New Days Ahead

At my church, we just hit that 600 mark. A little background, we are a four year old church plant in a rented theater building. Our space is far from optimal though the location is good in the downtown area of our big town/small city. While we have space in the main theater(sanctuary) for the adults in the two services, the kids side of the church is overflowing! It is a good problem to have!
Creative solutions is becoming the name of the game around here. We have a New Believer's class meeting in the pastor's office,there is another group meeting in the lobby, of course in the sanctuary, and then the upstairs, downstairs and classroom space is being used on the "children's" side on Sunday nights! God is Awesome! We are praying for God's guidance,(and funding), for a new location or some other creative way to handle the growth. It is incredible to see people coming to the Lord and seeing people's lives changed.
This is more of a testimony than a great blog to help your church, but hopefully it will encourage you if you are a pastor out there who feels like your church is handicapped by your facilities. God can do amazing things with very little! Think a few loaves of bread and some fish!

Day After Elections

Today, half of you are upset, the other half are thrilled. Such is life the day after elections. Now that things are over, I as a teacher can talk about my voting. I am most closely aligned with the Libertarian party however in the primaries, I voted for Mike Huckabee because I thought he was the best choice of candidate to represent me. As we now know, he not only lost in my state of South Carolina, but he did not get the Republican nomination for presidential candidate. Then I had a choice to make again. When I realized that Bob Barr was the Libertarian Candidate, I knew I could not vote for him and began looking more seriously at John McCain and Barack Obama. To be honest, neither of then thrilled me. When John McCain took Sarah Palin as his running mate, that sealed the deal for me and I ended up voting for the McCain/Palin ticket. Guess what? I lost! So now, I, and all those who voted for someone other than Barack Obama have a serious choice to make. When Barack Obama is sworn in as our new President, we can either gripe about him for 4 years or we can decide that he is now our President and learn to be proud of the things he will do right and deal with the things he will do that we don't agree with. Most of all, as Christians, we will pray for him.
The last 16 years of my life, I have heard Republicans and Libertarians bust on/attack/slander/impeach/and tear down Bill Clinton and then when George Bush was elected I heard Democrats bust on/attack/slander/ cry for impeachment/and tear down the current president. We have a choice to make now. Continue fighting or work together.
Have an awesome day!

Intentional Relationships

Note: I cannot take credit for coming up with all of this on my own. Much of it comes from Catalyst 2008 notes and from reading what others have already written. It is a lesson I put together for the Home Group leaders at my church, but thought those who read this blog might also be interested in the material.

George Gallup said: “Americans are among the loneliest people in the world.”
We have busy, overcommitted lives and schedules. We live and work around lots of people, but somehow most Americans miss out on MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIPS.

God didn’t intend for us to be alone. In the Garden of Eden, God made Eve for Adam because he was lonely. Each of us is wired differently as to our need to be around other people, but all of us as humans need some form of meaningful connection with others.


John 17:11 I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name—the name you gave me—so that they may be one as we are one.

Jesus is praying here his last prayer before being arrested. He has come to the end of His ministry as a human here on earth and like many he is focused in on what is most important as he faces the end of His human life. Note that he prays, “So that they may be one as we are one.” He is talking about his disciples! The guys he has been hanging out with for the previous three years. He is talking about the guys who couldn’t stay up praying with him. He is talking about the guys who never seemed to get it. Yet his prayer for them is that they will be one. He wants our relationship with each other to be close like the relationship Jesus shares with God and the Holy Spirit! That is pretty close!

John Ortberg said: “In community – the divine community especially—a heart comes alive.” Jesus was praying that his disciples would experience this kind of life giving divine community that makes our hearts come alive. This kind of community can only come from God himself!

You might be thinking, ((Yeah, of course Jesus prayed for his disciples. They lived with him for three years.)) But notice that he wasn’t just praying for them. Look down to verses 20-21 “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father just as you are in me and I am in you.”

