Did you see the news?
There was an article written about the churches in the city of Charlotte that doesn’t involve some kind of pastoral scandal or racial division. #praisebreak
Somehow a national Christian publication caught wind of the united sermon series that we found ourselves in as a city and decided to highlight it. (Click Here to read about it!)
The irony?
Two years ago almost to the DAY, Charlotte was in the news for a very different reason. There were riots in the street. Violence and fear was so thick people were afraid to be downtown at night. Someone was shot. It was horrible.
Two years later there are 74 churches across Charlotte now wrapping up a four week united sermon series called For Charlotte.
And one has to wonder: So where do we go from here?
What I keep telling people is that whether we know it or not, we are standing in unprecedented times here in Charlotte. The efforts of local pastors like Clay Smith from FBC Matthews, Chris Payne from Church at Charlotte/New Charlotte, Alex Kennedy from Carmel Baptist Church and Bishop Claude from The Park Church are changing the tide and trajectory of churches in the Charlotte area.
Private relationships are starting to turn into public displays of unity. 20 years ago this was not happening. At least not on this kind of scale. The division lines have been dissipating more and more as God continues to bring leaders into our city that don’t see the Kingdom of God as a denomination or historical tradition, but as a body.
I think one day the church-goers and pastors of Charlotte will look back at things such as this and recall with smiles what is was like “back in the day” before the fullness of our unity was on display. We’ll remember that it took faithful people taking faithful actions on small scales that then led to a tipping point of operational unity within the body of Christ. It took prayer meetings that only four pastors showed up to for ten years. It took lunch meetings with ten churches at a time. It took extra hours and extra money. It took intentionality outside of just the day-to-day church growth strategy. And it took relationships. Lots and lots of relationships.
My hope and prayer is that we will have several more years of testing just how far this thing called unity is taking us as the church in Charlotte. We’ll have annual events like Movement Day, YMCA Prayer Breakfast, and joint Prayer/Worship Nights together. Then we’ll move to round table discussions and the hearts of folks in south Charlotte will break for the same things as the people in west Charlotte, and vice versa. We’ll start to share resources and meals and prayers, and then one day it won’t be hard anymore. It will be the most natural thing we could have imagined.
Then one day we’ll have to explain to our kids that there was once a day that it wasn’t like this. There was once a time in our city that we were evaluated as the 50th out of 50 cities in upward mobility. There was once a time when the church stood silent on issues of inequality. There was once a time when the sign on a church building meant more than the unity of the body.
And then we’ll get to smile and say, “No longer.”
Won’t that be amazing?