Progressive Expectancy

We have an amazing church! This weekend in Kings was our Miracle Cash Offering and Pledge Sunday toward our Campus development. Over $2.4 million was pledged for the coming twelve months, which will allow us to destroy our current debt to open the door to our future dreams.

Kings also gave a cash offering of about $100K yesterday toward our building fund. This is brilliant, but particularly amazing when you consider that just last weekend we gave almost $25K to the work of Watoto, for the care of orphans and raising of leaders in Uganda. A few weeks before that we gave our Sunday AM offering of $19K toward aid relief in Burma and a few weeks before that gave a spontaneous $100K toward our building development.

Many churches experience a slump in financial support toward their building programs once they have moved into new facilites, as paying off a debt can be far less compelling than possessing new facilities. However we have received our biggest pledge (up $600K on previous best), one year into our new facility, the Champions Centre.

I think that this unusual generosity could be attributed to two things:

Firstly, the fact that our church gave to the poor. Proverbs 28:27 states, 'He who gives to the poor will not lack...' Few Senior Pastors would have faith enough to give almost $45K out of their offerings in the weeks leading up to a building pledge. God gathers possessions for him who will pity the poor (Proverbs 28:8).

Secondly, the power of progressive expectancy. From the moment Kings moved into the Champions Centre we have known that it is only stage one of our campus development. The progressive vision is clear and compelling. We know that we have not yet 'made it' and there is still much to do; this is the greatest way to live.

The weekend's events reminded me of this from J. John's E-letter on June 19th:

About 350 years ago a shipload of travellers landed on the north east coast of America. The first year they established the site for a town. The next year they elected a town government. The third year the town government planned to build a road five miles westward into the wilderness.

In the fourth year the people tried to impeach their town government because they thought it was a waste of public funds to build a road five miles westward into a wilderness. After all, they thought, who needed to go there anyway?

These were people who had the vision to see 3,000 miles across an ocean and overcome great hardships to get there, who nevertheless couldn’t see the point in venturing five miles further out of town, a few years later. They had lost their pioneering vision. With a clear vision of what we can become in Christ, no ocean of difficulty is too great. Without it, we rarely move beyond our current boundaries.

A missionary society wrote to pioneer missionary David Livingstone and asked, "Have you found a good road to where you are? If so, we want to know how to send other men to join you." David Livingstone wrote back: "If you have men who will come only if they know there is a good road, I don’t want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all."

When Julius Caesar landed on the shores of Britain with his Roman legions, he took a bold and decisive step to ensure the success of his military venture. Ordering his men to march to the edge of the cliffs of Dover, he commanded them to look down at the water below. To their amazement, they saw every ship in which they had crossed the channel engulfed in flames. Caesar had deliberately cut off any possibility of retreat. Now that his soldiers were unable to return to the continent, there was nothing left for them to do but advance and conquer. And that’s exactly what they did...

Let’s be expectant, adventurous and let’s embrace the motto of another great missionary William Carey: “Expect great things from God, attempt great things for God."

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