Monday, June 30, 2008

A Cool Praise, A Big Challenge

I just opened my mail for the week and I found a magazine from my denomination with a listing of numbers of baptisms for churches in our state. I was blown away to discover our church was in the top eleven churches in our state when it came to baptizing people. That discovery led me to several thoughts.

First, I'm thankful and grateful that our church has been used to help people come to faith in Christ and follow Him in baptism. May God receive the glory in that praise!

Secondly, I'm challenged by the fact that as a whole baptisms in our denomination are down. Didn't Jesus say, "Go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them..."? Somehow we have to regain our focus on what is really important. Every church I know is busy. The question is, are we busy about the right things?

My prayer is that every church has an increase in baptisms. I pray that we increase baptisms so we can increase disciples. Let's get busy reaching "all nations".