From Pastor Steve’s 2014 Annual Report

Some time ago, some of us attended a Catalyst One Day event where Andy Stanley noted that if church leaders don’t know what is making their ministry work well, they won’t know how to fix it when it’s broken. I think this was his way of saying, “Don’t expect that the good things you are seeing will continue to happen automatically. There are God-given ideas that have produced the fruit you’ve experienced. You need to know what is making that happen if you expect to see it in the future.”

As I pondered that idea, I adjusted his thought in my own mind: If we don’t know how we arrived at the place we are; we might not know how to proceed forward from this place.

So what brought us here?

What have we learned and implemented over the years at Curwensville Alliance? I think the three remainders – Faith, Hope, and Love – mentioned at the conclusion of the Love Chapter make a good framework on which to hang our recollection of the past and a runway toward the future. I’ll talk about them here, but not in the order we generally see them.

Hope

Years ago a group of people hoped that an Alliance Church could be planted in Curwensville. They dared hope, and the church was established. Decades later, people of that congregation hoped that God would empower and direct them to relocate from the house they were in to a better location. They hoped and God made it happen. A dozen years ago, we hoped that God would give us some property to expand that facility for needs we didn’t yet have, but we hoped  we’d have those needs. And God came through once more. Then we hoped that through looking at ways to connect with younger men and women, we’d be able to grow in number. And once more, God honored our hopes and has made it happen. Hope. It’s a great thing.

Looking ahead, I wonder, what are we hoping for in the future? Are we satisfied with where we are? Have we found the best parking space where we can just sit and enjoy the view? Or are we hoping for more of the same? We can have higher hopes than that, right? It’s my hope that we can see God do greater things than we have seen in the past. I hope for multiplication of ministry. Multiplication of leadership. And I have a couple specific hopes.

I hope for freedom. When I was a young Christian, freedom was a frightening concept. It seemed that the thinking was, If we allow people to be free, what will they do?! So, as a younger pastor, I bought into a lot of what the established church had taught – that Christian life means slavery to a lifestyle that no one would ever want. As I’ve grown, I see that Christ brings a different kind of freedom. He brings freedom from things like guilt, sorrow, depression, slavery, shame, and self. Christ breaks our bondage with the gospel – so that you are free to live from a foundation of being loved deeply by a God who has set you free. I hope we, as a church and as individuals can grow in that kind of freedom.

I hope for innovation. That Curwensville Alliance will be a place where people can try new things to express their worship and to live out their joy of being made new. It’s great to remember the past; it’s productive to innovate for the future.

Hope brought us to the place we are. I look to the years ahead with hope.

Love

Love is attractive. And, it’s the greatest of the three items we’re thinking about.

I love Curwensville Alliance. And when I say that, I am not saying I love the building, although I do. I am not saying I love the music, although I do. I am not saying I love the programming, although I do. When I say I love Curwensville Alliance, I am saying I love the people. The people here are working to shed the human tendency to hide and be real and genuine with God and with one another. They are working to honestly admit their struggles in this real life in a world marked by challenges. And they are constantly seeking the presence of the real God Who is speaking to and through them.

I love walking with people who pursue and embrace these things so boldly.

I love the grace that has come to exist at Curwensville Alliance – that when you mess up, no one is nodding their heads as if to say, “Yeah – I saw that coming.” Instead, when you fail at Curwensville Alliance, there is someone nearby to help you up, extending a hand. Grace is a powerful expression of love. Love, expressed in grace, is transformative.

Love is hard to maintain, though. Ask anyone who is in the post-newly-wed stage of marriage. Reality tends to test love. Grace can wear thin over time. Love can run dry. Because of this, we need to be on our guard to keep our grace/love tank full. We know how to do that, right? Jesus told us. Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. – John 15:4. If we disconnect from Jesus, we will run dry. Personal closeness to Him is essential to maintaining a heart, and an atmosphere, of love.

Love brought us here. Love is essential as we move forward. It’s the greatest of these.

Faith

I have come to believe that faith is one of the least-well understood things in Christendom. A. W. Tozer noted that his own generation saw faith as an open-sesame coin, whereby one could gain admittance to heaven, or gain whatever else one sought. Others see faith as a sort of self-blinding will-power whereby you eliminate the negative thinking and replace it with positive thoughts. Neither of these is anywhere near biblical.

In his great work, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Bible Doctrine, Wayne Grudem makes this statement about faith:

…the word “trust” is a better word to use in contemporary culture than the word “faith” or “belief.” The reason is that we can “believe” something to be true with no personal commitment or dependence involved in it…. The word faith…is sometimes used today to refer to an almost irrational commitment to something in spite of strong evidence to the contrary, a sort of irrational decision to believe something that we are quite sure is not true!

The word trust is closer to the biblical idea, since we are familiar with trusting persons in everyday life. The more we come to know a person, and the more we see in that person a pattern of life that warrants trust, the more we find ourselves able to place trust in that person to do what he or she promises, or to act in ways that we can rely on.

So rather than to say, “I have faith that this can be done,” Grudem might encourage us to say, “I trust God to do this. But whether He does this or not, I trust Him.” Trust is based in personhood. Faith may or may not be.

I look into the future with a spirit of trust in God and in my church family.

Curwensville Alliance has arrived where we are by trusting God. And by trusting one another. Trusting that God would take care of us when we walked away from a building on Filbert Street. Trusting that God would help us as we intentionally reached out to younger adults. Trusting that God would provide for us as we took a great step of faith and built an addition that the engineers warned us we could not afford. Trusting that God will keep us together as we expand the styles of worship we offer to Him. We are where we are because we trusted God. And because we trusted one another – we trusted that God had renewed us and was working in and through us.

Trust has brought us where we are and will be essential in propelling us toward a healthy productive future.

Hope, love, and trust. We need all these things, not just as a framework onto which to hang our past accomplishments, but as a vehicle used of God to move us forward in His care.