How Do You Feel About Your Congregation?

William Martin asks: How do you feel about your congregation deep within your heart?  And then he adds: That is what they will become.

So how do I feel about this congregation deep within my heart? 

How should we answer this question?  With statistics?  With measurements of how many are here, how often, and how much they give financially?  With lists of projects and achievements?  With bulleted points of success and accomplishment?  No.  Those are all very good things, for which I’m grateful.  But they will not do.

I feel like this congregation is a young woman who does not yet know how beautiful she is becoming.  She cannot quite imagine yet that her life will glow with a beauty not available to you when you’re 13 and in braces.  

She does not really have to “work” to make this beauty appear.  It will come because there is something growing, coming to form, out of the depths of her own life.  This surfacing beauty is natural to her in one sense, but also a kind of radical gift, from somewhere else completely.