This Sunday we announced that “Love God. Love People. Take action.”  would be our new creed/motto/tag line for actionchurch.   Obviously, the “Love God. People.” part comes from these verses that we talked about every Sunday in the month of February. 

 ³⁷ Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ ³⁸ This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹ A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  ⁴⁰ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”  Matthew 22:37

So where did the “Take action.” part come from?  Is it just a clever tie-in to our church name?   Not exactly.   The name “actionchurch” started out as a joke…a reference to a heated rant about church that I once delivered to my wife after a particularly frustrating elders meeting.  Long before I even considered starting a church or being a pastor, I said “if I ever ran a church it would be called action church, and we would actually DO THINGS instead of just having meetings about them.”   My wife reminded me of those words when we were thinking about what to call our new church start up.  Be careful what you say in anger, because to this day whenever I am tempted to just “talk” about what the Bible says instead of doing something, the word actionchurch reminds me of my words. :-) 

  More importantly though, Jesus taught in the parable of the Good Samaritan  that being religious, knowing the scriptures, even being a religious leader like the priest and the temple assistant is NOT ENOUGH to fulfill Gods commands to “love God with all your heart-and your neighbor as yourself.”  The only person in the parable who actually pleased God was the hated Samaritan.  He was the one who took action…the one who stopped to help the injured man…the one who took it upon himself to insert himself into a “messy”  situation. 

If we Love God and Love people…Jesus taught that the only way to PROVE IT is by taking action.