Weekly Links

Scot McKnight writes about homeschooling with, get this, a Germany and Memphis connection

Making lemonade out of lemons - found out about this movie on Seth Godin's blog. The idea is that sometimes the best entrepreneurial moments come out of times of crisis

Starting a Church Without Losing Your Soul - by Ed Stetzer

Audio & Video from the Acts 29 Church Planting Bootcamp in Raleigh

Ten Reasons why Churches Stall - Tim Chester

10 Tips for Missional Communities

Weekly Links

Matthew May helps us to ask the question, "Am I making the most of what I have to offer the world?" He writes, "The sad fact is that many people, if not most, would rather be doing something else with their life and instead spend their day in some way distracted in their work or feeling like they don't or can't bring their true and best self to work."

JR Vassar reflects on five years of living in NYC.

Hugh Halter describes Adullam's weekly worship gathering

Jonathan Dodson on introducing your church to others (on Sundays and on your website)

NY Times columnist David Brooks writes that the recent tragedy in Haiti is a poverty story rather than a natural disaster story. His first point is that we don't know how to use aid to reduce poverty.

Weekly Links

Audio from the Acts 29 Bootcamp in Louisville can be found here. Haven't listened to any of it yet, but reading Steve McCoy's reflections of the event make me want to.

Found this site from Acts 29. Here's the tag line from Dustin Neely: "speaking up for the guys who may never plant mega-churches, while being thankful for those who do."

Great interview with Jon Foreman of Switchfoot.

Advent Conspiracy in Wired Magazine

My friends Linda Bergquist and Allan Karr have a new book out: Church Turned Inside Out. Check this out.

How Tim Keller Found Manhattan

Here's a great article on Tim Keller from Christianity Today. I've read a lot about Tim Keller and a lot from Tim Keller, but there were many new pieces to his story that I learned from reading this article. As a parent living in the city, it was good to read that he and his wife, Kathy, wrestled with moving their family of three boys from the suburbs to the city.

And terrifying to his wife, Kathy, who focused on their three boys, ages 5, 9, and 11, a.k.a. "the hellions." She couldn't imagine her unruly children surviving New York. "My mother said, 'All your kids will be in gangs by the end of the first week.'"

Kathy had a meeting with God in which she concluded that she would go and live in a cardboard box, if God told her to. The Kellers were finally ready to leave the suburbs and head for what they had thought of as hell.

But it wasn't hell. They had caught a vision for Manhattan as a place terribly underserved by the church, and a place with gigantic multipliers of influence throughout society. It was both needy and strategic.

Just as important, the Kellers discovered that they liked Manhattan. The kids thrived on the freedom of going anywhere by themselves via the subway. They were desperately proud of their dad and would tell checkout clerks about his new church. No longer was their rowdiness a problem. Kathy says they could never be the worst kids in their classes, "because the worst kids had jail time." They found a new group of heroes in the young adults who began attending Redeemer.

The other refreshing thing that came from reading this article was learning that the things that Keller knows now, he didn't know 20 years ago when he moved to Manhattan. There's no other pastor/teach/author I know that, after reading his work, I realize just how little I know. It's good to see that even Tim Keller is a work in progress!

One last quote from the article:

"The difference between a solid church and a terrible church is pretty much up to you," he tells one group. "The difference between a solid church and incredible success has almost nothing to do with you at all. It's like you are out there paddling on your surfboard, and suddenly the wave comes and you ride in, standing up like you're a Greek god. That has everything to do with the wave."

How I Got Here - City

One more Keller article. This one's titled "A New Kind of Urban Christian." When I read this, it put into words so much that had been on my heart for the past few years. My first exposure to Tim Keller was listening to his three messages at the 2006 Reform and Resurge Conference in Seatlle. You can download that talk here. This article is a synopsis of that talk. His primary points are as follows:

1. More Christians should live long-term in cities. Keller believes, like James Montgomery Boice before him, that Christians should "live in cities in at least the same percentage as the general population." He says that the reason we are not influencing culture is that we have left the cities. Couldn't agree more.
2. Christians should be a dynamic counterculture. He references Matthew 5:14-16, where Jesus told his disciples that they were a city on a hill. Basically, we should stand out, not in a bad way, but in a good way. We should look different from the world.
3. Christians should be a community radically committed to the good of the city as a whole. This article first appeared on The Christian Vision Project's website. I love the question they ask: How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good? The story of the Israelites as exiles in Babylon has impacted me greatly in this area. I remember reading Robert Linthicum's City of God, City of Satan in my City class in seminary. He referenced Jeremiah 29, where God tells His people through Jeremiah that as the city prospers, so will they prosper. This is this message of being committed to the good of a city.
4. Christians should be a people who integrate their faith with their work. It's not pastors who shape culture. It's, as Tim Chester and Steve Timmis say, "ordinary people living ordinary lives with gospel intentionality" who shape culture.

