from the pastors at nvcf

A home is not a house but most homes live in a house of some kind.  NVCF is a Church Family that is building together a spiritual home and yes, that home has a house at 919 Hanson Ct.  Most families will divide up their houses into specifice usages.  For example they will have a front room, a family room, kitchen, bedrooms, garage, etc.    This dividing up the family house is the agreed on way a family chooses to live in a house.  For example, the front room usually is the the place were things are kept more orderly and nice and where guests are welcomed and entertained.  The family  room usually is connected to the kitchen and is the designated place of eating, relaxing, wrestle with the dog and just being family.  Bedrooms are the places where we rest, have intimacy and have our own space to hang out.    But, why am I talking about a house?   Over the last two or three months, the ministry leaders of NVCF have gotten together to develop a “house paradigm” for the life and ministry at NVCF.  Obviously we share our “house” with two other congregations and do not have the space to set up a room for every church family activity…but we can set up our various meetings and ministries to serve the needs of our church family.   Why?  For most families, no one room of a house should serve to meet every family need… you can do this but it is messy.  It is the same for a church family.  No one service or ministry can serve to meet all the needs of a church family.  So, we are building a new paradigm that we believe will help us better define our meetings to better cover the needs of our church family .  Here are some of the designations we are giving our services in alignment with the concept of a spiritual house.

The Sunday Mornings Service will be our FRONT ROOM.  What this means is that we will build our Sunday Morning service to be one of the key places we will seek to invite our guests and entertain and welcome them at our church.  This means we will not seek to “just be family” but we will be sensitve to the needs and concerns of our invited guests and seek to be good hosts.  We will still be family and seek to serve our church family needs but in the context of being inclusive and not excluding any new person who comes through our doors. 

The FAMILY ROOM.   If Sunday mornings become our Front Room,  then we will need to set up events and services where we can “relax and be family.”   At such services or ministry times we will seek to talk more about family concerns, focus more on family needs and not always explain ourselves as much as we would if we had new people we were working hard to keep including and making sure they understood what and why we were doing.

The BEDROOMS.  Every family needs a place to sleep and rest and have down time and intimacy.  A spiritual family needs rest and personal time with the Lord and each other.  We need to deliberately set up times of retreat, prayer times that seeks God’s face, provide support and recovery ministry for marriages and our personal lives.   There will need to be times of dealing with the deeper and more personal needs and relationships we need with the Lord and each other.

The GARAGE.  We will need times of throwing open the garage door of our church family’s house.  This will be ministries and meetings that are deliberately aimed at getting out into our neighborhoods and community and reaching out to people with the love and compassion and goodnews of Jesus Christ.

Again, why are we developing this house paradigm?  Because as a church family we can not do all we need to do in one meeting or ministry.  Because we need to develop times and places where all our church family needs are being met and where our family clearly understands what is supposed to happen in those meetings.  You do not invite guests into the bedroom.  You can not always relax as a family when guest come over.  And yet, we need rest and intimacy with the Lord and we need to be just family at times.  So, we believe God is building us into a spiritual house (1Peter 2:5) in which we can serve God in all the ways of his spiritual family (1Tim.3:15). 

As we move into the 2009, You will hear more on this subject but in the mean time, be in prayer for our leadership as we try to develop a more clear and consistent approach to spiritual life in our church family.

Blessings

Pastor Dan