Spiritual Transformation: A Question of Feeding

This past Thursday evening I had the opportunity to launch our midweek series: Bringing Up There Down Here Starts Here. The focus was "feeding myself." I find that it's a topic that's challenging to address for a number of reasons:

• Christians tend to think their local church pastors should feed them more... at least more "meat."
• Local church pastors tend to feel frustrated when they hear from Christians that "it's not deep enough."
• Individual Christ-followers often feel an enormous amount of guilt because they feel they don't self-feed well or enough.
• Christ-followers often feel ill-equipped to understand what they read in the Scriptures. "Where do I start?", "How do I make sense of this?", "Been there, read that, know the story."
• Local church pastors often feel a similar guilt because their own "self-feeding" is almost completely focused on "feeding" their people.
• People who don't know Jesus are dependent on the clear teaching of God's Word, his Story.
• People who are new in their experience of following him are just trying to figure out what to read, how to study, and how to apply what they read to their lives.
• People who are "veterans" in their faith journey aren't entirely independent and have often assumed they've applied more from their reading than they have.

It's a perplexing...

plight for any local church. It's the kind of question I'm wrestling with a lot lately. It's one of the many issues our senior management team has been working through for many months. It's a big reason we locked ourselves in a room the past two days.

We emerged from the room with wild-eyed dreams, more questions, and a lot of resolve. We're not content to merely toss the responsibility back and forth from pulpit to people. We're all responsible. Pastors. People. Staff. Volunteers. Each person. (To read more about those 2 days, see Tim Steven's post here.)

The point of engaging the Bible is engaging God... as his people. As the Body of Christ in the world. The point is to be transformed in his character, his image. The point is to bring "up there" down here.

And it starts in the heart. The pastor's heart. The people's heart.

Your heart. My heart.