It's actually very refreshing to see that the transformation of cities is not rocket science. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. God wants to redeem and restore that which is lost. His plan has not changed. I know it may sound pretty simplistic, but I believe that in some ways we just need to do the opposite of what has been done over the past several decades. A couple of examples: instead of running from our cities because there is so much sin, crime, etc., many of us should move back, and instead of pulling our children out of our schools, let's enroll them there. But not only that, but let's get involved. Let's serve the schools. Jesus says that we are salt and light, but the only way for us to fulfill our purposes as salt and light is for us to be present.

How I Got Here - Missional Community

A year or so after reading the Cutting Edge article about Vineyard Central, I picked up the magazine again and noticed an article about a church that had been started in Washington D.C. in 1947. That church was called The Church of the Saviour, and the planters were Gordon and Mary Cosby. I guess I had skipped this article because I was so excited after reading about Vineyard Central. But I also think it was a timing issue.

Probably the biggest takeaway from this was the idea of Inward/Outward Journey. It's definitely influenced the vision of our church today. It was the idea that the church exists for God's mission. It's much bigger than simply coming together once a week. And it's not meant to be done alone. It was also around this time that I first heard the term "missional community". I don't remember where I first heard it, but I was impacted by it, and primarily so because of what I read from this church.

Here's the quote that I couldn't get out of my mind for a long time:

...the greatest impact on the world comes about by small, highly committed and disciplined communities of people focused on outward mission, inward transformation, and loving, accountable community.

This became a mission statement for me, and something that I desired to be a part of more than anything else.

Depending on God Pt. 1

I haven't been able to sleep tonight. This is a rarity for me, and I'm not sure why I'm so wide awake. I finally got out of bed around 12:30 and have been reading and writing ever since. This Sunday is our first Sunday in our new location, and more important, it's our first Sunday without Jason and Barb. I realize that I haven't done much blogging lately, and this is the chief reason. It was in some ways the elephant in the room, and I just haven't had the words to write about it.

Right before Thanksgiving Jason told me that he had been feeling for awhile that his time at Neighborhood Church was nearing an end. Though he wasn't sure what the next steps were, he felt that God was calling them away. My initial reaction was surprise, but over the next few days it became more and more clear that this was right. I then had to deal with the sudden realization that I was about to become a pastor. Now I realize that I have been a pastor for awhile, but since moving to Memphis to start NC, I've been referring to myself as a "co-pastor." There were several reasons why I did this, all of which I won't get into, but the unhealthy on is this: as much as I value "Team", it has been a crutch for me for awhile. Wow, I actually said it.

God has been doing a major work in me over the past couple of months, and it has started with a renewed sense of dependence. I do not feel adequate for this task. I know what my limitations are. But I also know how big God is. I know that He is strong and that He loves me (Psalm 62:11-12). God is calling our church to trust Him, and through that He will not only reveal His love for us, grant peace to our troubled hearts, and give us abundant life, but He will begin to do what only He can do in our city.

Weekly Links

• Jordan Cooper writes about the coming changes to the church based on our economic woes. This post led me to the next few posts/articles.
  
• Jason Evans, Chris Marshal, et al write about the same thing.
  
• James Howard Kunstler's Forecast for 2008. Again, I found this through Jordan's post. He seems to be quite angry, which means that I don't agree with everything he says. And he's definitely a lot smarter than me, which means that I don't understand much of what he says. However, you can't argue that it's a little eerie at just how much of this came to pass.
  
• NY Times: Consumers believe that the worse is yet to come
  
• Ron Paul on the Bailout Plan
  
• Good insights on the credit crisis from Allelon
  
• The audio from the Total Church Conference is now online
  
• My buddy Joe's new movie has just premiered. Here's the info and the trailer

Church Planter Training

I mentioned last week that I was going to write about my time in East Tennessee a couple of weeks ago. I was asked to help revamp our denomination's church planter training materials to have a more missional focus. The team consists of three church planters and two strategists who work within the state of Tennessee to start churches. We did our initial work over our two days there, and will continue working this summer. The plan is to be ready by this fall, when a new group of church planters comes in for training.

One of the big changes is in our terminology. We're using the term "missionary" more than "church planter." The reason is that we feel it is necessary to take the posture of learner when we step into a new culture. We want to help them to better understand their culture before deciding what the church should look like.

Weekly Links

• The Gospel in All Its Forms, by Tim Keller (this article is the basis for the talk he gave at the Exponential Conference in Orlando.

• John Carroll reminds me why Memphis is such a great place to live (and visit).

