Kristen & I are sitting on the floor in front - the last two on your right-hand side.
When you serve in children’s classrooms or walk past the children’s rooms of your church, do you think about what you’re passing on to them? Would you like them to know, decades from now, just how rooted your generation was in the faith of Jesus Christ? Would you like them to know how you worked for the gospel in your local community and church context, so they’ll draw strength and wisdom from your experiences?
My church Sojourn is a multi-campus community in Louisville. In a few days, we’ll launch our fourth campus, Sojourn New Albany. Many Sojourners live in New Albany and other small towns in Southern Indiana, right across the Ohio River from Louisville.
So we have a large core launch group, lots of whom have been Sojourners for years (and some of whom were even in the 1999 core group that launched Sojourn Community Church). You see many of them in the photograph here.
We asked fellow core launch member Chip Lewis to take this photo so hopefully our kids, grandkids, and many others in New Albany who we long to reach with the gospel of Jesus Christ over the coming decades will look back and remember the humble beginnings, and that “little is much when God is in it.”
Look at the photo again and notice we’re on top of a basketball floor. We took this picture inside our new campus building, which until a year ago was the Silver Street Elementary School building. We’re in the process of turning the gymnasium into our auditorium. Along the way, we’ve been photographing the changes as a record for posterity.
We can look to the past in a right way or a wrong way. Ecclesiastes 7:10 says:
Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?” For it is not wise to ask such questions.
Getting a bit silly ...
Yet God repeatedly told the Israelites to set up memorials and reenactments, and in other ways to remember what He had done for and through them, for the purpose of passing on their part in God’s story to future generations.
Whether you’re a young church plant or a centuries’ old congregation, now is the time to record — in words, photographs, video and other ways — the work that God is doing in your midst. Don’t do it so you will be remembered; do it so that the work that God is doing in you will be remembered, so your spiritual heirs will think about your story and then pray:
O God, our Help in ages past
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast
And our eternal home— Isaac Watts
A couple more shots, from our September 27, 2011 volunteer Work Day:
Soundproofing the auditorium
Unpacking the chairs we’ll use in the auditorium.
First communion at Sojourn New Albany, from the October 2, 2011 Core Group Preview service