Steelville Presbyterian Church

Ash Wednesday service tonight will be in-person only—no virtual service. Please join us if you can in Roper Hall. 5:30 Soup supper; 6:00 service.
Lent begins today! ... See MoreSee Less

Don’t forget to start your Lenten journey with us at our Ash Wednesday service to be held in Roper Hall this Wednesday, February 22, 5:30 PM, soup, 6:00 PM service. ... See MoreSee Less

I read this from a United Methodist pastor named Geoff Postgate. I thought it was worth sharing because something new from God is on the horizon for all of us who claim to be God’s followers.

From Geoff:
Something powerful is happening in the Chapel at Asbury University in Wilmore, KY. It seems wonderfully beyond human constraint, which is how the Holy Spirit tends to operate.

I don't pretend to know what the outcome will be. But I have observed some things about the movement of the Holy Spirit, from Scripture, history, and my own experience. The Holy Spirit doesn't seem to show up to reinforce or create a return to structures and ways of thinking that already exist. Usually the Spirit surges in order to plow ground for a completely new wave of God's endgame of loving, saving, liberating, and transforming human beings. In the events recorded in the Bible in Acts 2, the author describes the Spirit's invasion as a "violent wind." Literally this means a force that stirs things around and breaks things up.

That being the case, I look to where that breaking-things-apart push is needed amongst us in the Body of Christ, at least in North America. I observe this:

-Too many church and church folks have become more focused on our own comfort and convenience than on getting out of our comfort zones in order to build relationships with the least, the last, and the lost.
-Too many of us think being a Jesus-follower is just about showing up in worship and feeling all warm and good about songs and a sermon, rather than being about the daily discipleship work of prayer, biblical deep-dives, mutual encouragement and growth, service to others, and witness.
-We become more focused on enforcing religious rules as we interpret them than on offering the sacrificing, rescuing, grace-driven love that Jesus gives.
-We give more attention to those who are already in the fellowship than on those who could be.
-We put more emphasis on buildings and those who spend time in them than on those outside our buildings whom God loves and seeks.
-We spend more time and energy protecting and preserving church as-is than on shaping them into the disciple-making, world-transforming outposts they could be and should be.
-We offer benign indifference to the collective structures and practices that feed off of suffering, injustice, and oppression. Or we actually support them, rather than challenging them, as is our biblical mandate.

And as we drift farther and farther from God's endgame, we build structures, organizations, systems, and theologies to support the above. We become so entrenched in it all that something has to blow in and break it all up in order for something new from God's own heart to be unleashed.

Cue the Holy Spirit. ... See MoreSee Less