• The Commercial Appeal reminds me why Memphis can be a scary place to live.

• Grand openings are not so grand according to Seth Godin (I kind of wish I had read this a year ago)

• Ed Stetzer gives his opinion on the multi-site church strategy
  

MCAP

Hugh Halter talks about MCAP here. I started going through this a few weeks ago. So far it's been very good.

Essentially, we wanted to help church planters consider how a missionary would start a church through incarnational means instead of throwing up a church service and hoping people would show up.

God Moves Fast!

I love having days when I feel like I'm frantically trying to keep up with God. Today has been one of those days. This morning I finished reading The Tangible Kingdom. I then called Hugh Halter, one of the authors. A few weeks ago I was asked to help rewrite Basic Training for Church Planters with a more missional feel. As I've thought about that, I've been a little hesitant because I know firsthand that becoming "missional" requires major paradigm shifts. So that's why I called Hugh, simply to get his opinion on the matter. So far, with everything I've read from them, it seems like their training is top notch and would help us out greatly.

Hugh suggested that I go through their seven month program called MCAP. He thought that the best way to transfer what they are doing would be for someone to go through the experience, then to help coach others. He said that they started the new semester yesterday, but that that there was still time to get everything in. I also needed $2600.00.

By 1:00 today I had the money and had filled out the application. I think this is going to be a great learning experience for Jason and I, but I am also excited by the possibilities of how this could help our church planting efforts in Memphis and throughout Tennessee.

Reflections from Orlando Pt. 2

I mentioned that we had made a few mistakes in my last post. Maybe a better way of putting it is to say that over the past 12 months, we have pushed a few default buttons on what it means to be church. This was pointed out to me by Hugh Halter, a new friend from Denver. We were sitting at dinner on Tuesday night, and as I shared some of our story, he made the comment, "So it sounds like you've pushed a few defaults along the way."

What are some defaults of church planting? Here are a few: renting a facility, direct mail marketing, singing, preaching, children's ministry, etc. None of these things are wrong, and I should also point out that we would do most of these things again if presented with the opportunity. I just think that we perhaps rushed certain things. Doing what we're doing, in the city where we're doing it, takes time. It's human nature to do whatever it takes to speed up the process. The problem, though, is that speeding up the process is often detrimental to the process.

Two years ago we moved into our neighborhood with the intent of being incarnational missionaries bearing the gospel of Jesus Christ. Little by little others with a hope of seeing God accomplish his purposes in our neighborhood joined with us, and before we knew it we had a little church. How exciting, yet it was at this place that some of the default buttons began to be pushed. As I listened to Alan Hirsch, I finally began to understand. Hirsch presented the following diagram:

Christology --> Missiology --> Ecclesiology

Hirsch said that Christology comes first. Jesus is at the center of everything that we do. We then begin to understand and follow Him into His mission. Finally, we become church with one another.

Christology (Jesus as Founder sets the primary template)
Missiology (our present function in the world)
Ecclesiology (the church comes out of missionary engagement)

Another ways of saying it is that we started functioning (and organizing) together as a church without fully understanding the mission. When the mission is not understood, we're not really sure of the purposes of everything that we're doing and creating. What is the goal of our Sunday night gathering? Why are we going through this daily Bible reading plan? Why are we working with Peabody Elementary School?

I'm still processing this, but I hope it doesn't sound like I'm depressed. I'm actually so thankful that Jason and I are asking these questions. During one of Hirsch's sessions, Jason turned to me and said, "We have a lot of work to do!" We just laughed. I am thankful, however, that we've at least stepped out and made some mistakes. I'm glad it's not all up in our heads.

In the next post I'll give some thoughts on where we're talking we should go from here.

Reflections from Orlando Pt. 1

It's been a few days since I returned home from the Exponential Conference, and I think I'm ready to post some reflections from our time in Orlando. The biggest takeaway is that I'm once again reminded what a joy it is to serve with Jason. I am so glad that I'm not doing this by myself. God directed our steps in such profound ways throughout the week, drawing us to His heart and to His mission for our church.

Most people don't have this type of partnership within their line of work. However, if you're married, you'll know what I'm talking about. Often God speaks first to one spouse, then, as the couple talks and prays about it, God brings them both together. This is at least the way it works with Mandy and I. I remember one time, though, when God spoke to us simultaneously. It was May, 2003, and we were preparing for my graduation from Golden Gate Seminary and our move to Las Vegas to work with a network of house churches. Unbeknown to us, God had other plans, and in the span of less than 24 hours, He whispered these plans in both of our ears, at the same time. We knew that he was calling us to move 30 miles away to San Leandro, where Mandy had been teaching the previous three years.

