New link

I've added a new link, John Mark Reynolds, a professor at BIOLA. He is amazing! I heard him at the Godblog conference at BIOLA this fall, and was blown away his observations and wisdom. John is one of the great evangelical thinkers of our day. When news programs want to quote a Christian, I wish his expertise would be called on. Be sure to check out his blog.

Unity and Fellowship

Being a part of a healthy church is like having lots of caring brothers and sisters. It is a network of support.
God Still Heals, James L. Garlow


In prior posts I wrote about
unity and vision
Unity and healing
Unity and diversity



About a year and a half ago we started putting blank name tags into our worship bulletin, the information material that everyone receives when they enter the sanctuary (place of worship). We wanted to do it for the summer in anticipation of new people coming. By giving name tags, we could learn names of each other and be able to greet each other without saying, “what was your name again”, or trying to disguise our lack of memory with the generic Christian greeting “Hi, brother (or sister)”.

The summer experiment carried over to the fall, and then just kept going. To quote the song from an old television show, “you want to go where everyone knows your name.” We want to be in a place where we belong, where people care, where we know and can be known. That describes our church. Almost every church thinks they are friendly, but the key is, are you friendly to those who are new or recently involved? The answer to the latter is yes. This is a genuinely friendly church, where people immediately “at home.” That defines fellowship, and that is a part of the puzzle that makes up the unity of the body here.
Acts 2:42 "And they were continually devoting themselves tothe apostles teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer."

Birthdays

Old age is always 15 years older than I am.
~ Bernard Baruch

I celebrated my birthday yesterday. Being a dad of small children, what better place to celebrate than at a place of lights, glitter, loud music, laughter and fun: Chuck E. Cheese! We seem to have a lot of birthday celebrations there. It’s a great place for the kids, and the clean up is very easy. Probably the best part of the day was having the kids sing to me, especially Michala, who is almost two. She tries so hard to sing the words, but of course, not all of them come quite right, which makes her singing all that much cuter. And of course, the clapping and cheering at the end is of particular joy to her. She thinks it’s her birthday, too, so after I opened my presents, she wanted to know where hers were.

Every day I thank God for my family, and I especially did yesterday. I’m blessed beyond measure. God is good.

Unity and Vision

Psalm 133:1 How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity.

Jesus, in His prayer for the believers (John 17), spent a great deal of time asking for unity. Nothing empowers a church like unity, and nothing destroys a church as quickly as like disunity. On December 23 I wrote about love, love is the unifying factor of our church. Obviously the two, love and unity, go hand in hand. But what ties the two together is a vision: knowing what we are here to do, what draws us together. Proverbs 29:18 says, “Where there is no revelation, the people cast off all restraint.” Here is the vision (or mission) of the church:

To reach our neighborhood with the good news of Jesus Christ by doing what Jesus did: healing, serving and loving people into Christ’s Kingdom.

The statement is very simple, and it has governed all that we have done and will do. That statement unifies and defines us. We, as a church, are in our neighborhood to love those around us into a relationship with Jesus Christ. Most of our growth in the last year has come from the neighborhood, and those who have come in have either never come to church or have not been in years. There are a few coming from other churches, but very few. Our growth in attendance has come from new or recommitted Christians. And new Christians bring in a lot of excitement! They’re excited about the new relationship they have in Christ, and that enthusiasm is contagious, which spills over into our worship on Sunday and all else that we do. Church becomes very fun! A unifying vision works.

Christmas Vacation

We hadn't been to see my parents at Christmas for 7 years, and thought we were due. Our hope (Traci and I) was that on the trip we would see some snow. Being from southern CA, the only snow we can see is on the mountains around the LA area, which we can only see on good days (i.e. non-smog days). There was no snow all the way to KS and back, except for a small patch of dirty snow scraped off of the to the side of the road in Williams, AZ. So here we are, unloading the kids from the Trailblazer, in the cold, with locals driving past us wondering what we're doing, trying to get them all in front the only bit of snow we could find during the whole week, just so we could have a picture with snow. Are we a little desperate for a white Christmas, or what?