The Church Recovered (the why behind this series)

Jamie Hart   -  

Hello CrossPointe Winter Park!

After ten years of pastoring CrossPointe Winter Park I feel a tension and I’m wondering if you feel it too. The tension is something like this…

There’s a general malaise that seems to just press down on us as it pertains to the church. It’s hard to pinpoint or put our finger on, but we sense it. There’s an indifference and skepticism toward the church. There’s a fatigue. There’s a take it or leave it sort of mentality that exists. And this is even among those of us who call ourselves committed church people.

And amidst all of this malaise, we do genuinely want our friends, neighbors, and co-workers to know the love of Jesus. To experience His grace. And it used to be that people would come looking for us, the church. They would maybe feel some disappointment, frustration, or cultural pressure in life, and decide to try out church again (or maybe for the first time).

But increasingly people are not looking for us. They are not turning to the church. It’s not that the religious impulse has gone away (see Seculosity to delve deeper into this topic). It’s more that people are trying to satisfy that religious impulse, that longing for transcendence, through the immanent things of this world.

This presents us with a challenge but also an opportunity. We could be discouraged, or we can work to rediscover what the church has always been called to. What does it look like to recapture Jesus’ heart for His church in our time and place?

The world is feeling an absence. And you and I get to be a presence in that absence. To showcase the love of God by loving our community well.

To that end, we are starting a four week, vision series tomorrow (August 11). This will be done to help prepare us for the Fall Launch on September 8.

The series is called The Church Recovered: Four Practices for a Faithful Presence.

In this series, we will unpack our mission: Pointing our community to Jesus so that all people would Know God, Find Freedom, Experience Belonging, and Experience Renewal.

And as we all know, it’s one thing to rattle off a statement, it’s something else entirely to live it out. To see the mission embodied.

So as we explore each aspect of our mission, we also want to focus on what needs to be recovered in order to be a church that is a faithful presence in the absences of the world.

Here’s the breakdown of the series:

August 11 – Know God: Recovering Our Confession
August 18 – Find Freedom: Recovering Our Dependence
August 25 – Experience Belonging: Recovering Our Hospitality
September 1 – Seek Renewal: Recovering Our Stewardship

I hope you will join us each week of this series. Whether you have been involved with CrossPointe Winter Park or you are new to the church, this is going to be a super important and helpful series.

Let’s learn together how to be a faithful presence in our cultural moment.

Grace and Peace,

Pastor Jamie