I don’t know if you noticed, but putting on a “virtual” church service for the past 9 weeks has been a major project. TOCC is blessed to have the people who have the technical knowledge and skills to make it happen. What is amazingly better than that is the fact that each of these people – your brothers and sisters in Christ – have had only one purpose in all of this: to gladly do and give whatever it took [and it took a LOT of time and energy and thought and skill and love] to make sure that The Lord would be honored in every presentation, and that His people would be blessed by watching. They had no desire for any recognition of their work, and I’m sure they are horrified to be reading this now. But I hope you will join me in thanking and praying for all of them – God’s faithful servants!
And, I don’t know if you noticed, but preparing the building to re-open for live church this past Sunday was also a HUGE task. Bethany was, and is, involved in every aspect of this – from establishing contact with the State Authorities, to obtaining and reviewing the State’s requirements for re-opening, to coordinating how sanitization and clean-up will be done each week, to contacting the leaders of our Hispanic Congregation and setting up their worship area, to setting up our worship area and cordoning off other areas of the building, and other things that I don’t even know about. Fortunately, she did have some help from others. And that is not all. Coordinating a live worship service that is also broadcast online at the same time, plus adding in a sermon recorded at an earlier time, presents an entirely new and complex series of technical issues to be addressed. Again, I hope you will join me in thanking Bethany and the other servants who have dedicated themselves to accomplishing this difficult task.
Please don’t think I am including myself among these faithful servants. My task is the simplest of all – show up and talk when and where they tell me to. After that, in the words of Jackson Browne from his great song, “The Pretender”:
“And when the morning light comes streaming in, I’ll get up and do it again – Amen”.
But, my position as “the least of these” gives me many opportunities to witness truly great servants at work, and my spirit is being saturated by their wonderful examples! And, just last week I had the amazing opportunity to hear the first two heart-thoughts of two of our sisters when I told them about the up-coming re-opening. Their first thought was, “Hallelujah! It will be so wonderful to be with our family again!” Their second thought was, “You know, even with social distancing, our building is big enough that each member could invite a friend to join them at church!”
Don’t you love this family? God is building a Christ-shaped Community at TOCC. A Community that looks like Jesus is concerned not only for one another, but also for our neighbors. And that concern for neighbors includes the knowledge that the one thing our neighbors need more than anything else is Jesus. Strangely enough, the Corona-induced requirement for online worship has expanded our voice and our reach.
Here’s another strange consequence of Corona. The Government’s restrictions on crowd size have forced big churches to struggle with trying to figure out how to re-unite. But that has not been a problem for TOCC. The combination of our small membership plus our large building means that there is nothing preventing our entire congregation from being together all at the same time, with plenty of room to spare for our neighbors! Maybe being small [for now] isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Hmmm, let’s see: expanded voice, expanded reach, a heart for our neighbors who need Jesus, a place where they can now actually safely join us to see and hear what Jesus is all about and what He means to us - has God prepared this Christ-shaped Community for such a time as this?
Ambrose K. Ramsey III
Shepherd
