I can't remember where I heard this, but I was somewhere this winter when someone raised the question "do you pray like you did in the beginning?". That could be talking about your individual walk with God, but for me it was an indictment in the church planting journey.
Do I pray with the urgency and passion that I did at the beginning? When there were no people. When there was no money. When I wasn't sure if anyone would come. When I wasn't sure if anyone would stay.
In the early days there was a sense of desperation. I knew that if God didn't move in a HUGE way on our behalf, we were sunk. We pleaded with Him, we begged Him to grant favor. We prayed deep, passionate prayers on behalf of people who didn't know Jesus.
Then we grew. And grew. We hired staff. We went to two services, then three services.
I don't feel like we ever got comfortable. This church planting journey which is now almost 10 years old, still feels very tenuous. There is a feeling that even next week, there could be no one that shows up and the whole organization would shut down. I'm guessing I might always feel like that. I don't know.
But what I do know is that there was a loss of urgency. Or at least dependence.
We are in the process of launching a second site (this weekend). We have faced some major leadership challenges and issues. We have faced some huge financial challenges. And all of that has brought me back to the beginning. A desperate prayer life. A dependent prayer life. And it has brought Jen and I back to something we used to do at the beginning that symbolized for us our dependence and surrender.
And, I have this sense that this is exactly where God wants us and exactly what He wants to do in us. This morning I was reading in Deuteronomy about the Hebrew people who had been brought out of slavery in Egypt. They had seen God do incredible things among them, but they had forgotten. They had gone their own way. They needed to go back to the beginning and remember.
These verses challenged me today, I hope they do for you as well.
If you're a church planter (or maybe in your personal life) - do you need to go back to the beginning? Are you dependent, trusting, desperate like you were at the start? If not, what do you need to do to recapture that?
One of the things I'm going to do is recount some of the stories of what God has done among us, here on the blog over the next couple weeks. It's a way to celebrate, and it's a way to remember. And I have this sneaking suspicion that in remembering the past it will help us move forward into the future God wants for us.