The Church of 2020 God is Building

God is building His church, at 65 Chrystie Street, New York, NY, and around the globe. 

Clicking here and reading this post under MeginLeaWrites helps toward supporting us financially. Thank you.

Summary-Too Long Didn’t Read- GOD IS BUILDING HIS CHURCH! Even when we don't understand it and it looks messy. Thank You God… When you weary, dear soldiers, press onward. God is glorifying Himself…and in due time, we will understand more clearly…

The Novel:

Jesus told Peter that "on this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it," (Matthew 16:18). That was a promise He made. Peter went on to make a lot of mistakes, to try to tell Jesus how the church was going to be built, and Jesus often had to rebuke Peter, even calling him Satan one time and telling him to get behind him. Jesus didn't beat around the bush. 

God is building God's church. God is building it right now, and it is bigger than you or I realize. We get caught up in wondering about our buildings, where we will worship, what time, when, and what will happen. We worry and struggle to give each other the benefit of the doubt, to communicate thoroughly and not give into the temptation to think that maybe the leaders don't really care about the laity or that the laity really don't want to follow any leaders. All of that is from satan, and because we are broken people, we struggle. Yet the truth remains. God builds God's church. We disagree, make mistakes, pause services, have sabbaticals or collaborations, but God is actually the one orchestrating even if we think we are. In reality, we are all just seeking God... attempting to listen...attempting to hear...sometimes hearing correctly, sometimes having to back-peddle and learn from something that did not work out so well. Thank God for grace, and thank God we have been growing in learning how to show it to one another because we have all made mistakes. There is none righteous, no not one, (Romans 3:10). 

I see so much growth in the people in my own church who have been here since I came back in 2007. Maybe they were humble and amenable back then. I don't know. I didn't know them that well then and didn’t take the time to get to know many of them. But certainly I see today that they are people who love God and want God's will. We are all struggling together, trying to figure it out. We hurt each other's feelings sometimes, and we have communication issues, but God is helping us, and we are growing. I see that. 

For so long we concentrated on the fact that we were a commuter church and that it was to our detriment, as we were told. All the Chinatown churches in Manhattan, from day one when I moved here and started tagging along to pastor's fellowships, complained about the same issue. "People commute. The church is dead during the week. How do we impact the community?" Cue after-school programs and outreach directors and trying to work with youth. All great ideas that brought life; lots of sewing seeds, watering seeds, and harvesting seeds were done through those things over the years. Nonetheless, often it seemed we just heard that we were not going to be able to do anything with ourselves because we were a commuter church... that it was pointless, and we were unsustainable. And there was truth to that... The youth programs, though fruitful, were costly and draining the church financially. We needed laborers on the ground-level, on the front-lines, more than we could pay.

So I get the point. I understand it. I agree that people involved in the church should also be living their lives and taking up roots in the community in which the church is located, that church has to be more than Sunday morning. I’ve preached that. I believe it. That is important, and on that conviction, some of us in my church even wanted to move into the community and, by the grace of God, were enabled to move here. But it was never practical to think that so many of the people who had invested years of energy and love and stewardship and time and emotion into our church were just supposed to pack up and move into Chinatown, Manhattan. That never made sense. People couldn't do that. So how would they contribute? How would they help? They all asked that. Did they matter? Did we think they were important? Yes of course, but we didn't know how best to utilize ourselves and our resources. We tried to come up with answers, but we didn’t always know how, and then many people left, as we grappled with all this, trying to figure it all out... and save ourselves. And truth be told, honestly, from the bottom of our hearts, we never WANTED people to leave, but I understood when they told us why they had to, one by one, over-and-over again.  For a while, all we saw were the challenges we faced, and I didn't know how to overcome them. I don't know that any of us did. So we prayed, and we tried, and we messed up, and we kept going. 

How do we carry and rebirth a church with vigor and a younger generation when so few of us are living here in the neighborhood and our resources, even when great, are limited...?  How do we carry on when so many of the young people are not interested in sticking around and BEING the change they want to see? When they are impatient for changes to take place... what do we do? Many young people wanted to leave and go to a church where the changes they desired to see made were already up and running, and I get that. I respect that. I understand that. I don't judge that. Not at all. But Jesse and I, and I suppose most of those who stayed with us, always felt called to this ministry- to THIS CHURCH ministry. To help KEEP THIS church alive...to love the people IN the church and AROUND the church, to love this community, and to see God build a church that would minister to this community of lost and hurting people. I get that we did not always know how to go about doing that with each other. We struggled, and grappled, and talked, and planned, and started over, again, and again.

