Acts 4:1-31

Toward the end of the last school year, I hatched a master plan to teach our children how to cook entire meals from start to finish. They started by planning their respective meals together so we weren’t eating pancakes three days in a row. Then they made a list of ingredients and helped shop their lists, followed by cooking, serving, and cleaning up. Voila! Life skills learned! 

One week into my master plan, our dishwasher broke, and long story short: it was six weeks before a new one was delivered and installed. Whomp, whomp!

The lack of a dishwasher didn’t impede our cooking, but it did prove to be an interruption. Kids are messy chefs, and without a dishwasher to help us all out in the clean up department, we had to go boldly into the uncharted territory of one hundred percent hand-washed dishes. The necessity of doing this task by hand forced a new appreciation for the preparation of their meals from each child. In the end, it meant double the life skills learned!

Acts 4 finds Peter and John in the middle of doing the best of work: preaching, healing, spreading the Good News of God’s love. Then they were arrested, which more than qualifies as an interruption! When they were released, Paul and John went back to the believers, they prayed, and they got back to the business of doing God’s work with more boldness than before.

Chatham Community Church was doing great work prior to 2020; then Covid provided a major interruption. We’ve spent the spring and summer regrouping (our staff team has worked tirelessly throughout this season to bring us back together in thoughtful ways), regathering (raise your hand if you attended a service under the big tent at Chatham Mills!), and praying-- all as a means of preparing to go forth into Chatham county with the same mission as before, but with more boldness. There is still much good to be done in our community and the world, and it’s our hope to accomplish much good together!

Readers, it’s so good to be back in your inboxes! How are you adapting during this season of regathering? Is there an area of service you were involved in pre-Covid that you’d like to get plugged back into now? How can we as a church “connect people to God, connect people to each other, and engage our world for good” with more boldness?