Tag Archives: Church Renewal

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 15: What We Leave on the Shore

1 Comment

Read Luke 5:1–11

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“If you love your father or mother more than you love me, you are not worthy of being mine; or if you love your son or daughter more than me, you are not worthy of being mine. If you refuse to take up your cross and follow me, you are not worthy of being mine. If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it.” (Matthew 10:37–39 NLT)

A weathered wooden fishing boat rests along a sandy shoreline at sunrise. Nets overflow with a large catch of silver fish in the foreground while three disciples walk away along the water behind Jesus. The abundant catch remains on the shore as the figures move toward the bright horizon.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “What We Leave on the Shore” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

It is funny how easily a single chapter of someone’s life can come to define the whole story.

We meet someone after they have already become who we know them to be, and it can be difficult to imagine them as anything else. The teacher was once a student. The grandparent was once somebody’s child. Even the people closest to us had whole lives unfolding before we ever entered the picture.

Scripture can have the same effect on us.

We know Peter as Peter, the disciple and apostle. James and John become the Sons of Thunder. Matthew becomes the Gospel writer. Thomas becomes the doubter.

But none of them began there.

Before there were disciples, there were fishermen and tax collectors, brothers and sons, husbands and friends. There were families, livelihoods, obligations, loyalties, disappointments, expectations, and histories.

Every disciple had a before. And then Jesus called.

Peter did not meet Jesus while waiting for his real life to begin. He already had one. He had a wife, a mother-in-law Jesus had recently healed, a brother named Andrew, fishing partners, boats, nets, responsibilities, successes, and failures. James and John had their father Zebedee and a family business.

And Peter wasn’t unusual.

Matthew had his tax booth and everything that came with being a tax collector. Simon carried the designation “the Zealot.” Thomas and Bartholomew had stories mostly lost to us. Even Judas Iscariot had a life before his name became forever associated with betrayal.

Every one of them came to Jesus carrying a history.

That is what makes Luke’s final sentence so striking. After the miraculous catch, after the nets begin tearing and the boats nearly sink beneath more fish than these fishermen could have imagined, Luke tells us that they brought the boats to shore, left everything, and followed Jesus.

Everything. Not simply the fish.

Peter leaves the nets and boat, but those belonged to a whole life: a wife, family, livelihood, partners, and responsibilities. James and John were not merely walking away from equipment. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Zebedee is right there when they leave the family business behind.

The call of Jesus reaches into whole lives.

That does not mean Peter suddenly ceases to be a husband. In fact, Paul later refers to Peter’s right to take his wife along with him in ministry. James and John do not stop being Zebedee’s sons. Andrew does not stop being Peter’s brother. Following Jesus does not erase the people we love or make our histories meaningless.

But it does reorder them.

Jesus makes that painfully clear when he tells his followers that anyone who loves father or mother, son or daughter more than him is not worthy of him. Jesus reaches toward some of our deepest and most legitimate attachments and says that even these cannot have the final claim upon where Christ may lead us.

That is what the disciples leave on the shore: the assumption that the life they already understand gets to determine the boundaries of the life Christ is calling them into.

And sometimes that means leaving something painful. But sometimes it means leaving something good.

Peter has just experienced the greatest professional success of his life. By every ordinary measure, this is the moment to stay, expand the business, and build a future around what just happened.

Instead, Peter walks away from the fish.

The miracle is not the destination. It is the threshold.

The miracle revealed something about Jesus and called Peter somewhere he had never been.

Yet Peter does not leave everything about fishing behind. Jesus tells him that from now on he will be fishing for people.

The fisherman comes with him.

Peter’s history is not erased. It is transformed.

That may be one of the hardest parts of following Christ. We understand leaving behind habits, prejudices, fears, sins, and ways of living that destroy us.

But what about the things that were good?

A career that mattered. A relationship that shaped us. A role we once filled. A place where we belonged. A tradition that carried us. A ministry through which God genuinely worked.

Good things can still become anchors when we insist they must remain forever.

Churches struggle with this too. Something worked once, so we assume faithfulness means preserving it. God met us through a particular ministry, building, tradition, structure, or season, so we begin protecting the place where God moved rather than watching for where God is moving.

Peter could have built a shrine around those fish. Instead, he followed Jesus.

Following Christ does not require having no past. It requires refusing to let the past determine where Christ may lead us next.

So perhaps the deeper question is this: What still has such a claim on me that I would refuse to follow Christ without it?

The shore will look different for each of us. But eventually, every disciple has to decide what gets the final word: the life we already know, or the Christ who says, Follow me.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Following Christ does not erase our past, but it does reorder what gets the final claim on our future.

