Asking New Questions: What is God Up To?

Written by Jonathan Bowell

Some people hate when a song gets stuck in their head. I rather enjoy it. I’ll sing it over and over again, trying my layman’s best for a harmony until my throat aches or my wife yells at me to leave her alone. What good are killer harmonies unless someone else hears them? Sticky songs become a sort of soundtrack for my day, as if I was a character in a movie.

I feel the same way about Bible verses. Sometimes a verse will get stuck in my head, or perhaps my heart, and give shape to everything else I think about. It happened recently with Psalm 111, which says in verses 2-4:

“Great are the works of the Lord,
    studied by all who delight in them.
Full of splendor and majesty is his work,
    And his righteousness endures forever.
He has caused his wondrous works to be remembered;
    The Lord is gracious and merciful.”

The Psalmist states that those who delight in God study his works. That is, when they read the Bible they don’t ask first and foremost, “What does this passage contribute to my broader theological framework?” or, “What does this passage tell me about how I am supposed to live?”  Rather, they ask, “What is God up to?”  And not only is that a helpful question to ask when reading scripture, but also when reading our lives. 

Paul Tripp says, “Human beings do not live based on the facts but based on their interpretation of the facts. You don’t actually respond to what’s going on around you, you respond to the sense you have made of what is going on around you – always carrying around an interpretative grid to make sense of your life.” What if our interpretative grid for this season of coronavirus and quarantine was the simple question asked with hopeful curiosity: “What is God up to?” Not because we think we can understand every detail of God’s plan or because we want to explain away our pain, but because God is working his grace into our lives and he wants us to sense it and sync up with it. That is what Psalm 111 is all about. This sort of “interpretative grid” allows us to look at churned up soil and, instead of seeing a destroyed earth, see the perfect conditions for growth beneath the surface. 

Allow me to apply this to our church plant. Just a few months ago, our church plant was beginning to gain momentum. We had just launched our third community group, welcomed in our second wave of new members, and were two weeks away from moving our Sunday gathering into a local elementary school when the chaos broke loose. It has taken time, but we have begun to ask, with hopeful curiosity, “What is God up to?” As a result, our vision is coming into focus on the three ways He is cultivating growth in our church.  

1.  A renewed focus on prayer. Through both an increase in needs and an increase in time, God is cultivating a spirit of prayer in our body. We may have less face-to-face conversations with our brothers and sisters and the people we are seeking to reach, but we can now have more face-to-face conversation with God on their behalf. He is making us into a truly praying church--something that, if it depended on my leadership, would not have happened otherwise.  

2.  A renewed appreciation for our friendships. It is easy in a church planting context to grow tired of the same old people you see every week and become burdened by all the work that goes into hosting a Sunday gathering.  But this season of physical distance is reminding us of the great blessing of being together, and our excitement is growing to create stronger rhythms of "life together". In fact, God is already strengthening our bonds through more prayer for one another and our weekly connection via social media. 

3.  A renewed commitment to micro-mission.  By "micro-mission" I mean those small acts of love for the people closest to us. Dreaming about how to bring Gospel transformation to the city is good, but it's important we remember it always starts "close to home.” As our centers of gravity have shifted, our people are intentionally reaching out to, serving, and building stronger relationships with neighbors, close friends, and their immediate family members. God is giving us opportunities to move towards those we normally take for granted. My intent in sharing these examples with you is not to promote cheap positive thinking. The pain is real and if we move too quickly past it we will miss the God who is at work in the midst of it. But there is more going on than meets the eye at first glance. God is up to something beneath the surface. “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.” May the lyrics of Psalm 111 be to you an interpretative magnifying glass through which you investigate your suffering for signs of grace. May they be a louder and stickier soundtrack than your doubts and fears. 

Update from South City: Trusting God in difficult times

Written by Jonathan Bowell

In Greek mythology there was once a giant named Antaeus, the son of the sea god Poseidon and the earth goddess Gaea. Not surprisingly, Antaeus was a powerful warrior--but not in the way you might expect. His source of strength came from his mother, the earth, so that every time he was thrown to the ground he would rise stronger than before. The more times he landed on his back, the more powerful he became. 

If your news feeds, Facebook walls, and conversations with friends are anything like mine, you are inundated with bad news. Not that they are telling you something you didn’t already know. Many of you are facing the prospect of job loss, social isolation, sickness, and even death. On the surface, the bad news abounds. But in God’s world, which is precisely where we are, he is always up to something. We have a Father who rules over all things and uses the waves of suffering that slam against our life to wash us upon the shore of his grace. Because His Spirit lives within us, we have a “super power” similar to that of Antaeus whereby suffering is repurposed into strength.

South City Church has recently experienced this firsthand through open doors at Blackwell Elementary School in South Richmond. We originally planned to move our Sunday gathering to Blackwell last weekend, but, because of the school shutdown, a different kind of service began, not on Sundays but throughout the week as we participated in their food distribution program for families who rely on the school for daily meals. It has only been five days, but I have built meaningful relationships with the kitchen staff, the volunteers, and the families who came to receive food each day. I became fast friends with Janice, Mark, Chefonya, John, Yvette and others. We prayed each morning with the kitchen staff to start the day and were able to pray with 62 people from the community throughout the week!  

Many church plants spend years--even decades--building enough trust to gain passport into their community. For us it happened in a matter of days, so much so that Yvette invited me into her pain from losing her cousin this past week and asked if I would be willing to officiate a small memorial service for her family. You can’t make this stuff up but God makes it happen because he loves Yvette, and the families of Blackwell, and South City Church, and me, and you.  

Talk to me two weeks ago and you would have heard a torrent of fear, doubt, and complaining. Something like, “How are you supposed to plant a church during a time like this!?” or, “We built all this momentum only to slam into a wall!” or, my personal favorite, “We’re not gonna make it.” But God is reminding me that suffering is not an insurmountable obstacle but an instrumental opportunity. COVID-19 is not a constraint--it is a catalyst.

Could it be that the obstacles you fear are actually opportunities? Perhaps God will open doors for your church to serve the needs of the elderly in your community. Perhaps He will give you that chance you’ve been looking for to share the hope of Christ with your neighbor down the street who is about to get laid off from their job. Perhaps He will use your financial hardship, loneliness and even sickness to pull you closer to himself to prepare you for a new season of ministry he’s about to launch you into.

The day will come when we all look back at this pandemic and say along with Paul that it "has actually served to advance the Gospel” (Phil. 1:12), but the sooner we recognize it, the sooner we can regain what the church has always been marked by: our compassion and our courage. The Coronavirus will throw many of us down, but by God’s grace we will rise from our knees stronger than before.