As soon as I walked into the church office, I could tell we had power issues. Some lights burned dimly; others wouldn’t come on at all. Computers wouldn’t turn on. Telephones didn’t work. The burglar and fire alarms were beeping, as were various back-up batteries.
There was little on my “to-do” list that I could do. I couldn’t answer email. (My laptop battery worked; wi-fi didn’t.) I couldn’t make phone calls, print the prayer sheet, or access my saved sermon notes. The volunteers and staff couldn’t accept phone appointments for Mission of Mercy, vacuum the floors, prepare Sunday’s PowerPoint presentations, or update the webpage. And to my immediate frustration, we couldn’t even make coffee!
We checked the breakers and equipment. We called in key volunteers who knew more about our electrical system than we did. We devised some temporary workarounds. We had the church phone forwarded to my cell phone so we could receive calls, but that meant, of course, that I had to surrender my cell phone to the receptionist. We rescheduled some of the things that could be rescheduled. And we used other ways to do our work. (I’m actually writing this from a McDonalds on my IPAD, using their free Wi-Fi and drinking their coffee.)
And then, of course, we called the power company.
While I waited for the volunteers and the power company to figure out the problem, I started thinking. Is the church as a whole experiencing a power issue of a different sort? Is that why we’ve made little difference in the world, and why we have to try to so hard to “work around” the lack of spiritual power?
While I was thinking about this, the power company figured out that an underground power cable had shorted out. Within a couple of hours, they had a temporary cable in place, and our power was restored.
Is it time for our church to call our other and more important power company?
If you understand my drift, join me at one of the least attended meetings of the week . . . prayer meetings on Wednesday nights at 7:00 pm!
Pastor Jack, from his IPAD