In august it will be my second wedding anniversary. I remember my wedding like yesterday. I remember all the fights me and my wife had about money and planning for this event. We both wanted a great wedding but our ideas were different on how that looked. I wanted to fly to a island a few close friends and get married. My wife wanted a big church wedding with all the bells and whistles. We went with the church wedding. I say we spent almost $15,000.00 on that one day. Which I hear was low balling. When the wedding was done we didn't have any money for a honey moon and we got home and we were broke. We were working super hard and were super stressed out. My biggest fear was realized. We planned for the wedding and not the marriage. We blew off counseling sessions to taste cake and plan receptions. We skipped bills to pay for dresses and a caterer(who normally is real good but on our day sucked). We didn't even read the book we were assigned we both lied and cheated our way through marriage counseling. The wedding was planned but the marriage surprised us. My earlier post "Gimmicks but no power" I mentioned how churches bank so much on gimmicks to get people in to the first service but do not make sure things are in place to sustain the life of the church.
I am a church planter who have made several mistakes. I might plan to much in some regards. We are trying to lay a foundation in which we can build on. Church planting is more than lights and grand arenas. Church planting is about starting new churches that will transform people lives. The best outreach methods to people who don't do church or not in to church or who are tired of church, experts say is planting new churches. There are over 800,331 people in Atlanta alone who fit in that previous category. There are churches but established churches tend to lean on survival and not new growth. I read a survey that said about 300 churches close every Sunday. The reason for most of these closings are due to great weddings but awful marriages.
No comments:
Post a Comment