PRAYER
Jesus, thank you for all that has shaped my life. Give me wisdom to know what to carry, courage to release what I cannot keep, and trust to follow wherever you lead. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 9: Can You See It?

Leave a comment

Read Isaiah 43:18–19

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“And the one sitting on the throne said, ‘Look, I am making everything new!’ And then he said to me, ‘Write this down, for what I tell you is trustworthy and true.’” (Revelation 21:5 NLT)

Two groundhogs emerge from their burrow at dawn in a Pennsylvania landscape. Bare trees and lingering frost surround them, while tiny green shoots and warm sunlight quietly reveal that spring has already begun.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Can You See It?” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

During the last couple of years I lived in Pennsylvania, I knew spring had arrived when the groundhogs began appearing. First, I would see Mama and Papa Groundhog venturing out again. Then, later in the spring, their pups would emerge and begin exploring the world around them.

And no—they never appeared on Groundhog Day.

They followed no human calendar and waited for no ceremonial announcement. By the time I saw them, the changing season was already underway. Life had been stirring beneath the ground before any groundhog—or pastor—appeared above it.

That is the tension within God’s question through Isaiah: “I have already begun! Do you not see it?” God is not merely promising that something new will happen eventually. God declares that the new thing is already emerging, even while the wilderness still looks like a wilderness.

These words were not written by the eighth-century prophet Isaiah himself. They come from a later prophetic voice continuing in Isaiah’s tradition, speaking to the people of Judah during the Babylonian exile. Jerusalem had fallen, the Temple had been destroyed, and the people were living far from home under foreign rule. They needed more than a comforting memory of what God had once done; they needed to recognize what God was beginning to do among them now.

The exiles knew what God had done before. Their ancestors had been enslaved in Egypt, trapped between Pharaoh’s army and the sea, with no visible road to freedom. Then God divided the waters and made a way where no way appeared possible. The Exodus became the defining testimony of Israel’s deliverance—a sacred memory passed from one generation to the next.

Yet Isaiah declares, “But forget all that—it is nothing compared to what I am going to do.” God is not commanding the people to erase their history or diminish what God had done. In fact, the verses immediately preceding this passage deliberately invoke the Exodus. The past still testifies to God’s faithful character.

The warning concerns what happens when sacred memory becomes a boundary around what God may do next.

Before, God made a road through the sea. Now, God promises a road through the wilderness. Before, God divided the waters. Now, God promises to bring water into a wasteland. The landscape changes. The method changes. God’s faithfulness remains.

The people knew how to recognize the God who made a road through the sea. The question was whether they could recognize that same God making a road through unfamiliar terrain.

God declares, “I have already begun! Do you not see it?”

That question suggests something unsettling: God’s new work may already be emerging while God’s people remain unable—or unwilling—to perceive it. They may be staring toward the sea, waiting for familiar waters to divide, while life is already breaking through somewhere else.

This does not mean that everything new comes from God. Newness alone is not evidence of holiness. Not every innovation is faithful, every disruption is deliverance, or every promise of change is life-giving. Institutions can adopt new language, introduce new programs, and advertise new visions without confronting injustice, relinquishing control, or changing anything substantive.

God’s new work must be discerned according to God’s revealed character. Does it produce the fruit of the Spirit? Does it cultivate love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Does it tell the truth, practice mercy, pursue justice, extend hospitality, loosen bonds, and restore life?

Discernment protects us from two equal dangers: worshiping novelty simply because it is new and rejecting God’s work simply because it is unfamiliar.

The second danger can be particularly difficult for churches and institutions to recognize. We may pray passionately for renewal while quietly prescribing what renewal must look like. It must use our familiar language, preserve our established structures, affirm our existing authority, and resemble a previous season when God’s presence seemed especially clear.

A testimony can become a template. A former movement can become a monument. Nostalgia can disguise itself as faithfulness.

Then, when new life begins emerging through unfamiliar people, overlooked communities, or places we had dismissed as barren, we may resist the very renewal for which we prayed. We may conclude that God is absent because God is not working through the people, practices, and patterns we expected.

The same temptation exists within us personally. We can become attached to the way God once met us, the work through which we once served, what once gave our lives meaning, or the person we once believed we had to be. Those memories may remain sacred, but they do not have to dictate our future. Honoring who we have been does not require us to remain there.

Sometimes the new thing God is revealing is not an opportunity appearing outside us, but a truer life already emerging within us. It may begin quietly—small enough to overlook, unfamiliar enough to mistrust, and alive before anyone else recognizes or approves it.

The past testifies that God makes ways where none appear possible. Faith trusts that God is not restricted to making the same way twice. Honestly, I praise Jesus for that!

Friends, the new thing may already be emerging.

Can you see it?

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
God’s faithfulness does not require God to repeat the past.

