Dear ABCNJ Pastors, Members and Friends:

After preaching at Osbornville Baptist Church this Sunday, my family and I are going to enjoy three weeks of vacation. I hope that you also will enjoy some time of rest and relaxation during this summer!

In anticipation of "closing up shop" I have been trying to get through all of my e-mail. You all know how hard that can be!  But this afternoon, my pastoral mentor and close friend, Rev. Howard Keeley, just wrote to me. We both receive daily devotional messages from Inward/Outward, which today quoted from a sermon by Gordon Cosby, pastor of the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C. I was going to write Howard about it, but he beat me to it and posed the following provocative question: "What if every church in NJ under your supervision were to seriously deal with this challenge by Gordon Cosby? I suspect something might happen under the presence and power of the Holy Spirit."

Well, let's find out! Here's what Cosby said. How does the Holy Spirit speak to you in response?  E-mail me your reflections!

The Central Question

N. Gordon Cosby

The church founded by Jesus is intended to be the embodiment, the incarnation, of who he is so that he might be seen, discovered, known, experienced in the local corporate life of those who have been invaded by him. I emphasize the word local. What would a true expression of Christ’s body look like today, in the neighborhoods where we live, if it really embodied the essence of Jesus lived out corporately?

I think the central question for those of us who are in Christ and are eager to obey his “follow me” is how to be authentic church in the 21st century. How can we learn from our unfaithfulness to God’s covenant in the past? How can we embody, incarnate, become the local expression of Christ’s body now?

Inward/Outward Source: Sermon