"If We Build It, They Will Come"

Story of the Geneva Church of Christ (Eglise du Christ du Léman)

We surely remember the famous American drama sports film "Field of Dreams." In the movie, Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) is a farmer who lives in rural Iowa with his wife. While walking through his cornfield, Ray hears a voice whisper, "If you build it, he will come" (often misquoted as "If you build it, they will come"), and sees a vision of a baseball field. He believes he is somehow being asked to build it. Watched by incredulous neighbors, Ray plows under his corn and builds the field.

I must say that this is a bit how I have been feeling the last couple of years, hearing the voice of God whispering "if you keep building the church, they will come!" In 2003, like many churches, our congregation went through a traumatizing year. Every month of that year, the church was losing members--from 42 down to 35, down to 30, down to 25. We couldn't see the end of it. I remember one particular church service during the fall of 2003. We were only 12 at church that Sunday. That morning I felt "maybe it's the last church service of our congregation."

But thanks be to God our savior, a few of us, with very little faith but lots of hope, kept hearing the whispering from God . . . "If you build it they will come!" And that's what we did despite our incredulous neighbors (often Christian neighbors). So we decided to dig deep in order to build high. During that process of digging and rebuilding the church, I must say that I learned and admired the Swiss way of doing things. Switzerland is a very special country in a sense that during its 800 years of history, there's never been any war except one very short little riot. These folks with four different languages and cultures have learned to "peacefully and successfully" run the country throughout the centuries!

 Today Switzerland is not only known for its watches, chocolate and cheese, but for being the headquarters of over 400 major world organizations such as the Red Cross and the United Nations.  In addition, Switzerland is known for being a peaceful and secure place to live. Even after the 2008 financial crisis, Switzerland still enjoys a fairly low unemployment rate (under 4%)! The amazing thing is that the Swiss people don't really expect much from its President (What's his name? Who knows it? Do they even have one?) As a matter of fact, the key element of the Swiss success has always been the very high level of involvement of its people in every major decision regarding the country.

To "peacefully and successfully" run the church was clearly our desire for our congregation after such a challenging year. Therefore, we re-worked the foundation of our church around this Swiss principle of having a high level of involvement of the members. It took about 8 months of meetings with 15 disciples (out of 25 members at that time) to agree on our core beliefs and the "organization and functioning" of the church. This was unanimously accepted by the entire church at the General Assembly. During that period the church all came to understand the need of having staff and having a spiritual leadership team.  I was willing to stay on staff and they apparently were happy to keep me!

It took then some time to motivate and inspire the disciples gifted for leadership to lead again. Many had lost faith that they could do anything good for God. But God is faithful, and His Holy Spirit was at work in the hearts of the weak but committed disciples! It was actually truly inspiring to see the children of God in Geneva coming back to faith and to leadership roles. The leadership group went from one guy (me) to a very diverse and wonderful group of 10 men and their wives. To this day, I am very happy to share that all the meetings of this famous "Pastoral Council" have been a true joy to watch and participate in.

Even though, all these mature leaders are men of deep conviction and strong opinions (often different opinions), the Holy Spirit has kept His unity in this group in sometimes amazing ways. I've personally learned that one of the major qualities required to be a "uniting" leader in such a group is simply humility. We all have our opinions and desires, but the goal of a spiritual leadership group is to make every effort to figure out what is the Holy Spirit's opinion and desire! We have probably not succeeded in reaching that goal all the time, but we try.

We are so thankful for the faithfulness of God. He did remember our congregation! As we tried hard to build in the most spiritual way we could, God worked in the hearts of those who had lost faith and been scattered in different cities. We started to see growth and miracles again. Former disciples were restored in their faith (14 as of today) and quite a few moved to our church because they felt the need to be part of our loving family. Former disciples who used to be on staff came back, and it's a great joy to hear them preach now on Sundays. And after many years of no baptisms, the church rejoiced this year with the baptisms of Yolande and Bruno, and prayerfully more to come!

In short, the congregation has grown from 25 "survivors" in 2003 with their 19 kids, to 54 adult members today and 48 kids! During those years, the Geneva church in partnership with the Paris Church also developed our summer youth camp. We started with 63 participants in 2008, and we expect around 120 this year in the Swiss Alps! What a joy to see more and more teens learn from God and get baptized into Christ!

Even though we've seen some victories and we are excited about the future, we know that the battle against the forces of evil is huge! The prayers of many will make a difference! Beginning last year, we have been focusing more and more on the mission. It is actually very encouraging to see the desire and motivation of the disciples to share their faith and invite people during the campaigns we organize. But we definitely face a country that has all the "material blessings" and doesn't see its need for God. I would like to ask all the readers of this article to pray today for God to open the hearts of the Swiss. We have Douglas Jacoby coming for a conference on June 4th at the main Geneva University on the theme "est-il logique de croire" ("is it logical to believe"). Please keep us in your prayers. We can plant and water, but only God can make it grow!

Ray Kinsella' field of dreams was of a baseball field. He listened to the whispering voice and he built the field of his vision. And at the end of the movie, the view pulls back to reveal a trail of car headlights approaching the field, extending to the horizon. We also have our field of dreams. Our field of dreams is a field that is ripe for harvest, with all nations streaming to it! Let's listen to the whispering voice of God! Let's keep building His Kingdom with gold and silver! And surely we will see a field of dreams-a field ripe for harvest extending to the horizon!

Thierry Fender, Evangelist (Eglise du Christ du Léman)