Encourage Each Other

“Each of us should please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.” – Romans 15:2

In his book “Slow Kingdom Coming”, Kent Annan writes: “From the outside Calvary Church in Holland, Michigan, looks like a typical large church that many Americans attend. The church developed the typical way: it started small and then began to grow. As the church grew, it had to accommodate worship and programming for hundreds, then more than a thousand people. Which means it needed to build. Which means the congregation has to pay for these buildings. Which means capital campaigns to encourage people to give.

For 12 straight years Pastor Frank Wevers led capital campaigns on the $4.5 million project for Calvary, a church of mostly working- and middle-class members. The good news is they finished phase one of the building project. They were ready to celebrate completing the worship space and retiring their debt by having a mortgage-burning banquet. The bad news is that finishing phase one meant they soon had to start phases two and three of the building plan, which included more space and a Starbucks-like coffee area. Wevers was tired.

The congregation was tired. Yet there was more to do to keep up with the ministry vision. Wevers went on a three-day personal retreat in anticipation of the mortgage-burning banquet. While on the retreat, he started thinking about the biblical idea of jubilee, in which Israel was to rest and reorder resources between those who had more and those who had less. This idea connected with feelings of guilt he’d experienced throughout the process. “Any pastor who oversees 12 years of capital stewardship campaigns and spends millions of dollars on a facility should feel some guilt,” he says. “I thought, How can we be spending so much money on this with all the other needs in the world?”
The need to mark the end of the project, the idea of jubilee, and guilt about having spent so much on themselves led Wevers to an idea: Let’s proclaim a year of jubilee as a church. For Calvary, this decision meant they would pause for a year and not raise any money for their own buildings. Instead, they would help build structures in places like South Africa, Haiti, Ecuador, Palestine, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and New York. And they wouldn’t just send money: members of the congregation would visit these places.
The congregation would celebrate finishing their own home church by sharing their resources with people around the world. The following year they gave away $370,000, and 250 people from their church went on these trips. When they came back, everything changed. In Wevers’s words, they felt “ambushed by God.” Their attention shifted from themselves to the world beyond. What they thought would be a brief sabbatical in fact became the new commitment. After these trips people decided they didn’t merely want this to be a year of jubilee—they wanted to be a “jubilee church.” This journey continues 8 years later.”

Are you building up people as you go along in life? Thank the Lord for the people He has placed in your life and seek to encourage them in Jesus Christ.

“Encouragement is perhaps one of the greater gifts friends can ever give. An encouraging friend is a lifeline to steady a floundering heart, to bring sunshine to a cloudy day, and to deliver a blessing just looking for a place to land.” – Susan Duke

“Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another–and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” – Hebrews 10:25