This Sunday evening at Riverscape Metropark, I’m expecting a miracle. Have you ever done that before? Have you ever been a part of something that feels so amazing that the only way to describe the event is miraculous?
That is the way this event feels to me, and while I can’t quite explain why, what I do know is that only God could make something like this happen. I read in scripture over and over again that God is a miraculous God, and yet it is my human tendency to try and rationalize how/why something happened.
I simply refuse to do it with this event. This event is going to be miraculous, and I am giving God ALL the credit!
So, I know what you are thinking: How did something like this happen anyway? How did five churches from around Dayton, Ohio decide to come together for worship and to collect school supplies?
Well, it started with five men who are incredibly broken. Granted, they are gifted, they are anointed, but they are all 100% broken. And when I say broken what I mean is that we all have our “stuff”: You know, the “stuff” that keeps us full of anxiety, worry, anger, and fear. We all have our stuff and what we realized is that if we got together and talked about our “stuff” then it wasn’t nearly as heavy. We got together for accountability, we got together so that we could share our brokenness with someone who knows how it feels.
Did I mention that we are all pastors? Sometimes that makes our “stuff” feel unique (although it probably isn’t), and sometimes it makes it a little harder to say that life is hard. That’s mostly because we work for God, so we all (including us) tend to wrestle with this pre-conceived notion that working for God is all sunshine and lollipops. When we got together it was as if it was okay to admit that ministry is hard.
Something really cool happened when we started sharing: We all kind of clicked. We laughed, we cried, we just seemed to work well together. In light of this unity, we felt as if we needed to do something together. We could see God working in our group and working on our friendship, and then, all of a sudden, God started nudging us with an idea.
Each of us represents a church, and each one of those churches would benefit from seeing something different. It became clear that if the five of us were better together, wouldn’t our churches be better together?
It slowly went from an idea to a realization that we had to bring our churches together. Our churches need each other. The church has to be something more than what we do on Sunday morning, it needs to be diverse, eclectic, unique. The church should make us a little uncomfortable, and it should be bigger than something we could ever direct on our own. The church has its own brokenness, and when we are together the brokenness doesn’t seem so heavy.
The church, when done well, is a miracle!
And that is how this incredible event came to fruition. Five broken guys, serving five local churches, serving one miraculous and incredible God. I hope and pray that you’ll join us on Sunday evening -- so that you can say you witnessed a miracle.
