I'm fasting and praying today in preparation for the big meeting tonight. I am praying with all I have in me that this won't be a bloody battle that results in more damage done to the body of Christ. That may be inevitable, but I am hopeful and trusting God's sovereignty. I spent my time alone with God this morning reading the book of 1 Timothy. So much good stuff there about the church and submission to God.

Out of that time, I was led to just write out some things that I intend to read during the meeting. Two hours later . . . I had a document that will take me about ten minutes to read. I don't plan to speak except from the reading, but I am willing to if called upon.

As I wrote about the "real" issues that our church is facing (as opposed to the ones that will be raised tonight about shallow business issues), I came to the conclusion that we're all just very disappointed and hurting people. Some people have dealt extremely poorly with their disappointment and turned on one another. Some are disappointed because of hurt and broken relationships - that's regular people stuff.

But as I continued writing, it dawned on me that we're disappointed because we've been duped. Our church, like so many others out there, bought into a church growth mentality that promised big rewards and explosive impact if we were willing to follow just a few simple steps. For years we've been making changes - music style, church structure, facilities, ministry emphases, etc. We've gone to the seminars, read the books, followed the formulas. And here we are after making many sacrifices and painful adjustments, and we have less people in worship on Sunday mornings than we did when we started this whole deal. The big dream we had promised ourselves came up short, and now we're pissed. We want someone to blame . . . except that we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

We were the naive ones who bought into the notion that if God works in a certain way in upscale Orange County, then he must also work like that in upscale North County in San Diego. All we need to do is study (scientifically) what worked for them, and reproduce it in our context. The only thing we haven't figured out how to reproduce is the Holy Spirit. Hmmm, what to do, what to do, what to do? If we had started with the Holy Spirit in the first place we might have found out that explosive impact through massive worship services and sequential classes wasn't his will for us. Maybe we would have found out that the explosive impact he had in mind for us was through our relationships of authenticity within our baseball leagues and schools and grocery stores.

Jeez, like writing for two hours this morning wasn't enough, apparently I had to keep going here! I'll just shut up now.