My goal, as a pastor to my congregation, is not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to inspire and equip new leadership, to facilitate conversations between young and old, and to help them see Christ’s presence here in my congregation and city.
As I had conversations, I began to hear a theme of “tiredness” more and more frequently from our Old Guard. For many years, they’ve been shouldering the tasks and workloads of many different church functions – among them, hosting Serve. Their passion is still just as vibrant as it was years ago, but their energy is not.
At the same time of these conversations, I had my ear bent to the voices of our young people, a dormant demographic in many churches. As I heard the stories of highlights from their upbringing in the church, it became clear to me that Serve is one of the ministries that shaped their faith and commitment to Christ’s church.
These two threads of conversation have, I think, for many years been running parallel to each other. Most recently, the two threads collided at our classis meeting. One of the members from previous Host Teams here in Thunder Bay expressed a desire to see us host Serve once more and wondered what I thought about it.
I responded with, “Let’s ask the Young Adults, because I’m already striving to build them up as leaders in the church and they have already expressed interest in hosting Serve in the future.”
Upon asking the Young Adult’s, they responded with, “Yes! We’re happy to do the work!” and then there was an explosion of ideas.
The Old Guard expressed that they would love to support this new Host Team.
As Thunder Bay prepares to host Serve 2014 this next month, we do so seeing Christ bringing these two threads of people together to help equip a new generation of leaders in His church. Praise be to God!
