Wellspring Church
Why Wellspring?
Those who know me well know how important the concept of names are to me. Names are important because names are identity. We build our concept of ourselves around our name. So when it came time for me to think of a name for this church, I knew it would be an important decision.
So why Wellspring?
I think there are two major reasons for the name Wellspring. The first is that the presence of the Holy Spirit in the church has always been central to what makes the Church the Church. The Holy Spirit is consistently connected to the imagery of water in the Scriptures. During my studies, I had three separate thesis ideas all surrounding the connection between the Holy Spirit and water in the Bible. The concept is very close to my heart.
In Jeremiah 2, the Lord speaks about the evils His people have committed against Him. The most heart-wrenching image in the passage relates the Lord to being a wellspring (the Hebrew word is most frequently translated as fountain):
“For my people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken Me,
the fountain of living waters,
to hew for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns,
that can hold no water.”
-Jeremiah 2:13 (NASB)
What a tragic image. There is a wellspring of water to give sustenance and nourishment to God’s people, but instead of drinking freely from it, they dig around in the muck to search for their own water and build their own wells. These wells that they have built cannot hold water and will never provide for them what they need. To me, that image is speaking about forsaking the presence of the living God in their midst, the Holy Spirit who dwelt among God’s people. The remedy to forsaking God is to drink deeply from the Wellspring of God’s presence and to hear His voice in His word. The pursuit of hearing God’s voice in the means He has provided for us to hear Him will always be central to what Wellspring is about. We need God’s presence and we need to hear His voice. His revelation will always be indispensable for the life of the Christian.
The second reason for the name Wellspring is the story of Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the wellspring (more commonly translated as simply well, the word that shows up here in the New Testament is the same word that shows up in the Greek translation of the Old Testament in Jeremiah 2). John 4 is an exemplary story of Jesus’ immense compassion and deep humanity.
Jesus stops at a wellspring in Samaria on his way to Galilee because he is exhausted from the journey. In the heat of the day, Jesus is thirsty and a Samaritan woman approaches to draw water from the well. He asks her for a drink and she is taken aback that a Jewish man would speak with a Samaritan like her. Jesus speaks to her about the water He has to offer:
“Jesus answered and said to her:
‘Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.’
-John 4:13-14 (NASB)
Later in the Gospel of John, the Gospel writer makes it clear that when Jesus spoke of the living water He had to offer, He was speaking of the Holy Spirit. What this means is that not only did this woman meet Jesus at a wellspring, but that she met Jesus, who is the wellspring. She didn’t realize until later that she was meeting the only man who could ever offer her eternal life. She meets the wellspring of living waters, Jesus the Christ. She has no idea how radically this one encounter with Jesus will change her entire life and will transform the story of her pain and brokenness into the story of God’s grace.
I think this story is indicative of so many people in my generation. Like the Samaritan woman, we are going about living our life caught in our own shame and brokenness. She comes out alone to the wellspring, in the heat of the day when no one else will be there, so she won’t have to have her pain and her vulnerability exposed to anyone. But Jesus sees through to the core of her suffering and in love identifies with it and He offers her something better.
My hope for Wellspring is that those are the kind of people who will want to come to be a part of this church. The broken, ashamed and vulnerable kind. Maybe you’ve been broken by the world. Maybe you’ve been broken by your own choices. Maybe you’ve been broken by the Church Herself. That’s my story. Despite that, I still believe that Christ made the Church the answer for the world’s problems and that His Spirit still indwells it and transforms it. If you’ve been broken and are ashamed, you need an encounter with the wellspring of living waters. You need to meet Jesus.
You are welcome at Wellspring.
-Jeremy Birt 12/11/2019