Happy March!  This may be the most wonderful time of the year…at least for me.  March Madness is about to ensue.  The grass is about to turn green.  The trees are about to bud.  The sun shines a little brighter.  And the days are getting longer.  March is refreshing to me and reminds me of God’s sovereignty.

Just as God is sovereign over the seasons, He is sovereign over our church.  As I mentioned from the stage a few Sundays ago, I have wanted to do a series on the Holy Spirit for well over a year, but the timing just didn’t seem right.  I felt God pressing other things on my heart that we needed to teach.  Hindsight now being 20/20, this was the perfect season in the life of our church to do a study on the Holy Spirit.  We have learned that the Holy Spirit desires to shape us and mold us and move us onto the business of God.  And the business of God is making disciples of the world.  Being a disciple means making sacrifices.  Jesus tells us the cost of discipleship in Luke 14:25-35 and Mark 10:17-31.  But what we give up in this life to follow Jesus in no way compares to what we gain.

As a church, our leadership is serious about making disciples.  That means getting outside the four walls of the church and taking Jesus to the four corners of the world.  It means leading people from a life of insignificance into a life-changing relationship with Jesus, teaching them the transforming truths of Scripture, and then sending them out to do the same for others.  We long to be a church like the first church that we read about in Acts…a church that makes disciples who make disciples.  We cannot do that apart from the power of the Holy Spirit.  And…we cannot do that without clarity of purpose.

The Strategic Planning Team acknowledges that God’s overarching mission for us is to “go and make disciples.”  Over the past month, we have created a draft Purpose Statement that is simple, clear and calls people to action toward that mission.  The team has also drafted and is working to prioritize a set of values that will provide guiding principles for making decisions directly related to our purpose and mission.  Over the next few weeks, we will be defining how to measure progress within the journey of making disciples.  We will be looking at the data that was gathered from 12 groups and more than 100 people.  This data will reveal Center Pointe’s key strengths and opportunities, as well as assist us in aligning our strategies to the identified values. 

This is such an exciting process.  And the most exciting part is to see the Holy Spirit moving and bring pieces together.  He is orchestrating simple things such as timely messages to challenge us and cause us to think about the work He’s already doing and how we can join Him; Ministry Leaders who desire to align with the purpose for cohesiveness and maximum impact; elders and elder candidates who desire to be Spirit led and used however God sees fit; and not to mention…your faithful and sacrificial giving to both our general budget and our campaign that is allowing us to remove distractions and move forward with impactful ministry.  Believe it or not, this is more refreshing to me than the month of March!