Last fall, the Lake Avenue Church Ministry Council, our congregation's leadership group, went on retreat to plan for the church's future months of ministry. Most of us who have been on church retreats know that they are usually not retreats at all. They often are times of intense strategic planning, debate and dialog, and policy making. As Garrison Keillor once said, "Church retreats are not retreats. They're more like advances."

But something different happened at this retreat. Kathy Hollimon and Roger Bosch called us to stop our frenetic activity and spend time seeking the Lord together—not just for a few moments but for the entire first evening. And on the second evening (and we had only two of them), Jeremy Rose insisted that we take extended time worshiping God. And I believe that we heard some things together.

When we tried to formulate what we had heard, this is what we wrote:

We are sent ones, intergenerationally:

• Worshiping in unity

• Learning in community

• Progressing toward completion in Christ

• Serving God's mission

Since that time last October we have been considering how we should move forward in ways consistent with the vision gained at the retreat. That brings us to the study we will be engaging in each weekend from April through August 2013. If any book in the Bible guides a local church into becoming a community of people who 1) meet to worship in unity and then 2) go out into the world as sent ones in service of God's mission, it is The Acts of the Apostles. I think that a better title might be "The Acts of God through His People."

Listen to what Bible scholar, translator, author, and pastor J.B. Phillips wrote about Acts in the middle of the last century:

No one can read this book without being convinced that there is someone here at work besides mere human beings. Perhaps because in their very simplicity, perhaps because of their readiness to believe, to obey, to give, to suffer, and if need be to die, the Spirit of God found what surely He must always be seeking—a fellowship of men and women so united in love and faith that He can work in them and through them with the minimum of let or hindrance. Consequently, it is a matter of sober historical fact that never before has any small body of ordinary people so moved the world that their enemies could say, with tears of rage in their eyes, that these people "have turned the world upside down"! (Acts 17:6)

I am praying already that the same will be said of us at our church and at all churches who name Jesus as Lord in the San Gabriel valley.

To His Glory,

Dr. Greg Waybright
Senior Pastor