[Jay & Tully are part of my personal faith mob.] Last week, as my daughter Ariel, just minutes away from being baptized, listened to friends and family share about her love and life, I looked around at the large crowd of witnesses perched on the breezy banks of Lake Washington and thought about how "it takes a church" to raise a child. Ariel's spiritual growth & spiritual decisions, like those of all disciples, are a mysterious blend of influences: the Holy Spirit, her parents & brother, other teen Christians, even her kind school friends and mentors, and, of course, her own spiritual work.
We know God has conspired to make the church an orchestra rather than a one-man band. Every part of the body affects the rest and no man is an island. Our collective spiritual gifts make the church a beautiful team. As Brian Felushko once said, "none of has 'has it all,' but together we 'have it all'--all that we need."
Watching the M&M program last week, painstakingly organized by Alex and Dani Whitaker, I was struck by how much this observation applies to our faith as well. The participants of the week long evangelistic training program were, it seems to me, transformed. Their faith became contagious to one another and to me. We wound up all afire.
Have we tricked ourselves into thinking our faith is a one-man-band responsibility? We see great profiles of individual faith in the scriptures of course, and it's also true that a crowd can spread doubt as well as faith (remember the 10 spies), but experience says to me, as I consider evangelizing "two by two" with my wife, that our faith isn't really designed to stand alone; instead, our personal faith, as with our spiritual gifts, is a piece of a bigger faith puzzle, and when the body of Christ combines all its faith pieces, great miracles come forth. It's a mob of faith.
Shall we test my hypothesis this fall? Let's gather together in prayer, in faith-talk, in vision-sharing, and see what happens.
We know God has conspired to make the church an orchestra rather than a one-man band. Every part of the body affects the rest and no man is an island. Our collective spiritual gifts make the church a beautiful team. As Brian Felushko once said, "none of has 'has it all,' but together we 'have it all'--all that we need."
Watching the M&M program last week, painstakingly organized by Alex and Dani Whitaker, I was struck by how much this observation applies to our faith as well. The participants of the week long evangelistic training program were, it seems to me, transformed. Their faith became contagious to one another and to me. We wound up all afire.
Have we tricked ourselves into thinking our faith is a one-man-band responsibility? We see great profiles of individual faith in the scriptures of course, and it's also true that a crowd can spread doubt as well as faith (remember the 10 spies), but experience says to me, as I consider evangelizing "two by two" with my wife, that our faith isn't really designed to stand alone; instead, our personal faith, as with our spiritual gifts, is a piece of a bigger faith puzzle, and when the body of Christ combines all its faith pieces, great miracles come forth. It's a mob of faith.
Shall we test my hypothesis this fall? Let's gather together in prayer, in faith-talk, in vision-sharing, and see what happens.
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