It’s Been a Watershed year
When we envisioned the name, Watershed Collective, we initially pictured a geographic area of land that allows water runoff to flow toward streams, rivers, and eventually the ocean. We wanted our gatherings to be spaces where all who joined us would be encouraged to discover their role in God’s Kingdom. Our hope is to empower people who long to follow Jesus to join the flow of God’s Spirit-led intention for their lives, even if that means equipping and sending them on from the Watershed to other places and people to serve. If we want to be true to our mission to love God and people being disciples who make disciples, it involves holding onto everyone and everything God gives us with open hands because the goal is to remain in a posture of obedience that seeks His Kingdom first rather than our own.
There is another intriguing meaning to the term, Watershed. A watershed moment is a turning point that occurs in the life of a person, community, nation, the world, that changes the course of history in a dramatic way. It can be likened to the slight shift in snow that leads to an overwhelming avalanche. The intervention of Jesus in the life of Paul in Acts 9 was a watershed moment, not just in the life of Paul, but in the lives of the early believers, and it was an event that catalyzed the spread of the Gospel to the rest of the world. We believe the year 2020 has been a watershed year with all that has occurred to altar the flow of our lives. We also believe that how we choose to respond in this moment will have profound implications for the future of the church in America.
We have a significant opportunity before us to choose fear or faith, and, no, we’re not referring to mask mandates or COVID-19 shutdowns. What if in this time of upheaval, God is inviting us to deepen our faith in Him by trusting Him with the unknown? When COVID first hit our area, and we went into lockdown, like everyone else, we had to move online, in our case, Zoom. We lost touch with a few people that had been joining us for our Sunday evening interactive gatherings, and our already small faith family shrunk significantly. One day as I, Shaunna, was praying, I began to feel discouraged about the setbacks we were experiencing. It was in this moment that God reminded me to cherish the remnant of faithful followers, to focus on what He had given us rather than what we had lost. After all, David loves to remind me that we want to value quality over quantity. This was an important shift in our mindset that has sustained us in the midst of the chaos that is 2020. It was a Watershed change in our perspective.
For so long, the American Church has been good at growing and doing what we do through grit, determination, and ingenuity. It might even be said that we have forgotten our need for God and that in order for transformation, renewal, and revival to occur, we need the power of the Holy Spirit at work in us. At the beginning of the pandemic, I met with many pastors, and the conversation almost always centered on what we needed to do in order to prepare for the uncertainty ahead. Ideas were floated about how to ensure the survival of the church, and by church, most meant the many buildings in which various congregations meet, and it began to burden me that perhaps we were approaching the situation the wrong way. This is not to say we don’t value what we have come to think of in our culture as traditional church, but to ask, “What if our focus is on the wrong prize?”
What if instead of new, innovative, great ideas, we need the presence of God? I realize most of us are aware that we need God’s Spirit to move, but I often wonder if our lives reflect the desperation we ought to have for His presence to go with us, for Him to do what only He can do. So many of us are longing for things to go back to the way they were, but I’m beginning to wonder if that’s not part of God’s plan for the future of His Church. Throughout the history of God’s people, He has often allowed desperate situations to draw His people back into right focus on Him. What if that is what He is doing now?
Despite the craziness of this year, God has blessed the Watershed tremendously. Never when God called us to move to Iola, did I ever imagine that the people to whom God would allow us to minister would be so richly diverse. Through Allen Community College, God has brought the nations to our doorstep. It has been wonderful to watch as our brothers and sisters from various African countries have taught us to deepen our faith and strengthen our prayers. Our brothers from Brazil have taught us how to love with open arms and to grow in hospitality. Our sister from China and brother from Haiti have taught us how to delight in the joy found in coming together as the people of God. It’s beautiful to behold! God is also teaching us to say yes to opportunities to show generosity to those in our community who are in need. Despite what 2020 has cost us, we have gained in ways that cannot be quantified or measured, and God has strengthened our resolve as a result. We are more committed to investing in the remnant of faithful followers God has given us, to seek His face, to wait for Him to move, and to trust that He has a plan and a future for His Church. It may not look the same; it may be different than what we expected or wanted, but it will be good because it will be of God.
This is where I would like to invite you to seek God with us, to ask tough questions, to humbly offer to God our plans, dreams, and visions and be ready to receive what He has for us. When Jeremiah wrote to the Israelites in exile, he wrote to a devastated people who had lost every single part of their identity that marked them as the people of God. The Temple where they worshipped God was no more; their capital city was destroyed; most of them had been carried to a foreign nation, and while many expected God to restore the nation of Israel sooner rather than later, Jeremiah warned them that they would be in exile for quite sometime. This is how he instructed them to use their time of desperation: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper,” (Jeremiah 29:4-7, NIV). This is the context for Jeremiah 29:11. God can prosper His people in the midst of crisis, even if it means the crisis persists. The Israelites were not to long for what was lost but to make a future in the midst of the mess, to see new possibilities for what it meant to be the people of God in the midst of a hostile situation.
What if God is humbling us so we will wake up and realize our powerlessness? This gospel task was never anything we could accomplish. It was never something we could make happen through cleverness or sheer determination of will. What if we're supposed to be on the edge of despair, so we will remember how desperately we need God to move? What if he doesn't move according to our timetable? What if God is not at all worried about the situation because what if he is the one who builds his church? What if he is the one in charge, not us? We believe that when the Church wakes up, confesses our need for God to be the One to move, and holds our plans before Him with open hands waiting for Him to breathe life into them, we will see a renewal in our day we never could have imagined. Will you join us in humbly seeking the renewal only God can bring?
