I'll confess I was a little unsure about what might happen when if we actually put the service into "church service."  Sure the message is clear.  Jesus challenged those who follow him to serve others.  The appeal is clear.  If you want to experience God, you've got to go where he's already working.  But how would people react?

Well, the answer is that people embraced the challenge.  RCC is experiencing an explosion of new opportunities to serve and people are rising to meet them.  We had nearly 50 people make commitments to serve in new or expanding service opportunities at the church.  It was incredible to watch people worshipping by moving around the church and discovering different ways to give service to others.

Angel food Ministries received nearly 20 new volunteers to start up this food distribution ministry.  Family Fun nights received a similar response as we get ready to connect with families in our community starting June 8.  Even our Children's Ministry, Worship Planning Team and The GPS (Guest Pursuit Squad) got some great responses.

I can't wait to see what God is going to do in the lives of those who have volunteered.  It will be almost as amazing as what he does through them to reach the community!

Our series, "How to Improve Your Love Life" wraps up tomorrow and I can't help thinking that I've hardly scratched the surface.  There is so much left to say, but that's not the biggest challenge. 

Talk is cheap, especially when it comes to love.  What really counts is the way I live.  Sermons are 30 minutes out of a very busy week.  How will I take what God says and actually get it outside the walls of the church and into the world where it will do some good.

At RCC it is a major goal for us to give people ways to do just that.  With this series I'm trying something new.  We're extending content onto the web.  I've included a page of helpful ideas on how you and I can strengthen our love muscles.  Just click on the link below and you can keep strengthening your love life.

Improving Your Love Life Exercises

The terrible news coming out of Haiti these past two days got this transplanted Californian thinking.  Perhaps growing up on top of a major faultline makes it easy to ignore it.  Having moved in more recently I've been thinking, "When will our turn come?"

When it does, I hope we will find the world responding with more compassion and help than Pat Robertson did today on CBN's The 700 club.  He took the opportunity to point out that this earthquate was punishment for the Haitain people making a "pact with the devil" in order to get rid of French Colonial rule a couple of hundred years ago.

I have no idea on the veracity of the facts he's siting, but I'm pretty clear on the problem with trying to assign blame for a horrific tragedy at the very moment that people are still trapped in the rubble.  Now is not the time for pointing fingers and making pious claims to understand the mind of God.  Now is the time for action!  There will be time enough later to satisfy our need for understanding.

I'm so thankful that my church family has been spending their time rather more productively than blaming the victims for their own suffering.  ADRA, a part of our ministry network, has people on the ground right now handing out food, blankets, and basic necessities to those in need.  If you want to help, click here.  You can contribute online directly to the needs at hand.

Unfortunately, when Christians start trying to draw direct lines between natural disasters and the sinfulness of the victims they sound callous, insensitive, and not very much like Jesus.  In fact, Jesus, when faced with the same opportunity, pointed out strongly that its a terrible mistake to decide who is more sinful based on who lives or dies when something terrible happens.  In Luke 13, he referenced two different local tragedies of his day and categorically denied that the survivors were more righteous than the victims.  Just read the book of Ecclesiastes and you'll get a very clear, if somewhat depressing, picture that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people sometimes. 

So if, or more likely, when its our turn in Southern California to find ourselves digging out from the rubble and trying to find our footing, how will we want the world responding to our time of need.  I for one hope all people will be more concerned about the Golden Rule than about lecturing us on the wickedness of our land.

So its a brand new year and I'm still trying to wrap my head around how quickly things can change.  Last fall it seemed like my job consisted mostly of figuring out how to deal with the next crisis.  Many of our leaders had to face the death of people close to them, including one of our own.  Several ministries were struggling to survive.  Not to mention the financial down turn that finally caught up with our church finances.

But I can testify that no matter how caught up I am in the crisis of the moment, God is not confined to my reality.  As we enter 2010, a whole new range of possibilities is stretching out ahead of us.  God has taken our difficulties and turned them into potential.  Let me rund down a few of the exciting things he's done.

• We received our annual health scores back and we are much healthier thn we thought!
• We finally paid off a huge debt that has been draggin our budget down for years
• Several people made incredible financial sacrifices to keep our mission going
• Some difficult staffing cutbacks have freed us to fund ministries that need money.

I could never have predicted just 6 weeks ago that our future would look like this.  To be certain, there are many challenges ahead.  But when you work for Someone who can take impossible problems and turn them into magnificant opportunities, I think the future looks bright.

Pastor Eric