Click this link to hear an audio version of the below text narrated by SOTH member Jerry Rhinehart:
Genesis 11:1-9 (NIV)
The Tower of Babel
11 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. 3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” 5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” 8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
A great danger within Christian churches is to confuse what they are doing with what God is doing. The story of the Tower of Babel is a good reminder. Like the Babel-ites we try to build our towers to God because we are not satisfied with the ways that God comes down to us. But our agendas of what a church should do often cause confusion and strife, rather than unity. It has been this way since the first tower building project. As you pray, ask God to help you set aside your own desires for what Shepherd of the Hills should do or be so that your heart would be open to what God is doing during this transition.