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My Eighth Letter

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By Dan Amos

Around our house, one of the most common questions we ask each other is, “What do you have going today?” The default answer is something like, “I’ve got stuff to do, but nothing necessarily scheduled.” Are you busy, too? I come from a heritage of busy people. It’s what I do. So, when the elders looked at the membership covenant this month (you can find it attached to the Elim constitution), I had to reflect on whether my life is in line with it. Then, on Sunday, Steve had us all write an “Eighth Letter to Elim” in the manner of Revelation chapter 2.

The covenant, based on the examples in Scripture, calls us to be disciplined in regular practices of prayer, study, and worship. We’re to be doers of the Word, serving with our time, talents, and things. We are to come together regularly and encourage each other and build each other up.

In all of my busyness, I ask myself, Am I good busy or just busy?

So, my letter to Elim is a personal letter to me, and it calls out my busyness.

It comes from Jesus Christ, the Creator of all things. He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, who has existed through all time. He doesn’t just know time; He created it.

He is pleased with our welcoming nature and how we have learned to and practice extending grace. He is the God of second chances, and we are His people.

But He criticizes our busyness—too busy for Him—too busy for each other—too busy for the ones we welcome in.

So, be still. Listen. Be productive with good things. Come together and break bread together. Don’t live your life in solitary busyness.

Why? Because Jesus will be with us always and we can know the peace of being in His will. He will give all that we need to fulfill His purpose for us. Our busyness prevents realizing this.

I’m in my sixth decade of doing this life. (That means I’m in my fifties; count it on your fingers like I did if you don’t believe me.) I’m still learning and hopefully improving, but I know I need to keep working on the good-busy thing. My letter doesn’t speak for everyone, but it’s one that I could imagine getting in the mail.

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Membership: It’s More than a Card in Your Wallet

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By Dan Amos

Membership—Costco, a gym, AARP. We have memberships in lots of places, but we don’t always give them a lot of thought. Yet when we are members, we do say “we belong.” It’s a way of identifying what is important to us, and it links us to others. Membership at Elim is vitally important to our future. The decisions we make over the course of selecting a new pastor will shape who we are and what we do, and members will make those decisions.

It’s been so long now that I don’t really remember the process Fran and I went through to become members. We would have read through and agreed to the statement of faith and received a copy of the constitution. Most importantly, we would have told our stories to an elder or two. How did we come to faith in Jesus? Where are we on our journey with Him?

Telling our story is about being known by others. It welcomes other believers into our lives. We become part of a community that is mutually supportive and accountable. Sometimes that means confronting sin, which is very uncomfortable, easy to avoid, but totally necessary.

We don’t require membership to attend or go to Bible study or community group or to take communion. Community and accountability are not dependent on membership. So, why bother?

Membership is a formal declaration, a covenant with a group of believers to support one another, build each other up, and worship Christ together. At Elim, our statement of faith is a declaration of what we believe God’s Word tells us. We will use the Bible as the measuring stick for all that we do, and if we deviate from that, the membership is responsible to hold the elders and pastors accountable.

With that agreement in mind, the membership entrusts the management of resources to the staff and elders to be used for building God’s kingdom. We have been focused on discipleship. As we go through the current transition, we will put a finer point on how we will accomplish this. We’ll restate our mission, the vision of where we believe God is taking Elim and what He wants us to do.

So, when it comes to picking a pastor, managing resources, and setting a course, the members not only need to be in agreement, but also need to have a common foundation. If we did not insist on members who are believers and agree to the statement of faith, we could go the way of many churches before us. We could deviate from the Word of God; we could compromise our faith and lose the saltiness God has given us.

Membership has a lot of work before it, but it is profitable work. Each meeting and vote we take sets us on a path. We need each member to actively participate. The elders are reviewing the membership roll to identify those who are no longer an active part of the body and encouraging them to return or relinquish their membership if they have moved away. If you are not a member and you call Elim your home, let us know if you want to become a member, and we’ll start the process. Your church family needs you.

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When Friends Leave

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By Dan Amos

When the newsletter comes out, it will be Valentine’s Day. For two weeks, Fran has treated me to a daily paper heart with a thing she loves about me. One of the things I love about her is she challenges me when I need it. Recently she said, “You don’t have a lot of really close friends you open up to, and you’re losing one of your best friends in Martin. How are you doing with that?”