We are those people he was praying for! We are believing in Jesus because one of the disciples told someone about Him, and then that person told someone else….
I want to share a bit of questionable history, but it makes a point. How many of you have heard of Edward Kimball? What about Billy Graham?
• Sunday School teacher Edward Kimball helped lead Dwight L. Moody to Christ;
• J. Wilbur Chapman was converted at a Dwight L. Moody evangelistic meeting;
• Billy Sunday was converted at a Chapman meeting;
• Mordecai Ham was converted at Billy Sunday meeting;
• and Billy Graham was converted at a Ham meeting.

Why in a lesson on Intentional Relationships am I talking about the history of people who got saved? Each of these people was a link in a chain in the world of ministry. Each of us, through our Home TEAMs and other relationships has a chance to affect people’s lives. We may or may not see the end results of the affect our relationships have on those people. Edward Kimball was long dead before the first Billy Graham crusade was held.
When Jesus continues in verse 21 “May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” Our relationships with God and with each other show a watching world about Jesus’ ministry. “He is saying that the credibility of His life and message in the eyes of unbelievers is dependent on the way we as His followers relate to one another.” (Andy Stanley) Loving one another is Jesus’ command to us. He also says in John 13:35 “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
We have an awesome opportunity through our Home TEAMs to share that love and relationship with the people in our groups. We also as a group of leaders have the opportunity to share meaningful relationships with each other. However, it is a weighty issue! Do you see how high the stakes are? Do you see why we can not settle for anything less than Jesus’ dream for community? The integrity and credibility of His Gospel is at stake!
Our job as Home TEAM leaders is to create communities that are “so satisfying, so unique, and so compelling that they create a thirst in a watching world!”(Andy Stanley)
Get into groups of 4-6 people.
Questions for small groups:
1. What roles have meaningful relationships played in your faith journey?
2. Identify a time when you felt isolated from others. What kept you in isolation?
3. What distracts you from connecting well now?
4. How can you begin to create opportunities in your current context for people to connect meaningfully?

A Day in Spanish Class

If you have followed my blog, you know that I teach Spanish at North Greenville University. Today, as I took attendance, my question of the day, translated back into English for the reading audience,was "What has God been doing in your church?" I was amazed to hear all the testimonies from the students! God has been busy, and so have God's people! Sometimes it is easy to get focused on our own ministry, our own church, our own community. It was refreshing to hear what God was doing in all sizes of churches and communities represented by the 100+ students that answered the question. HE is helping poor hispanics, people hit by hurricanes, planting new churches, growing youth groups, growing college groups, healing hurts, helping the homeless, starting house churches, adding home groups,sending out mission teams, adding prayer teams, bringing in new pastors, reaching out to communities and much much more! I must say that today's question of the day was quite a blessing to me, and I think to the other students in the classes as well! It was a great reminder that we serve an AWESOME GOD!!!

True Revival!

I just want to share a quick story today about an event that God inspired. A young man in the next town over from mine was waiting at a house for a drug deal to commence. While waiting, the Holy Spirit convicted him so strongly that he told his friend he didn't want to do it, and he went home. On the way home, he began to weep and ask God to forgive him. When he arrived at home, he confessed to his father what he had been doing recently. Now he is involved in a thriving youth group and growing in the Lord. Notice the obvious here. No one was asking him where he would go if he died tonight. No one was leading him down the Romans road. While those things are great! It was God who decided that this lost sheep needed to come home! True revival is breaking out among the young people of today. I just pray us "older and wiser" folk don't miss it!

Responsibility

Erwin McManus, once quoted an unnamed source, "Is it possible that Christianity has rejected this gospel because it demands too much of us?" Jesus changed the world with his life. He didn't call us to be comfortable or even successful by the world's standards. He called each of us who know Him to share that testimony of His grace with others. That quote is stuck in my head. Are we causing sinners to reject the gospel because we make it look to easy? There isn't a club in America that doesn't ask its members to do something, yet we so often try to get people to come to church and believe in our God with an promise that Salvation is free. We know that true faith in Jesus Christ costs us everything! He freely gives us salvation, but are we doing our job sharing with new believers the cost of the decision they have made? And do we really think that unsaved or un-churched people don't have a clue that if they commit to this Jesus following stuff that they are going to have to do more than pray once and it is all over? Please do not misinterpret what I am saying, I know that we are saved by the grace of Jesus Christ, and not by anything we do. I am however saying that once we are saved by grace, that there are things that we are called to do. Are we adequately sharing that with the people that we share the gospel with? I would love to hear comments on this one!

