As our culture turns more and more away from its Judeo-Christian roots, we who follow Jesus will find ourselves on the\u00a0outside of the \u201cin crowd.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0And that is okay with me.<\/p>\n
To be honest, the church gets lazy and soft if the culture is friendly and accommodating to it.\u00a0 When that happens, we tend to think of ourselves are part of the main flow, friends of the world. The Bible has some rather harsh things to say about that!<\/p>\n
If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own.\u00a0 Because you do not belong to the world, but I have
\n<\/i>chosen you out of the world\u2014therefore the world hates you. <\/i>(John 15:19 NRSV)<\/p>\n
Do not love the world or the things in the world.\u00a0 The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; <\/i>(1 John 2:15 NRSV)<\/p>\n
And yet,<\/p>\n
\u201cFor God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. <\/i>(John 3:16 NRSV)<\/p>\n
The bottom line is this:\u00a0 you and I, all of us who follow Jesus from the \u201chome base\u201d of FVUMC, are missionaries!\u00a0 Our church is a mission outpost in a world that is becoming hostile to nearly
\neverything we stand for, because God\u2019s love for the world must be expressed through us.<\/p>\n
This is our missional vision, to be \u201cA Biblical Family of Joyful Servants, Sharing the Love of God in a Broken World.\u201d<\/p>\n
Let us be about our Father\u2019s business!<\/p>\n
Hallelujah!<\/p>\n
Pastor Glen<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As our culture turns more and more away from its Judeo-Christian roots, we who follow Jesus will find ourselves on the\u00a0outside of the \u201cin crowd.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0And that is okay with me. To be honest, the church gets lazy and soft if the culture is friendly and accommodating to it.\u00a0 When that happens, we tend to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":1169,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,104,39,38,102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church-news","category-fellowship","category-local-outreach","category-outreach","category-pastoral"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefount.church\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefount.church\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefount.church\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefount.church\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefount.church\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1715"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thefount.church\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1716,"href":"https:\/\/thefount.church\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1715\/revisions\/1716"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefount.church\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefount.church\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefount.church\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefount.church\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}