Hmmm

You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there.

It's one of those quotes that makes you stop and read it again. Obvious. Simple. But chillingly true.

I've had the "benefit" of seeing that happen to a church. My home church, Bethesda Baptist, in Macon Georgia, no longer exists. My wife and her family were there from the beginning. I was on the cradle roll but went away for a few years. We were married there. At that time there were hundreds of people involved in a vibrant and growing church. I was ordained there in 1991. We loved those people - for a long time we were those people.

But it is gone, the victim of people paralyzed in the water. They knew that the culture was changing. They knew that the demographics around them were changing. And they did nothing. When they finally did roll over out of their sleep and realize they probably should do something, they bungled that too.

From my perspective, as someone charged with helping people live out Jesus' call on them and on the church they make up, what happened there was a succession of failures in leadership. First, in the church members who chose the pastors. But ultimately, those pastors failed to lead.

When you are approaching a point that a decision has to be made, you may be the only one that knows it. God shows you that a turn is in order before He does anyone else. That could be because you need to know, or it could be that you are so deep into the vision that your perch is a bit higher up and you can see farther.

But you know it's coming.

It is.

So climb out of the water.