Bronx Bethany, You Never Left Nazareth.

During the BBCN leadership meeting on January 10, our guest speaker (Bob Adams, who blogs at http://27gen.blogspot.com) incorporated a variety of exercises and reflections in his presentation. One of the "points to ponder" hit me like a ton of bricks, and it bears repeating in light of Pastor Sam's sermon this past Sunday:

The question was, What are the unique needs where God has placed us? In our city? In our neighborhood?

And as I looked at that question, the Spirit of God spoke to my spirit: Bronx Bethany can't answer the question because New York is not their city and The Bronx is not their neighborhood. They have yet to embrace the community I sovreignly placed them in.

In Acts 1:4 we read, "On one occasion, while Jesus was eating with them (the Eleven), he gave them this command: 'Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift My Father promised, which you have heard Me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit'."

Eleven men, who had spent three years as disciples of Jesus during his public ministry, experienced several encounters with the resurrected Christ. And Jesus gave them a simple order: Stay here in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is where the Holy Spirit will be poured out on you. Jerusalem is the starting point for your experience of ministering with the powerful anointing of the Holy Ghost.

My friends, some of you are supposed to be waiting in Jerusalem but you have never left Nazareth. You have not crossed Kidron. You have not watched in Gethsemane. You have not taken the walk along the Via Dolorosa. You have not gone to the Cross. You never made it to the Upper Room.

In other words, you are not where God called you to be. And you have set yourself up to miss the outpouring of His powerful Spirit.

Admittedly, Nazareth makes more sense in terms of human logic. It's where your fishing business thrives. It's where you can get your accounting degree and have your nice job supporting the Roman Empire. It's where you can maintain your political connections and talk about justice and representation. It's where you can be seen at the synagogue hanging out with your religious/intellectual friends. It's low risk and high reward. But God called you out of Nazareth, and that should be sufficient reason for you to leave it behind.

Do you have any interest in the Northeast Bronx? Acts 1:8 gives the blueprint- or, as Pastor Sam termed it, "the programmatic": Jerusalem (your neighborhood), Judea (your region), Samaria (the neighboring region), and the ends of the earth (the world). Jerusalem is first- that is, The Bronx is first.

But it's hard to put The Bronx first when your brain is still in Jamaica, or Harlem, or wherever you were before God called you to the Bronx Bethany church community. And, if we do not as a community redefine ourselves according to God's program (which, by the way, is spelled out in our church's Mission Statement), God might very well repeat history and leave us in the wilderness to die so that the generation behind us is released to put "The Bronx" back into Bronx Bethany.

Forewarned is forearmed.