Happy New Year!

New Year’s Day is always a great day! It’s always a time for new beginnings. And when you work in a church, it’s a time for either interminably long and boring staff meetings or going to a staff meeting like I went to today.

The church where I work will be celebrating its 40th anniversary this summer. I got a call from our pastor’s administrative assistant yesterday morning and was informed that I was invited to a 2 day long meeting with other staff members and ministers.

Like most of us in the technical arts, we try to avoid long meetings like the plague. So with heavy hearts, both of us in leadership of the technical ministry drug ourselves to what looked like would be a long, mind-numbing meeting.

With a pleasant surprise, this meeting turned into a great time of discussion, spiritual discernment and an awesome time of prayer.

Our pastor was seeking the staff’s input on vision for the church and the New Year. It was not a time of throwing out suggestions of new programs, capitol improvements to the church campus and the like. We were asked to answer 7 questions about the church and ourselves. We were also asked to truly open ourselves up to what the Lord wanted in our own lives and what He wanted for our ministry.

When we meet again next week, we will get into the specifics of direction and suggesting changes and things for the church, but our pastor really wanted us to set the stage for our discussion and to really open our hearts to become one as a staff and no matter what ultimately becomes of the discussion and our “pet projects”, we will stand as one and support what we think the Lord has let us to do.

The moral of today is, “Don’t judge a book by its cover!”

God bless you and may all of you have a happy new year!