My church is celebrating its 15th birthday this week. From the living room of my hubby’s parents place with 5 people to where we are today – in our very own building – reaching our community and the nations… it has been an amazing journey!

I can’t say it’s all been peachy because life is not perfect. We are not perfect leaders and people are not perfect church people. We have done the best we could with the knowledge and revelation we had at that moment in time. Would we have done things differently? That’s a question we could all ask of our own lives? Hindsight is always 20/20.

All you can do is learn from your mistakes and one thing we have learned… we all must be careful how we build – for we are all building something! We have a favourite saying, “How you build – what you build – is actually more important than what you end up building”.

1 Cor. 3:9-15 explains it all, “Or, to put it another way, you are God’s house. Using the gift God gave me as a good architect, I designed blueprints; Apollos is putting up the walls. Let each carpenter who comes on the job take care to build on the foundation! Remember, there is only one foundation, the one already laid: Jesus Christ. Take particular care in picking out your building materials. Eventually there is going to be an inspection. If you use cheap or inferior materials, you’ll be found out. The inspection will be thorough and rigorous. You won’t get by with a thing. If your work passes inspection, fine; if it doesn’t, your part of the building will be torn out and started over. But you won’t be torn out; you’ll survive—but just barely.”

I’ve spent the past few weeks looking over old photos and remembering moments that have past, we’ve had a lot of fun. I believe that church is an extension of your family and that means you do stuff together, not just showing up on Sundays with a plastic smile on your face so you can have some individual God and you time. If we had a theme song it would be (and we love to dance to this) the song by Sister Sledge, “We are family”. Another thing I’ve learned… the decisions you make as an individual effect more than just you, they effect the whole family. We rejoice together, we cry together, we pray together, we eat together, we learn together. We live Acts 2:42 in real time. God himself says He sets the lonely into families – not organizations or functions or programs – but families. It’s an amazing part of life and that what the church is to us.

I’ll add some more later, I have to finish putting together the party plans for this Saturday night… I love a good party!! 🙂

Happy Birthday Family!