Harbor Testimony - Part 2

Testimony of Chad Gray

I hung out on the periphery of Harbor Downtown for a couple years. I had grown up in the church, but when I first came to Harbor I was very cynical about Christianity, Christians and any place where Christians tended to congregate—like church or youth camps or my parents’ house or the Republican Party. For me, Christianity made for a head case of alternating guilt and self-righteousness. It was a confusing mess which I had tried to ditch several times. I could not seem to shake it, and so I was fairly miserable. I checked out Harbor on the recommendation of a friend who knew me well. The place immediately felt different from other gatherings of Christians I had experienced. My first observation was that Pastor Dick pretty much preached the same sermon every week, no matter where he was in the Bible. Pentateuch, Prophecies, Psalms, Gospels, Epistles—each week he somehow ended up at the Cross talking about a love story. It took me a while to grasp the concepts beneath the terminology—grace, righteousness, imputation, propitiation, justification, adoption—but I understood the feel right away. Here was a group of people that was honest about its sin and struggles, but full of joy. The people had a strange mix of humility and confidence that I found very attractive.

I slowly got more involved. I got around to becoming a flaky member of the set-up team. Then I joined a community group and made a few friends. I was in a Harbor class taught by Dick called "Gospel and the Heart" when I first really "got" the Gospel and started to grasp how very good the news is. It felt like a rescue to me, to be gripped by this love story and pulled to safety. Having grown up in the church, I was actually angry that I had never heard this stuff before. When I think about it now, I suspect I had heard the full gospel growing up, but for whatever reason it had never clicked until that class.

So the gospel became sweet to me, but I was still very stand-offish about the church. I guess I knew intellectually that church is important, the way I know vegetables are important. But eating vegetables has never been my favorite part of the meal. If I could get the nutrients some other way I would probably avoid them. I certainly liked Harbor better than other churches I had attended, but I was still pretty freaked out about actually sharing my life with all these strangers.

When Dick came to our community group and asked us to be the launch team for a new Harbor church plant in my neighborhood, I was up for it. After all, I had lots of opinions about how a church should not look and feel. And if I had to be part of a church (like I had to eat vegetables), here was my chance to make it a comfy place full of folks just like me!

So we began meeting together to plan and dream and pray about this new community. We talked about all the different aspects of a functioning church—preaching, music, set-up, childcare, event planning, refreshments, small groups, hospitality, care and mercy. There was a moment during this process when it suddenly hit me that if any of this necessary stuff was actually going to happen, it was someone in that room who was going to do it. That was the first time I grasped the wisdom of team leadership.

We spent a lot of time praying—praying the Lord's Prayer, praying for friends and family, praying for each other and for this church that was being born. It was during that intense time that I felt something shift in my heart's attitude toward the other folks on the launch team. I actually began to care, to really care, about them. We were mixing our lives together in prayer, accountability, encouragement, helping, dreaming, reminding—we were working toward a common purpose—we were discovering together the connection between the tasks that needed doing and this inspiring vision to see the Gospel transform people's lives. We were joined in anticipation to see how God would move. We shared a sense of being part of God's big cosmic plan. We were caught up in how He was shaping eternity. It was a trip. I found myself beginning to love this community, this church.

I think it caught us all by surprise when we finally launched and found out that we were the leadership team of this new church. Somehow I hadn't seen that one coming—that I would end up in charge of something, that God would now be working through my weakness to lead and build His church. I still wrestle with it. I feel like I should be a better man, have my crap more together, be more Jesus-ish. I take comfort in remembering that Christ is the one building His church, not me. He is amazing at drawing straight lines with crooked sticks.

For me, helping to plant Harbor Uptown was a life-changing experience. I learned that the community of believers is the body of Christ, not the individual. Jesus gifted each of us with different aspects of His perfect strength so that only when we come together can we most accurately reflect who He is. I learned that a community of believers is an amazing source of comfort in times of trouble. I learned that one of the best pieces of evidence for the truth of the Gospel is the time when a bunch of broken, selfish, and very different believers are surprised to find that they love each other. I learned that vegetables, lots of different vegetables, are very good -- frustrating, yes; challenging, yes; uncomfortable, yes, yes -- but very good.

In short, I learned to love the church. I highly recommend the lesson.