Where's the Baby?

by Mike Perkinson


Imagine a newly married couple moving into their home with dreams and aspirations of a joy-filled future. As they cross the threshold with life exploding in their hearts they stop in the entry to look at each other and dream about a home full of little ones running around, interrupting the quiet, disrupting the order and filling the home with vibrant life. The young wife wipes away a tear and her husband embraces her as they enter their new home with great expectation of life to come.

With great anticipation the young couple begins to plan for their new life. They make their way to the bedrooms and begin to think through how each will become a nursery. Each bedroom will house a little life and so the young couple begins to make plans for how each room will look, deciding that one will be for a boy and the other for a girl. After all, they’ve always wanted one boy and one girl. The décor is selected for each room, the clothes are purchased, the colleges selected and their careers are mapped out.

The young couple sits down at the end of a rather exhausting day of planning, systematizing and organizing. They look at each other with great expectancy and now wait for the life to come. Each day passes with no signs of a baby and as the months go by the couple adds to the nurseries, studies up on parenting, and prays daily for the life to come about. After months of waiting and now growing rather discouraged, they invest more in the décor of the nursery, in learning about babies and childhood development and even fast and pray in hope of life to come. All to no avail, the couple gives up on the pursuit and settles for their life without little ones. All of the efforts to make life happen were noble, right and highly organized. However, they forgot one very important part of the process. Life cannot be organized into existence.

In our ecclesiological nursery we find pastors and leaders dressing up the room, organizing the systems, learning theology and anthropology and every other -ology that exists – all in hopes of making life happen. Like the young couple, pastors often forget one very important thing. Life cannot be organized into existence. If we are not pregnant with life than no matter how much we decorate the nursery, organize the systems, study theology and fallen human nature, and market the dream, the baby will not come.

In America, we have some of the nicest and best-organized churches (nurseries) in the world. And yet, some are oddly missing the one thing that makes the nursery vibrant – the baby. The question of the hour is: Are we pregnant with the life of our God, bursting forth from our innermost being? Is there a baby on the way? If so, then by all means plan your nursery. After all, once life happens we then organize and facilitate systems that allow that life to grow and mature. Is life happening in you? Your family? Your leadership? Your spiritual community? Do we find the love of our Father compelling us to move out into the highways and by-ways and passionately and lovingly provide life to a broken and fallen world?

Life happens where the Incarnate One is present in the life of His people that love Him with all their hearts, love their neighbors as they love themselves and make disciples as they live life – being the ubiquitous church – the Church that is the Church anywhere, everywhere and all the time.

And so dear co-laborer, are you pregnant with life? After all, we can only give away the comfort we have received (2 Corinthians 1:3-4.) Maybe that is why so many of us have been reduced to giving formulas, systems and nursery décor because we have lost our relationship with our God as His sons and daughters.

Forgive me for being so simple but I’d like to encourage you to go back and commune with your Father and let His life and love nurture you and form the life of His Son in you. Let Him make you pregnant with His life that will express itself in our broken world, filling it with hope, salvation, restoration and love.

Those pregnant with life find themselves loving God whole-heartedly – making life in the Kingdom their aim, pleasing the One who makes life possible. Those pregnant with life love others as they love themselves, facilitating a life of relationship that gives birth to community that is based in reconciliation, restoration and hope. Those pregnant with life find themselves living the abundant life (John 10:10) that makes disciples, giving from the overflow of their relationship with God (Psalm 23:5.) May God create His life in us so that the world may come to know the life and power that is in our Christ and may our nurseries, systems and organizations help to develop and mature into fully devoted disciples of Christ. May God fill our nurseries with His life!