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Waterloo UBF 2014-2015 Chapter Report

1. 2014 Annual Review

Having been asked to continue on as lead pastor in Joshua’s stead, we made this transition official in our leadership transition ceremony in January. But it soon became clear that this was not really going to work for us, for a variety of reasons. Joshua asked me if I wanted him to leave, and I told him I did not feel that it would be healthy for our church if he were to leave altogether. We started trying to work with a two-level structure for leadership (Core / Board), but soon things shifted instead to a Pastoral Team consisting of Joshua, Steve and myself. The Pastoral team tried to work out a membership document so that we could have a set body of members from whom leaders could be drawn. God brought several things to light through this, and as we went through the internal and especially the external review process, Joshua and Steve came to the realization that God was leading them, along with their wives Hannah and Susie, to establish a prayer ministry distinct from but connected to the Waterloo UBF church. And so they asked me, sometime in November, whether I would be willing to re-accept the role as lead pastor. After prayer, I accepted this for a two-year term starting in January 2015, but with the awareness that I am not able to do it alone, and will need other committed leaders who can step up and fill in the gaps.

While all this was going on in our church’s leadership, the Lord continued to do good things among us. We had a joint Easter Retreat together with Hyde Park and West Loop in April, and Junia, who had established a relationship with our church, came and blessed many people. We held Romans studies on Fridays and preached from it on Sundays through the Summer and Fall. At the Resting Place conference in New Jersey in June, God anointed us to be burning ones and gave Pastor Joshua a special directive to establish the tabernacle of David and house of prayer. The men’s prayer breakfast meeting grew a bit and became a source of strength and encouragement for several guys, including me. And other prayer meetings were also well attended. Some of the girls in our church decided to live together, and their fellowship and serving hearts have been super encouraging to our church. Seeds of Waterloo (our student club -  SOW for short) continued to function, and a number of young leaders took stewardship and grew together in serving fellow students. In August, Leah Gerber, who was interning at the time, put together a wonderful coffee house event in Waterloo Park. Dacia, Scott and Hannah Love also interned in 2014 and contributed in many ways to the church’s life. Katie opened her cottage in Northern Ontario (and opened her heart to our church) and we had a wonderful time there and even did a wilderness canoe trip. Natalia from Ukraine UBF joined us for this trip and we enjoyed fellowship with her. Sophie, Taylor, Leah and Emily were baptized that same month. Through this baptism ceremony at Paradise Lake my mother’s heart was opened, and even some of her neighbors, as they listened in on the music and service. A group from West Loop UBF visited us to worship and go tubing together. We had an encouraging Fall Retreat and Pastor Sam blessed many of us through his prayers. Jennifer had a meaningful breakthrough at a short personal prayer retreat, and found herself in God in a deeper way. Part of the fruit of this was that early mornings in our home turned into a small prayer and worship furnace as she faithfully got up first thing to pour out her heart to the Lord. Toward the end of the year, Sarah Seo got engaged. The year ended for a number of us at the Well, where we came back to the Father’s heart. There are many more beautiful things that could be mentioned!

At the same time, many people in our church seemed to be wandering around, and we did not have much of a structure set up to minister to them. Because the membership document process dragged on so long without being finalized, and we were making everything else contingent on that, many things remained undone. Various individuals persisted in loving and serving others and in pursuing prayer and intimacy with God, but not much was happening at a whole church level. I was personally so busy that I was happy to just focus on the specific things God had entrusted to me and to trust that He would work out everything else. God emphasized to me repeatedly throughout the year that He had entrusted me with four things: (1) my family (2) my teaching job (3) my theology studies (4) preaching and teaching ministry in the church. Several times I would get all screwed up thinking about what was happening at church, or feeling the need to do certain big-picture things like building networks with other churches and Christians, or fixing this or that problem or situation, and God would remind me that He had entrusted these four things to me specifically and was not telling me to do all these other things. This helped me to let go of things. It helped me have a clearer sense of myself as just one very small person in life with a very small capacity. It also set me free from placing unrealistic expectations on myself.

II. 2015 Vision and Strategy

For our church community in Waterloo many things are new this year. We have a new prayer ministry that will be led by Joshua and Steve. We have a new leadership team to oversee the life of our church (Andy and Jennifer Stumpf, Josh and Katie Martin, Hannah Love Yoon and Scott Byers-Lane). I’ll be doing some new things including teaching a moral theology course at a seminary in London. Our 2015 key verses (John 13:34,35) say, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Jesus called this a “new” command. It is new because only in Jesus have fallen human beings been able to see the fullness of God revealed. God’s command is also new because God is always renewing it to His church. And I believe the Holy Spirit wants to restore the commandments to love God and love one another in our church. These two verses contain the basic direction I’m praying over our church for 2015. I believe the Lord will help us live with great clarity and will bless us and others a lot if we keep this focal point of Jesus’ words as our own focus in 2015. If we love Jesus, and if Jesus is Lord, then we obey Jesus’ commands. But Jesus’ commands are not burdensome (1Jn 5:3). The only way to live in true and complete freedom is to live in love, to love one another in the love we receive from God. When we obey Jesus and follow the way of love, we become what we were truly meant to be - divine-image-bearers.

