Starting Well

A good start is such a sealing happiness.  When we roar off the blocks it is clear to us and to all that we are heading for  the stars.

Take the Church where I am currently Pastor, for example.  It was founded (at the height of British Free Church popularity) in 1902.  I have been Pastor or Interim Pastor of several churches including one MegaChurch.  What they all share in common is that they began in tiny rooms with a handful of people.  The number of people covenanting together to form the first Church Membership was usually in the teens or the twenties at most.

Muswell Hill Baptist Church in its leafy London suburb roared off the blocks with 116 members.  One hundred and sixteen!!  And that's not all.  Just two years later the membership had more than doubled.  After six years it had nearly trebled.  Even a cursory statistical projection would mean that at that rate of addition the current membership would be many thousands. (It isn't).  At that rate of multiplication the membership of Muswell Hill Baptist Church would, many years ago, have included every human being on earth!

It was a good start.

Probably no-one thought about it too much in those heady times, but the Bible is very short of encouragement regarding sparkling starts.  It seems almost obsessed with a good ending.

For example we might think of the story of the sower.  Some seed starts badly but much of it well.  All that matters is the ending, the harvest.  On another track, we cannot understand the mission of Jesus Christ by stopping at Christmas or the Sermon on the Mount.  We may go further: the very definition of a Christian is someone who finishes - Be faithful to the point of death and I will give you a crown of life.  You cannot go through a deconversion.  You can stop professing and this is a mark of non-conversion.

Starting well is never the end of the story.