Message From Our New Minister
This is a new season for our family moving from Miami, USA, to the Algarve area of Portugal to serve as your minister at Christ The King. Our last weeks in Miami included non-stop trips back and forth to the local donation centre to give away many of our belongings, packing suitcases, dropping off our shipping items, trips to the vet to get Echo travel-ready, gathering documents, cleaning out our apartment, saying goodbye to friends and family, and more. Moving is not easy or comfortable and, even for the most organized, there are bumps and stressors along the way.
As believers in Christ, we are also called to move, not necessarily across the globe but often across the street to live out our faith in tangible ways by loving our neighbors and sharing our lives and faith with them. This call to put movement and action in our faith is not always easy or comfortable, but is at the very essence of what it means to be the church. Jesus commissioned the disciples after his resurrection with the words: “Therefore, go and make disciples”( Matthew 28:19). Following Christ always involves movement.
Yet, so often, it is easy and tempting to stay in our comfort zone, where our faith becomes stagnant and more of a hobby or an escape than a way of life. Author and leadership expert Fred Smith wrote about the need to move and our resistance to making changes:
“Sometimes human nature tempts us to stay where we’re comfortable. We try to find a plateau, a resting place where we have comfortable stress and adequate finances. Where we have comfortable associations with people, without the intimidation of meeting new people and entering strange situations. Of course, all of us need to plateau for a time. We climb and then plateau for assimilation. But once we’ve assimilated what we’ve learned we climb again. It’s unfortunate when we’ve done our last climb. When we have made our last climb, we are old whether we are forty or eighty.”
However, the early church was known as “The Way.” Notice it was not called the “Safe Comfortable Hiding Place,” rather it was a way of life where believers in Christ met together regularly, prayed, ate together, shared their possessions, provided for those in need and, not surprisingly, they grew in numbers (Acts 2:42-47). For these believers, following Christ was dynamic, it was a whole new way of living. It was not always safe or comfortable, as they faced opposition and persecution. But it was worth it!
From our first visit last March to our first month of living here, Veronica and I have been impressed how the congregation at Christ The King understands that church is a dynamic community, where everyone has a role and is invited to serve. Specifically, we have been encouraged with the church’s commitment to prayer, discipleship and outreach. I have also had conversations with many of you about ideas and hopes you have for CTK to have a bigger impact with the Gospel all throughout the Algarve and beyond. I know there is much work to be done and it is overwhelming, but this increases our faith and trust in God to do things that are bigger than us and prevents us from plateauing for long. We have many more climbs ahead of us and my family is excited to climb with you to see what God will do next in and through us here with Christ The King!
Many Blessings!
Rev Steve Chisholm