For What Your Church Calendar Say's, There It's Heart Will Be Also

OK. I know that Jesus actually said, "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matt. 6:21) and I'm not trying to make up new scriptures. But I think that if you look at a your church calendar (all the scheduled activities for the month) it will show you what the heartbeat of your church is. MJ was on the website of The Church at Brookhills in Birmingham, Alabama the other day and was blown away by what she saw (see photo above). There was day after day scheduled with missions trips, mission team training, church planting meetings, disaster relief trips... everything was about reaching the world with the Gospel and helping people in need. That was it. Nothing else. And then it hit me. That's because that's what's important to them. That's where their heart is. So I decided to look at a few other church websites where they had calendars posted. Here's just a few of my observations and the 4 most common church calendars I saw on-line:

1) Churches that had a predominately "internal focus" with all kinds of activities for people in their own congregation. Their schedule was loaded down with all kinds of self-help classes and get-togethers for "their people."

2) Churches loaded down with outreach events into the local community "only." Trying to get their name out there making sure that people knew that they were there for them.

3) Churches with the same calendar, doing the same thing every month (i.e., ministry A is on the 1st Monday, ministry B is the 2nd Friday of the month, etc.), and nothing fresh was happening.

4) Then, there were churches like Brookhills, with a calendar full of activities revolving solely around reaching the world with the Gospel, ministering to widows and orphans, and helping those who have physical needs due to natural disasters or even because of the economy.

Now I know that I'm looking at this through "my lense" and the way God wired me, but I look at church 4 as the church that is giving the most biblical view of what the Bible calls us to look like. I can't see anywhere, in the Bible, where we're suppose to only focus on "our people." I can't see anywhere, in the Bible, where we're "only" suppose to stay in our own community (although it's part of what we're called to do). And I don't see anywhere, in the Bible, where we're suppose to just do the same thing over and over, never arising to new needs in our communities or around the world.

I do see where we're suppose to make disciples and be witnesses in our hometown, surrounding towns, to people who are despised and to other countries that don't have the Gospel (Matt. 28:18-20, Acts 1:8).

And I can also see where we're suppose to take care of the orphan, the widow and the poor (Jas 1:27, there are over 300 scriptures dealing with this and actually God got pretty ticked-off when His people didn't help these groups Job 22:8-10, Isa 1:21-23).

As I was sitting in service Sunday, Pastor Mike Keaton quoted someone who said, "the mark of a great church isn't in it's seating capacity but in it's sending capacity." And it made me think of seeing the calendar of The Church at Brookhills and how biblical and focused they were. They were focused on sending people out to the world (local and far reaching) with the Gospel. It also got me thinking about how un-biblical and mis-focused a lot of other churches were. I don't think it's on purpose either. I think we just get so busy filling our calendars with doing "stuff" that we never stop to make sure that what we're doing actually lines-up with what scripture asks us to do. I guess we need to slow down and re-evaluate... take a long hard look at where all of our energy is going and make sure it's what God has really asked us to do. Because what our calendar says, is really where our heart is. What does your church calendar look like?

Just Curious,

Jim