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| Monday, June 23, 2008 |
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God’s Dream for the Church
Church of God Ministries, Church of God - General
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By Todd Braschler
 We know that God has a dream for the church. Participants of Monday’s daylong workshop “Equipping the Church of God’s Dreams” discovered what that entails.
Scripture describes many details about the kind of church God intended. He promises a very powerful gift to the body of Christ when we are passionate about staying on track with the purpose and dream he initiated for the church: the extraordinary power of his Spirit. If you’ve ever been involved in ministry without the anointing of God, you know what a job ministry becomes; it’s powerless and unfulfilling, lacking the vitality of what should be in the body of Christ. Man’s effort combined with God’s anointing produces the church of his dreams.
Workshop attendees learned that there are four key challenges to experiencing God’s strong support:
- Leading, preparing, envisioning, and articulating a church that God would choose to bless. With the understanding that God chooses to anoint or abandon ministry, depending on its intent, the questions become, If God has a dream and passion for the church, what type of church or ministry would God choose to anoint? If the blessing and anointing of God were on a congregation or ministry, what would happen as a result?
- Preparing for the blessing of God before it arrives. This preparation is simply building a foundation for ministry before that ministry actually arrives.
- Organizing the extraordinary care and development of people. Leaders have to rethink their personal definition of extraordinary care, becoming truly heartbroken for new people. Leaders must “build people using their church and ministry rather than using people to build and accomplish their work, church, and ministry.”
- Raising the value of new and lost people to a ministry. The passion and compelling reason for the church must be to see new and lost people as God’s ultimate reward for ministry done well. Lose this focus and the anointed church ceases to exist.
A version of this article appears in the Tuesday, June 24, 2008, edition of the NAC roundup/08 newsletter. To view the newsletter in its entirety, click here (2.34 MB). The document is in PDF format and requires Adobe Acrobat in order to read and/or print it. If you do not have Acrobat installed on your computer, you can download a free copy of Acrobat Reader here.
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