I didn’t really have an answer to that, because I was avoiding the question as much as possible. It was easy to go into the mode of “What do we do next as a church to fill his position?” That has already taken a lot of time and energy of those on the Elder Board and surely the staff, but just like everyone else, I have a personal reaction to Martin moving on.

As I remember it, our first Sunday in 1994 was Father’s Day. Martin had been at Elim a couple of months at that point and was not there that day. This is one of several things I haven’t let him forget. We met soon enough, and he remembers taking me to lunch at a Taco Time near McChord where I was stationed at the time. I’ll give him that one because I don’t remember it.

One of my first memories was a church picnic at his house out in Graham, and he introduced me to Rich Henderson and we were soon part of their community group. Martin put a lot of energy into getting people into CGs. We’ve been in one ever since and we led one for many years, but we’ve never been in Martin and Kim’s group. Most of those really close friends from our first groups have also moved on—to the Philippines, Edmonds, Montana, Arizona. In the previous 10 years, we had lived on three different continents; now we’re the stable ones.

I guess that brings me to one of the first things I’m feeling. I’m tired of my friends moving away. Just because family and opportunities are elsewhere doesn’t mean you’re allowed to leave. I know that’s not rational, but it’s a feeling, so it gets to be irrational.

Martin forced me to learn to say no to the pastor. He would call me (on the landline, because this was before cell phones and texting) and ask if I wanted to meet. It was usually at 7 a.m. on Saturday. This was his prime time. It was my only chance during the week to sleep in, and I grudgingly said yes for a long time. But I learned to say no. We’d push back to maybe 9 a.m. It was still not my favorite, but it was a compromise. He later heard it forcefully from my wife at a CG leaders retreat where he wanted to get things going at 8 a.m. on Saturday. She’d gone to a lot of trouble to get someone to stay with the boys for the weekend, and she wasn’t about to be up, dressed, and ready at 8 a.m. if she didn’t have to be. He changed the start time.

Our boys are similar in ages and spent a lot of time together. They engaged in healthy property destruction, fortunately mostly at the Schlomer house. This gave us the need to talk about the mysteries of raising kids, boys in particular. They are such a wild card that you can do your best putting into their lives, but what they choose to do with it is really up to them.

All three of our boys came to know Jesus supported by the ministries of Elim. Luke was baptized by Martin in what is now the Shorts’ hot tub. JC and Di Williams lived there at the time. Nathan was very proud to put a rose in the cross made by Gene Davies signifying a new believer at Elim. Andrew was probably about the same time, but back then he didn’t like being up front.

These memories are kind of all over the place, but that’s how relationships can be. Martin is my friend, and I am mourning the coming separation. He has been a big part of my adult life and a big part of my family’s growth. I imagine there are many who have similar feelings and are concerned about what is to come next.

As Jeff Foerster said, we have a big God who is not surprised by any of this. He is with us. Martin has invested in and empowered leadership for times such as this. We will calmly and deliberately find the best man we can to fill the position of senior pastor. He won’t be Martin, but who is? He’s one of a kind.

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Remember!

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By Dan Amos

This year, our family exchanged gifts and had our family meal on December 23. It’s our newest phase of life, in which Fran and I no longer set the agenda but coordinate getting together with our sons’ three families and their families. But when we did, as we’ve done for dozens of years before, we read of Christ’s birth from Luke’s account. It’s difficult not to think of Linus from A Charlie Brown Christmas, but I read from the NIV instead of King James. Even this set off an amusing discussion of translations among the now four families being created out of our one.

The following evening, we participated in the Christmas Eve service in which Brian and the team led us through the story of Christ from Old Testament prophecies to His birth, death, and resurrection. Brian repeated throughout Israel’s history how families recounted the prophecies pointing to the Savior that was to come. In reading the story of Jesus’s birth, we continued the tradition of retelling His birth from a virgin in the town of David and all to God’s glory.

Martin and Brian led us through December to the annual celebration by recounting essential doctrines: the Trinity, how we are created for God’s glory, and how we shattered that glory with sin. God provided the solution for our sin in the form of Jesus—our one and only way to redemption.

These are fundamental doctrines of our faith. Yet throughout the Christmas season, I was bombarded not with truth but with Santa, excessive consumption, and annoyingly odd commercial images intended to make me think of a smell. There was no mention outside of church of Jesus.