I mention that story because I believe this is what happened with Jason and I this week. God whispered a few things in both of our ears, and really brought us together on what has seemed like a few missing pieces of the mission of Neighborhood Church. We realized that we have definitely made a few mistakes along the way, but we were also affirmed in so many ways that much of what we are doing is good, and even though it is difficult to see the results, it is what God wants us to do.

I'll mention more of those mistakes and affirmations later, but for now, I am grateful that God has revealed his plans to both of us. A few Scriptures come to mind (Proverbs 3:5-6, 1 Chron. 12:32, 2 Chron. 20:12, John 5:19).

Orlando

Jason and I are in Orlando for the Exponential Church Planting Conference. It's been great thus far. As usual, a lot of great information, though I find myself desiring time to process, and time for Jason and I to talk about what we are learning. I've run into several college buddies, and I've also gotten to spend time with a mentor of mine who I've not seen since I moved to Memphis.

I'm very thankful that Jason and I are getting to experience this together. Once I get back to Memphis, I'm going to try to post some of my big takeaways from the conference. But for now, it's time to chill out and watch some basketball.

What is a Church Planter?

From Acts 29

A church planter is a uniquely gifted pastor with a passion to proclaim the gospel to those who are unchurched with the goal of establishing a new community of believers on mission in their community for the glory of God.

I think that's a really good definition.

Church Planting Journey to Memphis

This afternoon I decided to write a little in my journal. I began a Word template journal on May 17, 2000. The past two or three years I haven't written as much, probably due to writing more on the blog. Of course, from time to time I go to the journal since it's not open to the entire world like my blog.

After writing a bit, I started scanning through the 80 or so pages and came across a reference to Memphis on December 31, 2001. When Mandy and I moved to the S.F. Bay Area in August, 2000, neither of us had any idea where we would end up after seminary. At the time, I remember thinking it would be anywhere but back to the south.

It is so good to be reminded of the journey that we have been on for so long, even when we had no idea that we were even on it!

Mandy and I spent a couple of days in Memphis, and took a little trip into the Midtown area. We wanted to see how we felt there. I had told her that Midtown reminded me of the Central West End area of St. Louis. It seems to me that with so many people (and churches) moving out east, Midtown would be a good place to start a church, especially if young people are moving back into the area as I had been told. It was so good just to talk about the possibilities of being close to home.

The Church@ Hickory Hollow

This past weekend marked the 10th anniversary of The Church@ Hickory Hollow's first worship service. Mark, my former pastor, wrote a great post here. I did most of my reflection a few months ago.

Church Planting for Dummies

Is that title taken yet?

On my other blog, I'm starting to put together an administrative procedures manual (all three of those words sound so boring; I'll have to think of new terminology). We want to be a church that starts other churches, and I'm hoping that this becomes a practical tool for church planters. I know that Jason and I would have benefited greatly from something like this.

Ten Years of Church Planting

Ten years ago I was 22 years old, fresh out of college, and living with three friends in Nashville, TN. I moved there without really knowing why, and started working at a Christian bookstore, making minimum wage - not really a part of the long range plan!

One evening in September, 1997, my roommate, Andy, told me that a friend of his was helping to start a church, and they were looking for a worship leader. They wondered if I might be interested. Up to that point, I really knew nothing about church planting, but I was definitely interested (yeah, no more bookstore job)!

A week or so later I met with Mark Jackson, and he told me about his plans to start The Church@Hickory Hollow. I loved what I heard, and I felt that this was why I had moved to Nashville. It excited me to be a part of something like this. The amazing thing was that several weeks of talking took place before they ever heard me play the guitar, and that was a good thing, because I didn't really play the guitar that well at the time.

We spent that fall building a core group, and in January, 1998, we had our first public worship service. We definitely had humble beginnings. That Sunday morning I led worship, with my then-girlfriend Mandy singing with me. I set in a swivel chair because I couldn't stand and play the guitar. I dropped my pick two or three times that morning. The swivel chair was nice because I could turn around to adjust the sound to fulfill my other role as sound tech - not that I really knew what I was doing there either.

The Church@Hickory Hollow holds a special place in my heart. This was mine and Mandy's first church together - just about everyone in the church showed up on June 12, 1999 to watch us get married. I was also given lots of opportunities to serve and use my gifts. I had my first opportunities to speak there. I got to work with small groups, to equip and develop leaders, and to lead a band. This was also the place where God laid on my heart a desire to start churches. Because of this call, in September, 1999, I started feeling like God might be calling us to get more training in this area, and one year later we were in the San Francisco Bay Area.

So now ten years have passed. I'm back in Tennessee, though it's now Memphis instead of Nashville. And I now have the opportunity to help start another church. My life is good. God has allowed me to not only dream, but to see my dreams realized. I am truly grateful to Him for this.