One of my values is that all local churches are on the same team.  I remember how lonely it was when Lori and I started Palm Valley. Some pastors actually viewed, and treated us, as the competition.  I also remember how encouraging it was when a few local pastors reached out to me and showed me some love.

I’ve tried to pass this on.  I look for opportunities to build relationships with young pastors/church planters, and try to encourage them.  Lori and I regularly invite new pastors/church planters to our home for dinner.  We even paid for one local church plant to send out their first mailer because they couldn’t afford to do it.

I recently hosted a lunch at our offices, where a bunch of us younger pastors huddled up, prayed for each other, and encouraged one another.

We also decided to do something that would show our commitment to working together to build God’s Kingdom, not our own.  With the DaVinci Code movie coming out, we thought this would be a great opportunity to reach out to our community together, and let people know that we’re more interested in them knowing Christ than which one of our churches they go to.

So, this Friday in the West Valley View, you will see an ad from 7 local churches inviting anyone seeking answers to questions raised in the DaVinci Code to visit ANY of our local churches. I encourage you to check out the ad in Friday’s paper, and pray that God will bring a harvest of people into His Kingdom through all of the local Bible teaching churches!

It may not be the biggest happening in the world, but i believe this is one way we can knock down the competitive walls and honor God as a true community of followers of Christ.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 10:39 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Should you want to respond to this post, feel free to trackback to this post from your own site.