Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day.
- Acts 2:41

With growth comes challenge.

Many of the three thousand people who joined the church on that Pentecost day had journeyed to Jerusalem from far away, pilgrims for a religious / cultural festival. They didn’t have homes or jobs in Jerusalem. They were planning to return to their home cities after the festival.

But there was a problem.

The only Christian community in the world at this time was in Jerusalem. Everyone who knew Jesus and was filled with God’s Spirit … they were in Jerusalem. The wisdom and mentoring these people would need to grow in their faith … all of it was in Jerusalem. To leave Jerusalem would be to leave it all behind.

They didn’t want their encounter with God to become a one-off experience, a vacation story. They wanted to lean into their relationship with God, to grow deeper in their faith, to connect with other believers. They wanted to stay.

These people would need to find homes and jobs in this foreign place. They would need to find food and to navigate unfamiliar roads. They would need help.

With growth comes challenge.

This maxim holds true in every community and in every life. As your family grows, you’ll need to make adjustments to the way you do things. As your company grows, old traditions will need to go away and new ones will need to form. As you grow in your faith, new questions will reveal themselves to you. Challenges like these are essential to growth.

How will you respond to the challenges that growth presents you? What does it look like for you to remain faithful even as you make adjustments? How is God calling forth from you new creativity to meet new challenges?