QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Way beyond religion…” Jason Upton, singer/songwriter.

I think we’re coming to a place in human history where, “that’s the way we’ve always done it” isn’t going to quite cut it any longer.

If you pay attention to the statistics, people (specifically young adults) aren’t coming to church anymore. They cite boredom and irrelevancy to their everyday lives as reasons for not coming. “The way we’ve always done it” is not working any longer, and I could not be more pleased. You see, we are in a time when God is doing something fresh and new – something that looks very different from “the way things have always been done.” God will no longer allow political or denominational lines to form a box around his beauty and majesty. Those lines, that box – the “box” of religion – is beginning to be dismantled by the gracious hand of God.

What are we, as Immersion, going to do with that? God is such that he does not reside only in a temple “built by human hands.” What are we going to do with this knowledge? How are we going to respond to a God who “desires mercy, not sacrifice?” Meaning – God desires a “repentant and contrite heart” over you coming to church on Thursdays or Sundays. What are we going to do when the walls of religion come tumbling down in the church of America? Will we be ready…?

Prayer for the week: Father of Lights, the Fragrant One, break us out of the boxes that we spend so much of our time in. The boxes of religion, of “the way things have always been done,” these boxes of fear and apathy, of doing things by rote and uncreatively. You are the one who is constant but always changing. Teach us to be constant in our devotion and love to you but open to change everywhere else. In Yeshua’s Name, Amen.