There is power in loving your church. The future of your church depends on how you care about it now. If you love your church, you will do all you can to see it succeed. It will cause you to actually do something progressive to help your church in its time of need. And yes, love hurts.
As a pastor, it breaks me to see failing moments occur in our churches. Whether it be programs not reaching their full potential, brothers and sisters in Christ struggling, or any other rift in our ministries; my love for progress and success through Christ in our churches motivates me to do all I can to help turn what seems bleak to a bright triumphant moment for our church.
If you see something broken in your church and you don’t have an immediate thought of: “how can we fix this?”, then you might need to examine how much you truly love your church. If the failure of your church doesn’t bother you or ignite a fire within you to help your church succeed and be victorious, then you may need to reevaluate your love, or lack thereof, for your church.
Unfortunately, too often we find circumstances where people have simply left a church because the waters got too high and they didn’t see the need to swim. Simply, coming to the conclusion that you will just go somewhere else instead of growing where you’re planted, calls for a need to evaluate how much you love your church. We try to make things too easy for ourselves and just go somewhere else where it’s easier to love or be loved.
If you happen to be struggling with loving your church here is what you can do; Remain planted and pray. Stewardship is a key core value that has been highlighted in our church a few years ago. We are called to be good stewards with what God has blessed us with. Your church is among that list of blessings. Not only are you called to give in offering and tithe, but your time and effort placed into seeing your church grow spiritually and beyond is also part of that stewardship.
Loving your church means supporting, sustaining, as well as being a good steward toward it. Compassion comes from the gut and giving to your church should be felt. The word compassion in the New Testament is Splaxna. It is a Greek word that gives us our English word Spleen. The word Splaxna is used in various forms that mean, “all vital organs”, or basically guts. It is that sinking feeling (that pit in your stomach) when we are moved with compassion. The experience of compassion is deeply spiritual in its genesis, and profoundly physical in its revelation.
You and I need to experience this kind of compassion for our church and the ministries within. In a previous article I reminded us that we should give till it hurts. Today, I am including the call to have a passion for giving and supporting our church. I encourage all of you to fall in love with your church again. Pray and ask God how you can love your church. Afterall, He is the one who blessed you with it, and He will be sure to show you how to not only love but thrive in your church.
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