Israel was given festivals and commemorations precisely to help them remember. The Christian church was given Communion to remember Christ’s death and resurrection. Christmas will cease to be a remembrance if we let it.

So when we study doctrine, we keep it firm in our understanding and the core of our faith. As Martin pointed out, even within the churches of America, too many fail to understand the divinity of Christ and what he has done for us. The power of the Gospel is rooted in the truth of God’s revelation of himself.

Charles Schulz got pushback from his producer about including New Testament Scripture in the Peanuts special. But he countered with, “Bill, if we don’t, who will?” That remains our question today. If we don’t hold to the truth, if we don’t speak it and remember it, who will?

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Pgo

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By Dan Amos

I had an idea to write about Pgo and Pwin. I even spent pretty much a whole sermon thinking it all through, writing it out in my head. It’s not that my mind was wandering, but it was engaged in a different direction … but when it came time to put the words into Notepad, it just didn’t flow.

Pgo and Pwin are terms I’ve learned to use in my job in business development to quantify the probability of an opportunity happening, and of winning it. For the purpose of this note, the opportunity is what we’re all about as children of God.

We exist to be in relationship with God. That is the opportunity. In this existence, we must choose whether we live in relationship with Him or in opposition to Him. We are already eternal beings, and we’ll take the results of this relationship with us into eternity. Either we will be in eternal relationship with Him or we will be eternally separated from Him.

With Him, we will be surrounded by His perfect love, enveloped by His glory. Our hearts will burst out in songs of praise, and I will finally be able to clap AND sing simultaneously. (For now, it’s one or the other, not both.) We will have purpose and fulfillment, but sorrow will be gone forever.

Without Him, our eternal existence will be unending misery. We will have a void that can never be filled. The torment and pain will be like nothing ever known, and it will not end. Eternity is real, and it is for everyone. How we spend it is the most important choice we make in this life.

These two options for eternity are the 10th point of our Statement of Faith. For those keeping track, this would be the Opportunity. Within the first eight points of the statement are the basics of who God is and what He has done for us. Understanding who He is is all part of Pgo. Because He did all the work (Point 5), our response to “God’s grace through faith alone in Christ alone” (Point 7) is our Pwin. And, just to complete the analogy, Point 9, on Christ’s return, is part of the award process.

The point is, we must know who it is we serve and know what it is He wants of us. If we have that wrong, we are chasing a false opportunity, and we risk losing everything. We already have eternal life; it’s where we spend it that’s the opportunity. A win is spending it with Him. A loss is complete isolated desolation without Him. Make sure you understand the Pgo and go all in for Pwin and make your Paward 100%.

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Challenged

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By Dan Amos

It’s all or nothing. Sunday, I watched the video clips from Challenge, and the message that we are either all in or all out resonated with me. There’s no middle ground in our salvation, and we don’t get to choose what it looks like. The One who spoke creation into existence sets the standard, and He alone is judge.

Challenge is an apt name. Those who go are challenged in their faith, challenged in what they think they believe. We spend a lot of spiritual time with very fine sandpaper polishing the surfaces of our lives, but we forget the big rocks, the fundamentals that make us children of God. There are times we need to pull out the 80-grit, coarse sandpaper and do some serious reshaping.

Even more, I think students are challenged to own their own faith. The faith of their parents may have shaped them, but Jesus wants a personal relationship with each of us. We don’t get a pass into Heaven because Mom and Dad are saved.

Lastly, once we understand our faith and own it, the challenge is to come home and live it out. Or, it may mean GO and live it out! Wherever it is God leads us, we are challenged every day to live a life worthy to be called by His name.

As a church, we wrote our challenge into a statement of faith. These are the things we believe about who God is, what He has done, His work in our lives, our response to Him, and what is to come. It’s a challenge because it sets us apart from the world we live in. We are challenged to acknowledge the Scriptures as inspired by the Holy Spirit and the ultimate authority over human knowledge and endeavor. It establishes the framework for understanding our world and events. It’s the common framework believers cling to as a Church.

These are the big rocks of our faith. We can find the statement of faith on the Elim website under About. In rejecting God, the world has put itself into opposition to these truths. When God calls us to Himself and we accept the invitation, these things become our challenge; they become the coarse sandpaper that reshapes our lives.

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