PRAYER
Faithful God, free us from confusing familiarity with faithfulness. Teach us to honor what you have done without restricting what you may do next. Give us wisdom to discern your character, courage to recognize your new work, and faith to follow the road you are creating. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

SACRED SIGNS OF SUBVERSION, Part 24: Phoenix

Leave a comment

Read 1 Corinthians 3:10–15

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Unless the Lord builds a house, the work of the builders is wasted. Unless the Lord protects a city, guarding it with sentries will do no good.” (Psalm 127:1 NLT)

Symbols carry memory and meaning far beyond words. The Church has always leaned on them—sometimes hidden in plain sight, sometimes dismissed or distorted. Yet the most powerful symbols are those that subvert the world’s expectations and draw us back to the radical heart of the Gospel. In this series, we look closely at the sacred signs that unsettle, challenge, and ultimately call us deeper into Christ.

A singed phoenix stands in the ashes before the burned ruins of a stone church at dawn, wings partially extended as smoke lingers in the early light.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “SACRED SIGNS OF SUBVERSION, Part 24: Phoenix” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Part 24: Phoenix. The phoenix is one of those symbols that feels immediately familiar, even comforting. A creature consumed by fire, only to rise again from its own ashes. For many, it has become shorthand for hope after devastation, resilience after loss, life after death. And that reading is not wrong. Fire can purify. Ashes can nourish new growth. God does bring life out of ruin.

But before we go any further, the truth must be named plainly: the phoenix is not originally a Christian symbol. It does not emerge from Scripture. It was not born from the Church. It comes from ancient pagan imagination—Egyptian and Greco-Roman worlds wrestling with death, renewal, and the longing for immortality. Christianity did not invent the phoenix. It recognized it. And that recognition itself is deeply revealing.

The early Church was not threatened by truth found outside its walls. When Christians adopted the phoenix, they were not diluting the Gospel; they were confessing something bolder—that resurrection is not a fragile idea, and that echoes of God’s truth appear long before we name them. The phoenix was never worshiped. It was re-read. Not as proof of resurrection, but as a witness to humanity’s deep intuition that death does not have the final word.

And yet, even here, the symbol refuses to remain tame.

The phoenix does not simply rise after the fire. It rises because something has been burned beyond recovery. The fire is not an unfortunate prelude to resurrection; it is the necessary judgment that makes resurrection possible. Something real is lost. Something is not restored. Something does not come back.

This is where the symbol begins to unsettle us.

Paul’s words to the church in Corinth refuse the comforting illusion that everything we build deserves to last. The fire will show if a person’s work has any value. Not intentions. Not sincerity. Not effort. What we built. Fire does not negotiate. It reveals. It does not ask whether the structure was beloved or familiar or useful once. It simply tells the truth.

Some work survives the fire. Some work does not. And Paul is unflinching: even when a person is saved, what they have built may be reduced to ash.

This is devastating language—not because it threatens salvation, but because it threatens legacy. It confronts the assumption that faithfulness and survival are the same thing. It names the possibility that entire systems, identities, and institutions may burn—not because God is cruel, but because God is honest.

The phoenix, read through this lens, is not a promise that everything will return in a shinier form. It is a confession that not everything should.

This is where the symbol presses hardest on the Church.

We are adept at resurrection talk that avoids death. We speak of renewal while quietly preserving what no longer gives life. We celebrate transformation while protecting the structures that taught us how to survive but not how to love. We cling to what once worked and call it wisdom. We guard the city with sentries, convinced that vigilance will save what faith no longer sustains.

But Scripture is mercilessly clear: unless the Lord builds the house, the work of the builders is wasted. Fire does not honor nostalgia. It does not reward endurance for its own sake. It does not coddle complacency. It does not spare what has outlived its truth.

First, it must be said plainly: the fire burns institutions. Traditions. Forms of church that learned how to persist but forgot how to repent. The phoenix does not resurrect these unchanged. It consumes them. What rises is not the old thing restored, but something else entirely—or sometimes, nothing at all.

Next, the fire is also intimate. It burns the false self we constructed to survive inside broken systems—the version of ourselves that learned when to stay quiet, when to comply, when to call compromise maturity. Resurrection here is not triumphant. It is costly. It requires letting go of who we thought we were in order to become who we can no longer avoid being.

And then there is the most unsettling truth the phoenix carries: fire does not guarantee rebirth. The myth tempts us to assume that ashes always lead somewhere hopeful. Scripture is more restrained. Fire reveals what is of God—and what is not. What is of God endures, even if only as a remnant. What is not… ends.

That is not despair. It is mercy.

Because a resurrection that refuses to let certain things die is not resurrection at all. It is preservation. And preservation is often the enemy of life.

