CCConnect June 18, 2010

Connect E-Letter

June 18, 2010 - Edition Number 90

From the Pastor

Dear Friends,

I'm pleased to be able to tell you this week that Bob and Paula Faub have accepted permanent positions in the music leadership of our church. Effective June 15, Bob began serving as our Music Director with Paula as our Choir Director. These will be one-quarter-time positions. The Faubs came to us last October and have been a wonderful addition to the life of our church, both in their technical knowledge of music, as well as their servant approach to their musical offerings. Bob serves during the week as the band teacher in Caldwell Academy's Fine Arts Department. Paula was a voice major at UNC-Greensboro who later spent a number of years as a registered nurse in the Intensive Care Unit at Moses Cone Hospital. The Lord has been good to send us these servants. If you haven't met them yet, please make sure to introduce yourself to them.

Our building has been humming this week as a great group of leaders, teachers, and helpers have been preparing for Vacation Bible School next week. Our co-directors, Julie Streng and Stacey Barbour, have about 60 men, women, and youth serving in a number of areas, all toward the end that the 125 or so children attending next week would know God more fully in and through Christ. Would you commit to pray for these children and for their leaders? Ask the Lord to stir the hearts of these children as well as the adults serving.

The Inquirers' Class scheduled for this weekend has been altered a bit due to the travel schedules of so many who were interested. Instead of the Friday night/Saturday pattern of the past few years, we have divided the class into four modules that will be taught in a rolling four-week rotation through the rest of the summer. We will teach the first one this Sunday morning during the 9:15 hour. The remaining three modules will be taught at the same time on June 27, July 11, and July 18. We will then repeat all four modules on July 25, August 1, August 8, and August 15. August 22 and 29 will be makeup Sundays for any sessions that might have been missed by anyone. We will return to our Friday night/Saturday pattern in September. If you are interested in learning more about membership at Christ Community Church, reformed theology, presbyterian church government, or the ARP denomination, this would be a good class for you to attend. Coming to the class does not create an obligation to join, but it is also the first step in the membership process. If you have questions, email or call me. The class will meet in my office - at least until we outgrow it!

It is a time-tested pattern that financial giving to churches ordinarily drops in the summer months. Vacations and other travel tend to impact regular giving patterns. The church's financial needs are much more consistent, however. If absence has caused your tithes and offerings to become inconsistent, let me encourage you to "catch up" and also to plan ahead for upcoming absences. Our church's leaders have important decisions to make in the coming weeks and months; financial giving will shape some of those decisions. We want to make the right decisions before the Lord with the best possible information. Please pray for our wisdom.

As you prepare for this upcoming Lord's Day, remember that we will celebrate the Lord's Supper. We do this most months on the third Sunday of the month. The Lord's Supper is one of the two sacraments we observe. Sacraments are signs and seals of God's grace to us in Christ Jesus. As signs, they point away from themselves and toward a greater spiritual reality. As seals, they confirm to us the promises of God in very tangible ways that accommodate spiritual truth to our senses. We also speak of them as "means of grace;" in other words, they are a delivery system by which the Lord assures us of the forgiveness of our sin, encourages us in this present earthly struggle where we are not what we were but not yet who we will be, and stokes our anticipation for eternity and the day when Jesus will come again and make all things right. Perhaps surprisingly, these means of God's kindness to us in Christ also function as a means of judgment for others. 1 Corinthians 11:27-30 is why Bryan and I are careful each month to warn about taking the meal lightly. We love you enough to guard you from harming yourself. In that passage, God warns us of the consequences of taking the meal in an unworthy manner. At one level, we are all unworthy. The good news of the Gospel is that Jesus makes worthy those who trust in Him more than in anything else. Spend some time between now and Sunday morning examining your heart. Do you love anything else more than Jesus? Are you trusting in anything else more than Jesus? Are you obeying any power as if it were greater than Jesus? Have you committed yourself to the people for whom Jesus died? Are you in right standing with Jesus' family (the Christians in your local church)?

Finally, let me allow someone far wiser than me to remind us of why we do what we do every seven days. Why do we preach the Bible every single Sunday? David Wells is one of the smartest interpreters of God's Word and, at the same time, an astute observer of the American Church of the past century. His four-book series is both apt and rich. In Above All Earthly Powers: Christ in a Postmodern World, he writes:

"...[I]t is certainly the case that the Word of God, read or preached, has the power to enter the innermost crevices of a person's being, to shine light in unwanted places, to explode the myths and deceits by which fallen life sustains itself, and to bring that person face to face with the eternal God. It is this biblical Word which God uses to bring repentance, to excite faith, to give new life, to sustain that life once given, to correct, nurture, and guide the Church (Jer. 23:29; II Tim. 3:16; Heb. 4:12; Jas. 1:18). The biblical Word is self-authenticating under the power of the Holy Spirit. This Word of God is the means by which God accomplishes his saving work in his people, and this is a work that no evangelist and no preacher can do. This is why the dearth of serious, sustained, biblical preaching in the Church today is a serious matter. When the Church loses the Word of God, it loses the very means by which God does his work. In its absence, therefore, a script is being written, however unwittingly, for the Church's undoing, not in one cataclysmic moment, but in a slow, inexorable slide made up of piece by tiny piece of daily dereliction."

I look forward to seeing you this week.

Your friend,