“People who serve are people who stay.” This is a popular saying that, for a few decades now, has gained popularity as a truism within American church growth movements and around the staff meeting tables of myriad local churches. The idea behind this maxim comes from a line of thinking that prioritizes church growth via programmatic pathways focusing on guest assimilation and member retention, or as another saying puts it, a need to “close the back door.” These pathways or “assimilation systems” aim to maximize guest experience in hopes that they become regular attenders, regular attenders become meaningfully connected or members (if the church has formal membership), and members find ministries or programs in which they are committed to serve. Because of course, “people who serve are people who stay.”

As those who live in a society increasingly formed around secularism, it’s easy to lose sight of the spiritual realities that influence the world we inhabit.  As we watch the nations rage, the polarization of our society, and face our own difficult circumstances and trials of many kinds, even as Christians, we often only see these through the lenses of the material or coincidence.  However, the churches in and around Ephesus lived under no such illusions.

I was listening recently to an interview with well-known cultural and political commentator Dennis Prager, who also happens to be a follower of Orthodox Judaism.  Because of a shared Judeo-Christian moral framework, his professional life often finds him rubbing shoulders, platformed, and allied with conservative Bible-believing Christians against our culture’s descent into leftist secularism. 

It is difficult to imagine an aspect of God’s being more gloriously unfathomable and at once more comforting and awful than the realities of God’s Immensity and Omnipresence.  How can we truly get our minds around the idea that God is “without measure” (his immensity) or that he is fully everywhere, all at once, all the time (his omnipresence)?