Jesus commanded his eleven apostles (Peter, John, James, Thomas, etc.) to love one another as He had loved them. Jesus had loved them to the end by washing their feet. Washing of feet, in this passage, is an expression of practical service and assistance given in order to take away another person’s sins and any barriers or hindrances to fellowship between that person and God and others in the community. We cannot save each other from our sins. But we can carry one another in intercessory prayer to Jesus. We can wash each other’s feet by confessing our sins to each other, and praying for each other (Jas 5:15,16). Jesus loved His followers by His complete obedience to the Father, not by simply following the demands or wishes of others. The best way to love other people is by giving ourselves completely to God. Obedience to the command to love each other is impossible without dedication to fellowship and intimacy with God, because it is in fellowship with God that we receive the love with which we can then love others. My best way to love others the most that I can is by doing the things the Lord entrusts to me as well as I can in His grace. I am very interested in seeing each person fulfill the purposes God has for them. I don’t believe there is a single Christian who does not have love and ministry assignments from the Lord. These assignments will be unique to each person. But they will all have the shape of the cross - that is, of self-giving for the sake of others in obedience to God. We can love one another as Jesus loved us when we are faithful with the small things He entrusts to us, whatever they are. And we can love one another as Jesus loved us when we humbly wash each other’s feet.

Jesus says, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (Jn 13:35). Jesus really did, and still really does delegate His authority to His disciples, so that we can participate in bringing all the nations to obedience to God the Father in Him. Why would people listen to our teaching when we teach them to obey Jesus’ commands? It would only be because they recognize that we are really Jesus’ disciples. And they will only know this if we love one another. The love of God poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit as we seek God and open our hearts to receive from Him, manifests in our way of life, in our practical decisions and use of our time and resources, and in our attitudes toward each other. We produce the fruit of the Holy Spirit - which is not our fruit but His - and it’s a supernatural thing that people taste and say, “Hey, God’s work is evident here.” There is a close relationship between the inreaching and the outreaching of a community. The inreaching of the community of believers, as we love one another deeply from our hearts, has an outreaching orientation because that very love we show each other is itself a witness of God’s love in a broken and lost world. When we have this happening in our community, then whenever our community comes into contact with people, those people will see the love of God, and in seeing that, they will see Jesus. The Spirit will convict them that this is a place where Jesus is present, and where people really are following Jesus. In this way our community will be a place where Jesus has an open channel in the world to draw all people to Himself. Outreach, or outward, world-directed love cannot be separated from inreach, or inward, member-oriented love. It is quite true that our church has not been as active as we could be with outreach, and I’m sure many of us, including me, want to see our community come into a stronger evangelism and outreach this year. But in order to be strong enough to do this, we have to strengthen our inreach even more, at the same time as we seek ways to do outreach. God has been helping us to love each other and fellowship with each other, but I think we still have a long way to go in learning to truly love one another as Jesus loved us. May the new year, 2015 be for us a year of loving obedience to Jesus, and loving service to one another.

In the winter term, we will be focusing on Bible passages on the theme of emotionally healthy spirituality. Alongside this we’ll be going through 8 sessions of emotionally healthy spirituality within our Core leadership team, and then also in small groups on Fridays at Church. We are still in the process of setting up Church membership and small groups as well as a secondary tier of leadership including small group leaders and ministry team leaders (worship team, tech team, service team, etc.). We have a joint Seeds of Waterloo and Waterloo UBF retreat in March, a Canadian UBF summer conference in July, and a cottage retreat in Northern Ontario in August. Sarah Seo, a single missionary from Korea and long-time member of our church, is getting married in L.A. on March 7, 2015, so we will be praying for her and prayerfully sending her off on her new adventure with the Lord. We pray that all of us may go much deeper in our prayer lives and intimacy with the Lord, be filled with His love, and out of that place of the Father’s love and heart, we may love one another deeply from our hearts, and love the world around us with all our God-given gifts and strength. We want to see a growing depth of understanding and application of the Bible in all our members, along with powerful worship and encounters with the Lord, the release of the gifts of the Spirit to enable us to do evangelism and missions as the Lord leads and empowers us, and real love relationships in which we can be truly vulnerable and open and love each other practically.