Christ Church

Bible Challenge #25

Becky Pliego on

¡Hola, Hola! Friends, can we even start to count the many blessing the Lord has bestowed on us as we have come together to read His Word these past months? So many blessings, right?  And do you want to know what makes me even more grateful? That the secret of the success of this project lies not on the Bible Plan itself, nor the webinars, neither on the Facebook community, but in God who gives the increase. We absolutely love what the Lord has put in our hearts to do and we do it with much joy and put great effort into it to make sure it blesses you. But the truth is that you don’t need *this* plan to grow in your relationship with God. You need Christ. And this is -and always will be- the heart of the matter. However, we believe in a Sovereign God who governs all our lives through the Hand of His Providence, so we believe that He has planned for you and I to be doing this thing together, this year. And that, Friends, makes me -literally- sing for joy. Our God is good indeed!

We did a survey about the BRC and about 350 of you took the time to answer it. Thank you. And you know the one thing, generally speaking, that you all like most about this plan? The fact that you can “jump back in” anytime without feeling guilty! Well, praise God for that and praise God for each one of you who have jumped back in many times instead of quitting. We bless the Lord who leads us in His Kindness towards Him and never uses an “I-will-make-you-feel-guilty” approach. The Holy Spirit doesn’t accuse us, but in His kindness leads us to repentance when we fail to come to the Father in prayer and in the Word, and then ignites in us the desire and the hunger to keep coming!

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Grace & Peace: Revelation 86

Douglas Wilson on

“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16:11).

“And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication” (Rev. 14:8).

This is the first place in the Revelation where the name Babylon makes its entrance. The Babylon that is introduced in this place has her fall actually described a few chapters later, in chapter 18. A great deal of ink has been spilled in trying to identify this Babylon, and both here and in the sections that follow I will hazard my reasons for supposing Babylon to be Jerusalem—the city doomed to destruction throughout the course of this entire book.

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Bible Challenge #24

Becky Pliego on

¡Hola, hola! Time to re-group, Friends, and time to remember why we are doing this challenge.  Remember where we started? Yes, Psalm 119. We read of the Psalmist’s love for God’s Word. Of the way his heart, and soul, and flesh longed for it.  We read how the Psalmist, through being in the Word, came to understand the fear of the Lord and clung to His testimonies. We saw Him praying, struggling, asking God to incline his heart to His testimonies and not to selfish gain. He wanted to know God more, to understand the Word of the Lord more, to obey Him more. And that is why we are here. Because we want that in our own lives. We are not reading to check boxes, we are reading because we know that if we don’t feed our souls and minds with the Word of God we will starve. And this is not hyperbole, this is true. So, as you see, we need this reminder, we must not forget that this challenge is not about us feeling good for keeping up with our readings; the goal of the challenge is to be able to come before God with a humble heart, putting aside all our cares and perfectionism to pray every day: Lord, I need you, feed me with your Word. May my life be a testimony of how much I love your Word.

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Communication Strategy

Christ Church on

Dear Congregation,

As we grow in size as a congregation, communication challenges also increase. Our church community is about the size of the city of Troy, so we need to be aware of this as we send and receive communication. In Jim Wilson’s Principles of War, one of the key components of an effective battle strategy is communication. The elders, staff, and deacons of Christ Church recognize that as our church grows (alongside the growing sister ministries of Christ Church), not only the difficulty, but also the need for effective communication grows. We do want to strive to be efficient and effective our communication to you.

There are a couple challenges to be aware of as we work on building better communication in our community. First, with technology comes multiple channels for communication. These channels include cell phones (text/calls), Facebook messenger, email, and of course other various forms of social media. If we really aren’t careful, we could have channel overload, which adds to the challenge of how to maximize our communication and what channels to use to make sure everyone receives adequate church communication. Secondly, when there is a serious matter to be communicated to the church, we do not want to put this out over email. Obviously, some communication is for our church body only, and would be inappropriate to be publicly distributed. So, in the cases of sensitive information, we try to use head of household meetings for this type of communication. Lastly, communication is a two-way street. This means the church needs to be communicating to the best of our abilities, and active engagement from the congregation with the proper channels of communication is also necessary.

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