Catalyst Conference

Got back from the Catalyst Conference in Atlanta yesterday, but this is the first chance I have had to sit down and write. It was an awesome time! If you are a pastor or business leader who would like to get new ideas on how to be a better leader from a Godly perspective, then I encourage you to register for next year's conference! There were great speakers like Craig Groeschel and Andy Stanley but even better was that I was surrounded by 12,500 church and business leaders in the seats. I enjoyed the breaks getting to talk to people about their own ministries and what God was doing in their church or business. At one point while talking with two men, one from a church of thousands and another getting ready to plant a church, just as the break was about over, we had an incredible time of prayer together praying for the guy who was planting a church. We were from different states, but we were all in one accord in our prayer. God is doing amazing things in our world! It was neat to hear many of the stories of what he is doing!

Date Night

Ok, so this blog really isn't about church life. I went on a date with my wife tonight. We went on the kind of date we hardly ever go on - Dinner and a movie. After a wonderful meal at Olive Garden we went to see the opening night of Fireproof. It was an incredible movie and very well done. I usually don't go to the theater to see a movie, frankly because it is expensive. Tonight however, My wife and I wanted to support the production company that is making great movies with a strong salvation and life application message like this one...So we went. If you have not heard of the movie, or haven't yet decided if it is worth going to, I want to encourage you to go. If your marriage is in trouble or strong as a rock, it will be a good date flick. Enjoy!

New Ideas in Church Growth

I was talking with a friend today about church growth American style versus other ideas for church growth. We began the conversation discussing church planting models, and finally came to an idea that crossed the two ideas. What if churches, when they hit the point that they can afford to hire a second pastor would plant a new church. Then as the two churches grow, the pastors could continue to work with both congregations, but without the need to be tied to one large building in one geographic location. As the third, fourth, fifth etc. churches were planted, the geographic area impacted by the church as a whole would be larger. Once in a while, a large facility could be rented or borrowed that would be of sufficient size to hold the mother/sister churches in one location for a joint service that would be much like the "mega-church" experience, but without the constant overhead of maintaining the multi-million dollar structures that the larger church would need for a single location. (Note: I am not bashing large churches here; I am just throwing out an alternative hypothesis for church growth/church planting.)If there are any pastors of large churches/mega-churches that actually read my blog, I would be curious if you think there is any merit to this idea? Is there ever a feeling of being trapped by the need to maintain the structure of the church that inhibits the ability to do what you set out to do when the church was planted? Which was most likely that you wanted to reach people for Jesus Christ.

Thoughts on the last weeks.

Sometimes we humans sin just from our own stupidity and human nature, and sometimes Satan is gunning for us. I just want to mention an interesting "coincidence" from the last few weeks. A while back my pastor asked me to start a pornography addiction recovery group at our church. At first, I thought, how in the world do you get guys to come to a group like that? But then, after praying about it and talking to my wife about it, I agreed. Two weeks ago, we had our first meeting of "Monday Night Porn Talk". Here is the interesting part. Almost immediately, the level of e-mails inviting me to visit singles and/or porn sites arriving in my inbox went up drastically, and those are just the ones that got through the filter! So, why am I sharing this? On one hand, keeping a low profile is easier, but when we begin to challenge a stronghold of Satan not only outside the church, but one he has IN the church, I do believe he gets upset and fights back. The great thing is that our God is much more powerful than Satan can ever hope to be! We already have victory over him through Jesus Christ. So if you feel like Satan is keeping you from doing something that God has asked you to do, I am encouraging you to do it! And while Satan will retaliate when provoked, our Lord God is not challenged at all by the forces of darkness. Thanks for reading. Sorry I haven't posted in a week or so.