"Chosen..................................."

My pastor friend in Pensacola has now approached me twice about over-seeing a satellite church for him here in northern Kentucky. I’ve turned him down both times. It’s nice to know he has such confidence in me; but, at the same time, unless God tugs on my anchor-line otherwise, the Detention Center and the rescue mission have my heart. To be truthful, it is a mystery to me how the idea of community worship can be achieved when its built around a sermon delivered via a computer broadcast transferred to a large movie screen. Sunday evening, however, it occurred to me, while sitting in the balcony and watching the service evolve before me, that the whole event really wasn’t all that different. The fact that it was happening “live” and right in front of us, that there was no physical lens between the people on the stage and the congregation seated in the pews, did nothing to eliminate an invisible sheet of something or other separating those two groups. In the old days, one never knew when the Holy Ghost would move some brother toward the back of the sanctuary to arise and bring forth inspired witness; or it could well have been one of the older sisters who would start an old hymn, the words coming from somewhere deep inside her and breathing life into all there. Nowadays, it’s not so much that the Spirit doesn’t have the freedom to originate from the “spectators”, but that those people don’t seem to recognize it can be so. All eyes are on the pastor. All minds are geared on “the program”. Alice does step through the looking glass at times, of course. The anointing falls and prophecy calls forth the sick and the hurting; but, to me, when the veil of the temple was rent, it made us all priests, vessels through whom He could minister. If you think that such privilege makes anybody “special”, it might help to remember God once spoke through a donkey. The important thing is in recognizing grace when it comes to us……