Due to copyright, we are unable to show a clip from the Joining Jesus video, so here is an exert from the book that explains the bridge missing the river: “It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. I was online and looking at a photograph of a river and a bridge taken from an airplane. But something was obviously wrong. The bridge was missing the river! The photograph showed a perfectly good bridge situated beside the river. Not over the river like normal bridges but beside the river. It looked like someone had gone to all the trouble of building a bridge, but then forgot the main job of a bridge is to span a river! What a dumb mistake! Who would build a bridge in the wrong place?

However, there was more to the story of this river and bridge than met the eye.

You see, what I was looking at was the Choluteca Bridge in Honduras. It was a state-of-the-art bridge built by a Japanese firm for the Honduran government. When built, it did, indeed, perfectly span the Choluteca River. However, in October 1998, a tropical storm formed and began to gain strength in the western Caribbean Sea. It would soon reach hurricane strength and be called Mitch. Hurricane Mitch grew at one point to be a category five hurricane, the most powerful level of storm. However, by the time it approached the Honduran coast it had weakened to a category one hurricane. Mitch then essentially stalled and, over the next few days, sat there churning over Honduras, dumping historic amounts of rain on the region. There were reports of up to 75 inches of rain in some areas. That’s over six feet of water!

Honduras is a mountainous region, and when all that water came crashing down out of the mountains and into the Choluteca River Valley, it did so with such ferocity that it literally changed the course of the river. In a matter of days, a perfectly good, well-built, well-placed bridge became obsolete … and frankly, years later, looks pretty silly sitting there missing the river. (If you’d like, you can take a look at the photograph yourself by doing an online image search using the words “Choluteca Bridge after hurricane.”)

However, here’s the point: The real problem isn’t that someone built the wrong bridge in the wrong place. The problem is that the river moved.”

Excerpt From: Greg Finke. “Joining Jesus on His Mission: How to Be an Everyday Missionary.”

The cultural-river has moved, rendering useless some of the “bridges" that the institutional-church had created. As worldviews have shifted over the last decades, many of the church's processes and programs have become less effective if not obsolete. So what is a church to do? What is a pastor to do? What are you to do? Well, we start by reminding ourselves of the things that have not changed… so let’s talk about it.