the water so they can come up clean.

This, church, is why we do what we do, and the great thing is that we are just getting started.  The best is yet to come!