"Special At-Home Worship Service #8"

We wanted to let everyone know that we did not meet together physically as a congregation this week because we wanted to protect our FCC family from any ripple effects from the novel coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19). But we did upload a “phoned-in service” for people to watch, as well as providing another “at-home” devotional for households to go through together.

We understand that it's hard to feel disconnected at this time when so many people are panicking and living in fear -- and maybe even feeling alone and vulnerable -- but we also know that the best way that we can keep one another safe is to prevent the spread of infection. That’s why we’ve been sending daily emails to everyone in the church family to help people know that we’re thinking of everyone.

With that in mind, we wanted to encourage people to take a step back and rethink our paradigms. Every day--even in the midst of this global pandemic--we're inundated with massive pressures to pick sides, to settle in camps. Support one and protest another, love one and hate another, friend one and unfriend another. And sometimes, we truly do need to take a stand against specific injustices.

But what if--just sometimes--all of that pressure is missing the fundamental Truth that both sides of some issues are wrong, because both sides are using the same, broken equation? What if, in buying into the binary lie that we have to choose A or B, we miss the whole rest of the alphabet of options?

Here's the thing--if an equation was false 75 years ago, then it's still false today... and if it's false today, then it was false 75 years ago. The fact that we plug our own preferred values into the variables doesn't change the fact that it was broken then and it's still broken now.

For instance, we often hope (at least tacitly) that our group could have the power to influence media, police people's words and thought-lives, socially punish or ostracize those who think offensively, or otherwise save the nation by making everyone else do what we think is morally right--but that never actually changes hearts. It didn't in the 1950s when religious conservatives held socially influential sway, and it won't today while secular liberals hold socially influential sway. It's a broken equation that just keeps inputting new values into the same variables without really changing what truly matters.

Christ called us to change hearts, and He called us to do that not from the top down, but from the grassroots up. I mean, Jesus chose to go to people like fishermen and Samaritan women. The only time that He went to the Roman governor was when He was dragged there on His way to His death.

So instead of primarily praying that powerful social influencers will just "fix" things in immediate ways (the equation that didn't work in the 1950s and that won't work today), perhaps we should primarily pray that God will use you and me to influence those around us in meaningful, longitudinal ways. Perhaps we should pray that God would call you and me to be His workers, going out into His ripe harvest fields today. And remember, in Christ's time--when He first shared that analogy of calling us to be harvesters--they didn't use mechanical combines to gather the wheat en masse. Individual harvesters had to go and deal with each stalk as they came to it.

In our lives, let's not do what didn't work before and what has never really created genuine change. Instead, let's do what Christ Himself calls us to do and equips us to do.

And let's work to genuinely save this nation with Christ's salvation...