Evidences of Grace #1

As I shared at the devotional for our annual meeting, the first evidence of grace that I have seen is that over the past two years, our church family has seen at least 5 professions of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. I define a conversion as a genuine understanding of what it means to be a sinner and a genuine understanding of what it means to need a Saviour who not only forgives sinners of sin, but provides for them new hearts that they serve Jesus and His mission with (Jeremiah 31:33,34 & Matthew 28:19,20) I am not by nature a pessimist and reading Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibby reminded me that the Christian horizon in Canada is not as bad as one might think (read his short article here).  However, statistically, most churches that are over 25 years old have a very difficult time growing via new conversions. Statistics Canada says that while Protestant Christianity is growing, it is not quite keeping up with the population growth, and thereby losing ground slowly. This means that some, if not many churches will eventually die without conversion growth. All of this to say, 5 genuine conversions in the past year is evidence that God works through His Word, He has been answering our prayers, and it is possible for churches that are almost 50 years old to experience new believers who freshly understand and experience the power of the gospel. This has been a great encouragement to me and is one of the evidences of the grace of Jesus in our church family in 2008.