And our God...our GREAT God... God was WORKING all along. I am amazed. Here we are, in the midst of the corona-virus, where we have been relegated to our living rooms and forced not to congregate as the church. God has literally shut the doors of His church building and kept us from meeting in person. He's allowed this virus, and we are here... but the church, the church.... has not stopped. The church, is rising up, and just like Jesus said, the gates of Hades are not prevailing against it. Do you see it? Let me help you in case you can't quite see it...

 1)I think about the individuals who have stuck with our church through this journey, people traveling into the city from an hour away on Sundays, people who had to watch as all the things they loved about their church, all their traditions and the things that brought them comfort, slowly be taken away, yet they kept coming and worked harder, gave of their time and resources MORE to support the church as so many left. THESE people are the church. These people have been faithful to God's call here in Chinatown. They have been dedicated. The ones who remain here are STRONG and remained even during a season of feeling un-essential and confused. PRAISE GOD FOR THEM. I LOVE THEM! They love God, and they LOVE GOD'S CHURCH. I cannot thank God for them enough. They have lost so much, had to grieve so much, and yet they have remained. They are literally saints, soldiers in God's army. 

And what's more- there is MORE! 2)Now here we are, conducting church via social-media for the past few months and probably the upcoming ones... and I think....wow... God is building God's church. We thought God would build it one way, but He is building it another. We have people visiting for our services that live in different parts of the world, people who usually wouldn't go to church because they are working six days of the week and are tired and want to spend Sundays at home. And now they are phoning in and listening to the word of God spoken and praying together! We have church members that are taking to the internet to spread their voices and work to make change in our systems, in our city, and in our country. Literally every day of the week, people are gathering to pray and read the word ONLINE. We have people in our church taking to the front lines to take care of the sick, and people in our churches creating gofundmes that provide essential items and food for the needy. God's people are rising up and BEING the church regardless of WHERE they live. God is BUILDING His church even when we thought it was shut down. Is it perfect? Is this the ideal? No, but God is still moving, and will continue to move.

So it's kind of ironic... are not we just like Peter? We thought we had to live in the neighborhood in order to BE the church or come to the church building to be the church, and while living in the neighborhood and coming to the building are certainly good things, we see now that we ARE the church  simply by being who WE ARE AND GIVING OURSELVES FULLY TO GOD WHEREVER WE ARE. That is how we are the church. People wondered 'where is my place in this church? I live so far away from the building? How am I of use?' and I can see why they would ask that question... especially as their leaders talked about the importance of being in the community, but all along, God knew what God was doing. God knew that the work of the church transcended not only psychical buildings but even psychical neighborhoods! God knew that He planned on using us from our living rooms and bedrooms and bathrooms, (where I've sometimes had to go to get quiet from 2 small kids). 

3) The church is rising up, confronting deep seeded evils in our nation, calling out sin, taking a stand against it, corporately as Christ's body and in smaller congregations. Praise God! God is keeping His words! Was there ever any doubt? God's gift to His Church is Himself, and we are watching Him unfold before our very eyes...

We once drew a circle on a map, to identify where we believed God was calling us to have an impact as a church, to figure out where we should focus our resources, and we did it with good intentions, with the motive of trying to best steward our stuff. We joked when long standing members' apartments fell right on the outside edge of the circle, and we joked more when Jesse and I tried to move into the community of our church and had to make sure we made it into a building in our complex that was INSIDE the circle. But the reality is, though our circles are great and give us direction, God's circle is more than we ever can imagine. God's circle encompasses nations and people groups across the globe, and in this new world in which we find ourselves, who knows how much more the church will grow through social media and social platforms?! So even those who live an hour away from our church building can still pursue the needs of the community because God is changing how the church is constructed. I don't imagine we will be consigned to our homes forever, banished to our bedrooms and bathrooms to take prayer calls, but I do believe we'll emerge from this having learned how to adapt and reach a wider audience, and LISTEN to one another better. I hope we will not leave behind the lessons we are learning and how we can utilize technology and go the extra mile to make sure people's needs are met.  

God is INCREDIBLE. He has taken the tragedy of a deadly virus and transformed it into something that is revealing revival. BE ENCOURAGED BROTHERS AND SISTERS! Wherever you are, you have a place in God's church, in the Body of Christ. You always had a place. We all did. We've just been trying to figure out where it was and what it was....but God has been using us all the while. Praise GOD He is faithful to show us and build His church. Praise God He is faithful to use us even when we fail or preach the wrong things. Praise God He called back Peter and said "feed my sheep; tend my lambs; feed my sheep and be the rock on whom I build my church ...a church against which the gates of Hades can not prevail... "  amen