The Day Has Arrived!
February 27th, 2009
Many months of planning and preparation become a reality on Sunday, March 1, as The Summit begins. For the past two months we have been making our way through the Book of Esther leading up to this day. And now, we have arrived at The Summit, For Such a Time as This.
If you are here in Kansas City, there is still time to be with us each evening at 7:00pm, March 1-6. We are asking God for more than just a conference. We are asking him for a divine encounter that will transform our lives and our church. We have been praying that each of us would be secure in our life purpose, the reason we are here For Such a Time as This. And, we are asking God to lead us step by step in forming an alliance of churches to minister to the Kurdish people.
There is also time to be with us on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings for training in making disciples of Jesus Christ, the story behind the Directions study. On Thursday morning I invite you to join us as we discuss the formation of a Kurdish Alliance. Saturday morning you are welcome to be part of the New Missionary Workshop. Details about all this and more can be found here, or you can link there from kcbt.org. There is no charge for any of these morning sessions, but we do ask that you register online so we can do the logistical preparations.
Another Day Is Dawning!
Before we know it, another long-awaited day will be upon us. In fact, we have been waiting for this day for about a decade. On Sunday, March 15 we break ground for our campus expansion. What a journey this has been! I can’t begin to express how excited I am about this! The actual groundbreaking will take place between our two morning services, and you can always follow the details here on our newly renovated kcbt.org.
“Wait!” you say, “There’s a recession going on out there.” There sure is! These are tough times and many people are hurting. But, this is also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If you are not a regular blog reader, you might want to check out my take on building in a time of economic distress in my post of February 10. You can read it here.
The Men Behind the Wall
“So what are we going to study next?” I always hear that question as we finish one series and prepare for another. Actually, we are going to go back and examine a favorite portion of scripture that we studied a decade ago as we first began to talk about the need to expand our campus – Nehemiah.
However, it will be quite a bit different with the perspective of a ten-year journey. As we have said from the beginning, this is not primarily about a new building; this is about building people, making disciples, perfecting the saints, taking the Gospel to the peoples of the world and all that. Nehemiah is often the object of study during a building project because he supervised the building of the walls of Jerusalem following the Babylonian captivity. There are some wonderful lessons to be learned there to be sure! However, what is often overlooked is the fact that building the walls occupies only a relatively small portion of the book. The most important feature of this book is to observe that Nehemiah was a great builder of men. This will be the focus of our study: The Men Behind the Wall.
Nehemiah is a fairly large book and it will take us some time to cover it and do justice to the very important content. To make it interesting, we are going to break it up into several portions. The first segment we will study revolves around the first two chapters of Nehemiah, and I have called this study Choosing Inconvenience. What an appropriate name for what we are getting ready to experience!
After the ceremonial breaking of ground on March 15, there will come a day within the few weeks following that large equipment will appear on our property and most of our parking lot on the north side of 55th street will disappear (we’ll get some of it back after construction). Everything is ready to go and we will only be waiting on the city of Kansas City to do the necessary processing of papers. We do not anticipate any problems, but I am sure you understand that the city must process all the plans, and there is no way to predict how quickly that will happen. When it inevitably does happen, we will wake up to discover overnight that we will all be inconvenienced in some significant way.
I am not fearful of being inconvenienced. In fact, I believe that this is going to be quite healthy and even exciting for all of us. Nehemiah’s example will illustrate biblical truth about choosing inconvenience. Nehemiah intentionally chose to leave a very powerful and comfortable position in Persia in order to return to Jerusalem and be inconvenienced for the sake of the kingdom. On the other side of the temporary inconvenience, Nehemiah emerged a much stronger individual. Not only that, along the way he built an entire generation of men to be strong leaders – The Men Behind the Wall.
Get ready to embrace inconvenience!
Jeff Adams is the Senior Pastor at KCBT
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