Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.
– JAMES 1:22

What do you call that person who’s  more than an acquaintance, but who hasn’t not quite summited the friendship plateau? It’s that person with whom you’ve never done anything together outside of where you happen to run into each other. Nevertheless, that guy is a good guy. We both take an interest in the other person’s goings-on. As we were catching up recently, he asked me about what was happening in the church. I got to tell him the best story…

I got to tell him about the thing that makes us, us. I got to tell him how much fun our church is. I probably got a little too “pastor-y”: speaking with a slightly less conversational cadence, pausing with more drama, fluctuating the dynamics of my tone and tempo, and over gesticulating. This kind of talking and speaking is, by the way, why people get weirded out by pastors. I was slipping into becoming the thing I work so hard to NOT be. I really couldn’t help it. There is so much to be excited about in our church. Foremost among those things, is the one thing that’s the easiest to communicate to an outsider looking in on the church:

I told him about  Serve Day.

People may not understand all of what we believe. Make no mistake, we believe some very wild things. Even within the church, people engage in spirited conversations about lots of things in the Bible. But, at the core of the biblical message is the person of Jesus of Nazareth: a man born under the reign of Augustus Caesar in a rebellious outpost of the Roman Empire, who was purported to have been some kind of miracle-worker, who envisioned himself as the centerpiece of something called the “kingdom of God” as God’s favored son, who challenged religio-political authority, who was killed, and who rose again… and, whose supernatural presence gives some kind of inexplicable power to people in the present to live more fully as they were intended. C’mon, that is a lot to take in.

What is not hard to understand is what people DO with those beliefs. Specifically, does that kind of belief in a Spirit-motivated power result in something beautifully contagious? Does it leave people feeling as though they’re on the outside looking in? Is it a kind of spiritual justification for elitism? To actively serve the community doesn’t address all the bigger questions of theology: the Bible, God, death, heaven, etc. But, it absolutely tells the story of what a group of people committed to Jesus, DO with their faith.

Serve Day paints the picture that sometimes Jesus is most evident through calloused hands and sweaty brows, shovels and hammers, bricks and paint, trash pick-up and landscaping, sandwiches and tacos, live music and kid-oriented play-and-serve areas. To explain to someone that we’re a church committed to seeing the community bettered by our presence makes sense. So, come with us this Sunday from 1pm-5pm at Linda Vista Elementary School and personally acquire a fresh story about what your church is doing with what we believe. Come to church dressed and ready to work. Show up and be amazed by the church community you call home. Save yourself (and your kids) the hassle of a potentially long registration line on the day of by registering here.

See you soon,

Jeff