A Sunday with a focus on serving the Lord

On Sunday, September 27 Glynis LeBarre was in the pulpit. Glynis is one of our home missionaries from National Ministries ABCUSA. She is a transformational ministry expert. She works with churches that want to be more effective in what they do. For the last eighteen months she has been working with eighty churches across the United States. Twelve of them are from Connecticut. We are one of the dozen.

Back in April of 2008 Cynthia Strouse, Curt Brockway and Sue Ferguson went to the first meeting of the Connecticut teams. Glynis shared with them some pretty stunning statistics on how church attendance and participation had change in the last fifty years. We all know it. We just don't admit it. It has dropped from 80% of Americans attending worship each week to less than 20% in fifty years. Values have changed. Priorities have changed.

The church hasn't helped itself. We have become so legalistic that we have chased people away. We have become so angry that we have turned people off. In an effort to try to keep our moral center, we have at times lost our ability to remember the grace and love of Christ. In effect, we have isolated ourselves from the world.

Glynis called on us to remember that Jesus called us to minister to the world in his name. We were sent out as the salt and the light to share God's love with the least of these. A little earlier in the service Muriel Roderick asked the kids if someone looked like a lobster did that mean that they were a lobster? Her point was that one's looks could be deceiving. She reminded them that it was our love that showed the world that we followed Jesus.

Our choir sang two special anthems as part of the worship. The first was Ken Medema's "Come Build A Church." The second was Go Out and Serve Him" which was used as a benediction.

After church a few of us continued the conversation with Glynis over lunch and then we said our good-byes and sent her onto her next mission assignment.

Cal