#19: Finding Your Way to God
After 10 years of Forefront we’ve now done over 120 message series. Thought it might be fun and interesting to share with you my top twenty.
This series was inspired by Community Christian Church in Naperville, which is one of my favorite churches and is led by one of my favorite people, Dave Ferguson. Their motto is, “Helping people find their way back to God.” (I love that, because it is clear and is exactly what we’re supposed to be about. My only issue with it is the word “back.” To me it makes it sound like they’re for people who used to go to church and have God, but have drifted away. Which is cool, but what about people who never went to church and never had God? I realize there’s a theological argument to be made that in some sense we all used to have God because we were made by Him and for Him, and so everyone has to go “back” to Him. But I’m not that deep so we dropped the “back” and called our series “Finding Your Way to God.”) (I considered calling this series, “Finding Your Way to God, Whether You Used to Have Him or Have No Idea Who He Is and Wouldn’t Recognize You If He Was In Front of You In Line at the Grocery Store,” but it was just too long.)
So this series was really great, but what makes it especially memorable is that we had the first tragedy in our church during this series. On the night before Easter, a teenager in our church named Megan Merritt died in tragic car crash. That night the phone ringing woke me up. It was Megan’s father, Rich, who told me what had happened. I drove over to his house and spent most of the night there with Rich and his wife Karen. When I finally left around 4:00 in the morning I wondered what our Easter service would be like. It was starting in only five hours. Would people have heard the news already? I assumed I should announce it, but at the beginning of the service or end?
When I showed up the next morning people were crying everywhere. The car accident was featured on the TV News, in the paper. Our Easter service felt more like a funeral. It was odd, but in another way there was something perfect and beautiful about it. Megan wasn’t with us, but the resurrection shows us that she was not dead. Megan had put her faith in Jesus and because of that she found her way to God.
– featured on newchurches.com