I heard a story one time about a Jewish man, barely surviving in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. The old man had saved enough rationed portions of margarine to create a candle that he could light during the Jewish festival of Hannukah. On the first night of the festival the old man gathered some of the younger men around him and invited them to join him as he lit the candle. The younger men couldn’t believe the older man would waste such precious food to make a meager little candle. The wise old man looked at the younger men and said, “We’ve lived nearly three weeks without food, and three days without water, but we cannot live one day without hope.”
We’re all looking for hope. We need hope, because without it, we truly cease to live. That’s why the mission of RiverChurch is to bring Hope for life through Jesus Christ.
We want to find the person who’s lost hope with Christianity, or the Church. They’ve been burned before, or felt rejected by the Church. We want to find the person who’s always thought they were just never good enough to go to Church or the person who’s been in Church all of their life but finds no fulfillment in their faith experience. We want to bring hope for life through Jesus Christ to these people. We want to heal the wounds of their past rejection, we want to show them that through Christ can be made brand new, and we want to give them an opportunity to put feet on their faith. Not just go to church every weekend and sit with the “faithful”, but challenged to get up, to get out, and to live their faith.
We also want to find the forgotten people of Chattanooga. The homeless, the poor, the fatherless, the ones that can sometimes be so easily overlooked and left without hope. We want to gather a group of people just itching to share Christ’s love with someone else, and we want to GO where these forgotten people are and give that love to them. Whether its a warm meal, a new coat, a roof over their head, or just the hug of a child, we want to give these people the hope for life through Jesus Christ.
This call to bring hope doesn’t just stop in Chattanooga, we’re going to do this in our surrounding cities as well. Partnering with churches in Nashville, Knoxville, Atlanta, and Birmingham and all points in between. Hope is contagious and we want to be highly infected carriers. Beyond these places we will go to the nations of the world, to a Jewish Immigrant in Israel, an orphan in Honduras, or a village needing clean drinking water in Africa, and we will bring Hope for life through Jesus Christ.
Why? Because we simply cannot live without hope!
If you want to be part of our mission, or simply more information about RiverChurch. Email us at riverchurchchatt@gmail.com
