Dear Cornerstone Family,
It was a bustling week of business and fellowship at the 2022 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America in Birmingham, AL. To help distill the many items of business from this week, I’ll be pulling together a brief summary of key actions from this year’s GA. In the meantime, I want to thank you for remembering us in your prayers. I must have heard from a dozen or more of you, expressing the fact that you were lifting up the commissioners from our church and the General Assembly as a whole. You have no idea what a comfort it was to know we were being remembered by you in prayer. Thank you!
I want you to be encouraged. God is at work in our denomination. There are many, many encouraging signs of spiritual fruit happening throughout the PCA, and it’s a joy to partner with like-minded pastors, elders, and churches from across our denomination. At the same time, there are a variety of disagreements and differences across the denomination that continue to cause varying degrees of tension and struggle—which is to say, there is room for improvement and reformation. This should come as no surprise! In fact, our Presbyterian forefathers often said, ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda––a phrase meaning, “The church reformed and always reforming.” In other words, until the return of Jesus Christ, the work of the church’s reformation and growth will never be done. Let us keep this in mind as together we labor for Christ’s glory in the church in our generation (Ephesians 3:20-21)
Now, I want to hand the pen to our recently minted Hospitality Coordinator, Mr. Dan Fiedler. Dan has been hard at work on renewing and reorganizing Cornerstone’s hospitality ministry so that we can better be the hands and feet of Jesus Christ to one another and our community. Please listen closely to Dan’s testimony and take to heart his message and invitation to you.
“I spent a year in Japan as a missionary teaching English and building relationships with adult students as a way to share the gospel. The students invited me, a stranger and foreigner, into their homes for meals and were extremely hospitable, though they weren’t Christians. This caused a crisis of faith in my 21-year-old world. I thought being a Christian was being a “good” person. I viewed a missionary’s job as saving the “bad” people and making them “good.” I am grateful to have gone through this experience and to learn in a deeper way of the gospel, and the truth of 1 John 4:19, “We love because he first loved us.” In other words, we are to serve others because we humbly realize that we have been served first.
In the power of the gospel, Cornerstone strives to be a hospitable congregation. We aim to fulfill Paul’s words in Romans 15:7, “Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” As the Hospitality Coordinator, I am charged to help lay foundations for and inculcate a spirit of hospitality at Cornerstone. Toward that end, I’d like to ask you to spend some time recalling the ways that Christ has welcomed you by his grace. Then consider how the welcome of the gospel has been expressed in your life in demonstrable ways. It might be through something as ordinary as a shared meal or an invitation into someone’s home. As we respond to His welcome, we want to make room in our hearts, homes, schedules and budgets for others.
If you are interested in learning more about or potentially partnering with the Hospitality Ministry of Cornerstone, please come share a potluck with other members that are interested in discussing and sharing how God has welcomed us, and how we, as Cornerstone, can welcome others through the Hospitality Ministry for the glory of God. You can sign up for the potluck HERE. I hope to see you there.”
Your Servant
