I was given a full-time voluntary post at a large church (250 members). My duties included Outreach, Small Groups, Building Fund Drive and building volunteer crew coordinator. Frankly, they could have given me the ministry of toilets and I would have gladly served. Marsha and I poured ourselves into God's work...sometimes 100 hours a week. We spent four exciting, fun, depressing and sad years, until God called me on to the next post. To learn how to speak, I preached weekly in two Senior Centers. Oh, the mistakes I made! I also registered for mail-order ministry courses at the denomination's Seminary. Because the church was short of money, they had no funds for our outreach into the community. No worries! I recruited volunteers to put on fund-raisers so we could pay for printing handouts and training materials. One of the best ones was a parking lot flea-market. It was the best because it got people in the neighborhood onto the church grounds, rubbing elbows with church members. We made money and reached out to the community all in one event. Everyone, except a few overly religious members, loved it. This brought me to one of my first ministry insights...why do congregations spend half the money God gives them on a facility they only use a few hours a week? It seems like a terrible waste. The main room is usually used less than 20 hours per week (12%), including cleaning and rehearsals. The classrooms in most churches are used less than 4%. Our overly religious ones gave the excuse that this is God's house and that's why flea markets, scouts and other groups shouldn't be allowed to use them. I figured, if it's God's house, let's see to it He gets the best return on His investment He can. I scheduled lots of community events, twins club meetings, Sheriff Gang Awareness seminars. New people were beginning to come to church as a result of these programs. Sad to say, this caused problems for a congregation happy to worship with the friends they knew but uncomfortable with the unwashed strangers. Great education for a new minister. One day, a couple, claiming to be harassed by demons, asked for help. Having read things like this in the Bible, I thought it was possible...silly me. For some reason, every time I tried to share about Jesus with them, they interrupted and talked about a different subject. Not until another minister and I prayed with them to ask Jesus' help to get rid of the demons, were the people open to receiving the Gospel...and then they were not harassed again. Frankly, I couldn't say one way or another whether it was evil spirits. I did sense a strange smell that left at the same time the people calmed down and received Jesus, but I haven't experienced anything like that since. As the word spread about our "demon" encounter, I came to learn there were churches...whole denominations...who believed spiritual things don't happen any more. I came to learn it because I was in one of those churches. I was questioned very pointedly by my Senior Pastor concerning the incident. He informed me that this church didn't like the open expression of Spiritual gifts...that it disturbed their sense of order. He suggested I read a book that tried to explain these things in purely psychological terms. Personally, I believe the Bible. I didn't know if these were evil spirits or the victims were somehow demented. I figured these were the two possibilities. Since the only way to reach the couple was to "cast out" the demons, that's what we asked Jesus to do. Two more people had given their lives to Christ, but this, somehow, just put me at odds with my church. And, this was just the beginning...
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Aug 1 2006, 03:17 PM
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