Wakeboarding & Church Health

I wrote recently about my novice status as a golfer.  You may remember that golf is a rather new sport for me.  The summers of my youth were not spent on golf courses, but at the lake.  I often spent summer recreation time water skiing.

While growing up in Alabama, my family spent a lot of weekends at the lake, boating and water skiing.  So when our sons were growing up, we took them to the Lake of the Ozarks.  My parents had a lake house there, so that was a vacation spot we could afford.  The sport changed from water skiing to wakeboarding.  We spent summer vacations at the Lake of the Ozarks, and our sons worked on improving their skills on the wake board.  They would try the tricks that they saw others pull off, and they did well.

One trip they decided it was time to try to attempt a flip.  It looked easy on TV, but when it came time for them to make the attempt, it was difficult to get the nerve to really go for it.  When talking about what made it hard to try, one son said that just as he was ready to make the attempt, his sense of self-preservation would override his sense of adventure.

When we consider the coming of this New Year, we look forward to another opportunity to make new resolutions and set new goals.  The anticipation for this season comes from the desire in our lives to do things differently, to improve on what we have done in the past.  We want to improve in our personal walk with the Lord.  And we want our churches to experience new life and new health in the Lord.

We dream of Sundays when the seats are filled with people, and the people are filled with anticipation that God is going to speak.  We pray that God’s Spirit would be present in power and that people without Christ will come to hear the gospel and respond by yielding their lives to Him.  We hope for new Sunday School classes or small groups where lives are really shared and changed by the love and encouragement given.

We dream of 2011 being a year when something new and exciting and wonderful will happen in our churches.  But often it ends as a dream.  Often, the dream of doing a flip on a wakeboard, and the dream of real growth and health in our churches ends for the same reason.  Our sense of self-preservation overrides our sense of adventure.

If you knew that God was calling your church to greater things in this new year, would you be willing to develop the strategy, to take the risk, and to do the work that it would take to become more of who He wants you to be.

As your Director of Missions, I stand ready to help the churches of this association take the next step in that journey.