The phoenix does not promise that everything will rise. It promises that what must die will not be spared. And in that promise—terrifying as it is—there is freedom. Freedom from carrying what was never meant to last. Freedom from confusing survival with faithfulness. Freedom to trust that God’s work does not depend on our constructions, our defenses, or our fear of loss.

Fire comes. Ashes remain. And whatever rises does so only because it can finally live truthfully.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Fire does not destroy what is faithful—it reveals what was never meant to last.

PRAYER
God of truth and mercy, meet us in the fire we fear. Give us the courage to release what no longer carries Your life, even when it once did. Burn away what is false, wasted, or built from fear, and teach us to trust You with what remains. Where something must end, grant us grace. Where something rises, grant us humility. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

Sacred Signs of Subversion, part 22: Butterfly

Leave a comment

Read John 12:20–26

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” (2 Corinthians 5:17 NLT)

Symbols carry memory and meaning far beyond words. The Church has always leaned on them—sometimes hidden in plain sight, sometimes dismissed or distorted. Yet the most powerful symbols are those that subvert the world’s expectations and draw us back to the radical heart of the Gospel. In this series, we’ll look closer at the sacred signs that shock, unsettle, and ultimately call us deeper into Christ.

A fog-filled old cemetery at dawn with weathered stone crosses and gravestones, where vibrant butterflies rest and take flight, symbolizing transformation, resurrection, and new life emerging from places of death.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “SACRED SIGNS OF SUBVERSION, Part 22: Butterfly” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Part 22: Butterfly. The butterfly has long been treated as one of Christianity’s safest symbols. It appears on Easter banners and children’s curricula, a tidy illustration of resurrection and hope. Caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly—death, burial, new life. Simple. Beautiful. Inoffensive. But that simplicity hides a far more unsettling truth, because real transformation is not gentle, and resurrection is not safe.

Jesus does not speak about new life as a painless upgrade. In John 12, when people finally come seeking Him, Jesus does not offer reassurance or clarity. Instead, He speaks of death. “Unless a kernel of wheat falls into the soil and dies, it remains alone.” This is not metaphor for improvement; it is a declaration of loss. The seed does not become more itself. It is broken open. Its previous form does not survive the process. And only through that loss does fruit emerge.

The butterfly embodies this same scandal. The caterpillar lives longer. It eats. It survives. It moves close to the ground, protected by familiarity and repetition. The caterpillar’s life is about continuation. But the butterfly’s life, once it emerges, is often brief—sometimes only days or weeks. And yet in that short span, the butterfly does what the caterpillar never could. It flies. It crosses boundaries. It pollinates. It participates in the flourishing of the world beyond itself. Its life is not measured by duration, but by vocation.

This is where the symbol becomes subversive. We instinctively assume that faithfulness means preservation. We equate blessing with longevity. We celebrate survival while quietly fearing transformation. But Jesus never promises more time. He promises fruit. He never guarantees safety. He invites participation. Resurrection is not a reward for endurance; it is a call into costly becoming.

The chrysalis is not a comfortable place. Inside it, the caterpillar’s body literally dissolves. What emerges is not a repaired version of what existed before, but something entirely new. This is why transformation feels like death. Because it is. Not annihilation, but surrender. Not punishment, but passage. And many communities—faithful, sincere, well-meaning—decide that remaining what they are feels safer than entering that in-between space where nothing looks recognizable anymore.

So they linger. They grow smaller rather than different. They preserve form rather than pursue calling. Not out of malice, but out of fear. And the butterfly does not condemn this choice—but it does expose it. It stands as a quiet witness against the belief that staying alive is the same thing as living faithfully.

Jesus names this cost plainly. “Those who love their life in this world will lose it.” The Gospel is not interested in self-preservation. It is interested in self-giving. The promise is not that nothing will be lost, but that what is lost will not be wasted. The seed dies, and the field flourishes. The caterpillar dissolves, and the world blooms.

The butterfly refuses to let the Church confuse resurrection with comfort. It reminds us that becoming may shorten what we hoped to protect, but it expands what we were created to give. Faithfulness is not clinging to what was. Faithfulness is trusting God enough to let form fall away so fruit can come.

In this way, the butterfly becomes a sacred sign of subversion. It dismantles the myth that holiness is safe, that transformation is gentle, or that resurrection leaves everything intact. It tells the harder Gospel truth: life is found not in lingering, but in letting go.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Resurrection is not about lasting longer—it is about becoming truer.

PRAYER
Transforming God, we confess how often we choose survival over surrender and familiarity over faith. Give us courage to enter the chrysalis when You call us there. Loosen our grip on what we are afraid to lose, and draw us into the life You are still bringing forth. Make us willing to become, even when becoming costs us everything. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).