Over the last 2 months or so, God has further clarified who He has called us to be and what that means for us moving forward. Yesterday, we took time to share this information with everyone. If you want the full picture with all the details, then I'd encourage you to watch the video from our website once it's available later today or tomorrow.
Essentially, God has reminded us that He called The Overflow to be a movement of people that's overflowing His love everywhere with the ultimate desire to lead people toward Christ. I, nor really anyone else on our initial launch team, had ever really been a part of this type of church, so as we launched the church back in January, we did so by casting this vision and doing things more creatively and relevant than we had experienced in the past. Our hope was that if we could create the right environment on Sunday, then people would embrace the vision and begin to live it out.
Through our first few months, we have definitely seen God move. 9 people have been baptized, 6 people have surrendered their life to Christ, and God has done some really amazing things. We're seeing people pursue God for the first time ever and others for the first-time in years! By no means have we failed. However, as we considered who we wanted to be moving forward in response to who God was calling us to be, we noticed a few things that we felt needed to change.
In all honesty, we felt our church was primarily focused on Sundays. Despite our desire to cast the vision of a movement, we were actually driving everyone to focus their thoughts and efforts on Sunday. Our conversations and strategies all centered around making Sundays a better experience, but God was convicting my heart about HIS vision for our church and others were beginning to wrestle with this as well. We discovered that if we continued doing the same things we've been doing we would most likely never create a real movement of Christ-followers who overflow His love everywhere. We believed that without making some changes we would end up producing more people who could put together a great Sunday gathering than people who could overflow His love at their workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, etc.
As a result, we felt led to consider how we could still make Sundays an exciting time but place more emphasis on being the church and truly living out this vision. After a lot of prayer and conversations over the last couple of months, we communicated yesterday that our goal moving forward was to develop Christ-followers who lived out this vision. In order for this to happen, we would need to clarify a few things and make a few changes in how we think and act. Here are the highlights of what we shared...
We shared our vision for the type of people we feel God wants us to develop within our church. It's people who surrender their lives to Christ, connect themselves to His church, develop Christ-like character, and begin to personally live out their calling. We call it the 4 C's: CHRIST-CONNECT-CHARACTER-CALLING. We also shared our desire to meet people where they are and extend to them all the grace, love, and support they need as they seek Christ no matter their spiritual background or current views on Christ.
We then shared the practical changes we are making. We are moving forward with the understanding that life-change best happens in relationships where people are doing life with people. We want to better help people learn how to simply do life and overflow God's love in the process. Leading people toward Christ isn't something that we customize and put in a step-by-step method. It's really about learning how to do life with other people. It's a process, a journey, and a way of seeing life.
Therefore, our groups and Sunday volunteer teams are adopting a new focus that's essentially built around these 4 C's. Our groups will actually become the driving force that sparks this movement as they gather, pray, and serve all across this city. At the same time, we're no longer viewing Sundays as "the goal" because the reality is that God is touching lives way beyond Sundays, and we want to begin to celebrate that instead of only focusing on what happens on Sundays. Will Sundays still be important? Yes, very important; they just won't be the main thing we measure our success by.
To help us change our focus and work-load (setup and tear down) on Sundays, we also announced that we are moving the location of our worship gatherings to Dogwood Elementary beginning August 21st. This changes will reduce the amount of work it takes for us to create our Sunday morning gatherings, and it will make the atmosphere of our gatherings feel closer together rather than all spread out as it sometimes does now. The passionate and energetic worship and teaching will not change, but we will lose some of the "flash" and "fancy-lighting" that we had during our first few months.
We envision Sundays becoming a time where people can respond to life together more so than simply attending a production event. Our gatherings will still connect with people regardless of their spiritual background, but we think these changes will make our atmosphere more authentic and natural. It will help us better communicate that Sundays aren't all we care about.
The bottom-line is this... If we want to follow God's call upon us to create a movement of Christ-followers who overflow His love everywhere, then we have to first change the way we think and measure success, and then, we have to make the needed shifts so that our behaviors match our vision.
I also want it to be clearly said that we don't think this change in thinking and action makes us better than any church who may do things differently than we will moving forward. God uses and blesses all types of churches, but we have to be true to who God is calling us to be. We're excited to better pursue this vision in the days ahead because we know God has great plans not just for The Overflow, but most importantly for HIS CHURCH in South Knoxville and all across the area!
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