Core Value 6:Ministry programs and activities are started, led, and grown by gifted men and women from the church family.
Let’s take a dream break. Not a break from dreams—but a break to dream. Take a few minutes for the sole purpose of dreaming—of exploring the possibilities of life. We’re going to brainstorm here, so anything goes. Turn off any internal censors or naysayers you carry around with you. Call forth your imagination and your faith. Make this a safe time and place to dream big dreams.
Now, ask yourself these questions:
- What do I absolutely love doing?
- The times I most enjoy with God are when I’m doing ________________.
- If money and time were not an issue, what would I want to do with my life?
- If I could learn to do anything, what would I want to learn?
- If I could significantly impact my world in any area, what would I want to do?
- If God could get me dreaming about something, what do I think it would be?
If this dream break is tough for you, then your heart’s dream maker may be on the brink. You may have inadvertently (or purposefully) let the relentlessness or tedium of life wear it down. If so, you may want to introduce the above questions regularly into your conversations with God. Ask Him to awaken the dreams He has for you—the dreams He’s placed in you. Because God hasn’t called you to a relentless or tedious life, but to a full and abundant life (see John 10:10). He hasn’t called you to insignificance but to live in such a way that you change the world. Sometimes we forget that.
Ministry is just meeting human needs in Jesus’ name. If you’re a believer, God’s planted somewhere in you a dream and a gift for meeting a particular area of need in your world. At CVC, ministry programs and activities are started, led, and grown when people take action on the dreams and gifts God’s given them.
So, if you’ve never thought of yourself as having a ministry—or if it’s been a while—start taking some dream breaks. Pray about what God might have in mind for you. Plan to fully participate in the Spiritual Adventure this fall to explore the idea even further.
If you do have a ministry, start taking some dream breaks anyway. Pray about whether God might want to stretch your dreams in some area. Don’t rest on yesterday’s dreams, but prepare yourself for fresh ones.(Maybe God will give them to you during the Spiritual Adventure this fall.) Even the apostle Paul—whom we might think would have been justified in taking it easy after planting a few churches and taking a few missionary journeys—even Paul was continually looking for what new mission God might have for him. He never let his dream maker get run down:
Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is a head, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:12-14, NIV)
At CVC, God has called us to be “Friends Helping Friends Follow Christ.” That’s a big dream. What’s your part in it? Imagine. Imagine big. Ask God to fulfill the dream He’s placed in you and in CVC as a church. And watch the dream keep getting bigger and better in God’s hands.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.(Ephesians 3:20-21, NIV)
