Well, the future is always ahead of us, or is it. It is an old saying that those who live in the past have no future. The same can be said of a church. The past is a nice place to visit but it is a terrible place to live. In fact to live there invites the numbing effect of the death of the familiar. Whether the past was a grand thing or a series of miserable failures both will paralize you to the possibilities of the what God wants to do. When Joshua took over God clearly declared to him that Moses my servant is dead. The future for Joshua was to be marked by a living God still working as He had done in the past. The future of any church lies squarely in the hands of the men who lead it. Lead it to Jesus and the gospel and all well be fresh and exciting. Lead it with the past hanging on and a certain deadness will always set in. God is not the author of deadness, He is the author of life.