25 years! What an amazing blessing that by God’s grace Wawasee Bible will have been doing gospel ministry for 25 years this month! 25 years ago today on Sunday, September 7, 1986 Wawasee Bible held our first worship service at Milford Middle School. We’re planning to take the entire fall to celebrate 25 years of God’s faithfulness to us.

Last week I was leaving Goshen and passed First Baptist Church. On their sign was an invitation to join them for their 175th birthday—175 years! That’s rare for a local church to have existed for that long. Often, over time, a church will thrive at best for a handful of generations, then fade away.

In the 1990s an average of 3,200 churches closed their doors every year in America. Today that number is at least 4,000 per year (and some estimates say up to 7,000 per year).

This happens for any number of reasons. For churches in small towns, sometimes the town simply fades away. Sin is also a huge contributor to church-closings, be it the sin of an influential leader or sinful disunity among the people of the church. Sometimes churches stray from preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, and God closes their doors.

But many churches close even while being faithful to the gospel. Usually this is because they’ve been unwilling to contextualize the gospel. — Note: I didn’t say they failed to change the gospel (Jesus will have some fierce words for anyone who does that), but to contextualize it —to put it into context for their contemporary culture.

Think about First Baptist… Our first service was in 1986, theirs was in 1836! Certainly the culture of our community 175 years ago would have been radically different than it is today. The methods used to reach people with the gospel of Jesus Christ in 1836 probably wouldn’t be that effective in 2011. The common language would be different, the music would be different, style of dress would be different—and clearly the ways we communicate with each other are radically different!

Imagine if at First Baptist they decided in 1836 to never change, and just keep doing the exact same things forever… I can almost guarantee you that they would not be around today!

But you don’t have to go back 175 years to see changes in culture. Just go back 5 or 10 years and you’ll see how things have changed. With the advent of instant communication, culture changes at a radically faster pace than ever before—and the pace continues to pick up!

By God’s grace we’ve seen a lot of changes happen over the years at Wawasee Bible, and by God’s grace we’ll continue to see change. Change in our lives to become more like Jesus, and change in our church to better reach more and more people with the gospel.

But one thing will NEVER change… By God’s grace we will never cease to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. We will never water down the call for men and women to repent of their sin, and turn to Jesus. We will never cease to worship Jesus and strive to make him first in all things. The gospel preached on September 7, 1986 is the same one we proclaim today. It’s the same proclaimed by First Baptist in 1836, the same proclaimed by the reformers hundreds of years before that, and the same proclaimed by Jesus himself.

My prayer for our church lately is that 25 years is only the beginning. I’ve found myself praying that by God’s grace we might become a 100-year church. Maybe even a 200-year church. My dream is that in the next 5-10 years we would even begin planting other churches. That many people would come to know Jesus Christ. That by his grace we continue changing as individuals and as a church, so that in everything, JESUS would be first!

You Are Loved!

Pastor Josh