LOCATION
Messiah Lutheran Church is conveniently located at 8300 Providence Rd. just south of the Arboretum and Hwy 51 (Pineville-Matthews Rd). Map
Parking is located on both the north and south sides of the
sanctuary. Handicapped parking has been designated at the south
entrance, although both entries are wheelchair accessible.
February Memory Verse
Romans 5:8
". . . God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
|
|
Pastor's May 2010 Message |
|
|
|
|
EVANGELISM: IT’S NOT JUST ANOTHER PROGRAM 7He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. 8But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” Acts 1:7-8 I am excited about an opportunity that I have been given recently. I have been given the opportunity to teach the Sunday adult class that meets in the Fellowship Hall. We have had a number of really good teachers lead studies in the Fellowship Hall – the Longs, Josh Mize, Ken Krueger – to name a few, and as a result, the room is usually filled with people anxious to grow. For the past few years, I have been teaching an Adult Instruction class every fall and spring that prohibited me from teaching anything else. Having just finished such a class a bit early, I now have a chance to close out the Sunday School year by teaching a six week class. So what did I choose to teach? EVANGELISM, OUTREACH, SHARING THE FAITH!!! I have joined together our Life Design 401 class on Sharing the Faith with the Passion generated in the Ablaze Movement in the LCMS. With that as a backdrop for writing this article, I am reminded of an insight I gleaned from Rev, Dean Nadasdy, 3rd Vice President of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. He said that evangelism, reaching out with the gospel to the nations, cannot be simply another ‘program’ of the church. It is what the church is all about. In conjunction with that, he said that we should not look at the LCMS “Ablaze” emphasis of reaching 100 million ‘unreached or undiscipled’ people by the year 2017 as another program of the Lutheran Church. It is a movement, an emphasis that seeks to move us as Lutherans into making outreach ministry THE MINISTRY of our churches. In too many of our churches, Evangelism is seen as just one of many programs, like Vacation Bible School or “Bring a Friend Sunday”. It has a beginning and an end and involves those who sign up or volunteer. A better understanding of what Outreach should be is that, if a church chooses to have an evangelism or an outreach board, the purpose of that board would be to help the entire membership be involved in outreach. Rev. Nadasdy asked us to consider whether or not our churches are so busy with programs that they do not have the time, energy or resources to devote to our purpose for existence: to be witnesses, to make disciples. Or, to consider that if outreach ministry is not the main purpose of our particular church, what is? Many Lutheran churches have no central purpose, rather their ministry is a collection of programs sponsored by separate boards and committees. The result is a kind of hodge-podge of emphasis that looks like our friend, the duck-billed Platypus, below. One wonders what this is. Is it a duck, an alligator, an otter? It looks like an animal created by a group of committees who had no central vision.
On May 23, we will be celebrating once again Pentecost Sunday. A few Sundays before that, some of our young people will be making a covenant with God to love and serve Him until death. The Scripture verse at the beginning of this article tells us why the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost and to what these young people are committing themselves: to be witnesses, to “Share the Light” by bringing the gospel to others. That is our purpose, that is what unifies all that we do. Everything else is to prepare us for that one end, everything else is a “means to that end.” And it will be toward that end that I enjoy leading the Sunday class – to incite in those present a passion to share the faith, to identify tools to enable sharing it clearly and to sensitize our vision to see the opportunities that God gives us to do so.
|
|
