Moat conscious

If you been around our church over the past seven weeks and participated in this year’s 40 days of prayer, by now you should, at the very least, be uneasily “cross the moat conscious”. Up to now you thought you were doing pretty good keeping it together on your island – staying out of trouble and on God’s good side, showing up to church more often than not, working at being a fairly decent person, keeping your house in order, staying off the employment line, paying your bills, all the while seeking out a social life. Read more ›

We’ve reached the halfway point of Leap Of Faith. For those who are just tuning in, this is an exciting opportunity we’ve taken as a whole church over the last two years to exercise our faith muscles and believe some big things for us personally and for us as a whole church. The word I’m hearing is that this year’s Cross That Moat challenge hasn’t been easy and has caused many of you to re-examine how faith works.

Strange stuff

I’ve found exercising faith kind of like gathering “manna”. Manna, which in Hebrew meant something like, “What the heck is that?” was the strange, miraculous food God provided for his people in the wilderness. You can find the full story in Exodus 16, but for our purposes, I’d just like to highlight a few similarities between manna and my experience with faith… Read more ›

We’re about to begin our second Leap Of Faith 40 days of prayer. During the course of our preparations you’ve heard Lent, mentioned a lot. Maybe you’re not quite sure what Lent’s about, so I thought it might be helpful to explain a little bit about it.

A special season

Today, dedicated believers all over the world begin observing the Lenten season. The traditional purpose of Lent is the preparation for the annual commemoration during Holy Week of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, which recalls the events linked to the Passion of Christ and culminates in Easter. Read more ›

Did you know that the great Hindu leader, Mohandas Gandhi at one time had considered becoming a Christian … that is, until he was turned off by the inconsistency in the lives of the believers he encountered. Rather than convert to faith in Christ, he retreated to his native religion and would later say, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

Author Brennan Manning wrote, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”

Misunderstanding our beliefs

One of the big reasons for this inconsistency is that too many of us misunderstand our faith. And if we’re uniformed about the basic foundational teachings of the Christian faith how can we live out the message of the gospel the way it was meant to be.

For many today the “gospel” has become a self-centered, me-first exercise in personal improvement. The central question has become, What can Christianity do for me? How does being a follower of Jesus benefit my life? This thinking is far from the first-century concept of the faith, which centered its message in kingdom-building, not coming up with “steps” to becoming a better person and achieving personal success.

Jesus has called us to be his ambassadors. Therefore we need to know what we’re representing and communicating. Read more ›

After four frustrating days of cancellations and delays Char and I finally made it to Phoenix and our grandsons. Can you tell I’m smiling?

There’s another reason I’m smiling. I sense something wonderful taking place in our church. A God-thing. Something that just a year ago when things were at their bleakest looked so unlikely. When the loss of key leaders along with mounting financial woes had taken the steam out of us. When we were existing month to month. At that time a trusted member of my Advisory Team, in a moment of candor confessed, “If we were a company we’d have gone out of business by now.”

But despite the gloomy forecasts and my worst fears we haven’t gone out of business. God’s played much bigger than that. Today as we stand at the beginning of a new year it’s like night and day around here! God’s turned things around and because of that, I’m smiling. Read more ›

Busy, busy, busy…

Pastor and author, Bill Hybels likened the hyper-busyness of our modern day lives to being a contestant in one of those shopping sprees where you get to make a mad dash up and down the aisles of a store filling your cart with as much free stuff as you can in fifteen minutes.

It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity, but instead of being thrilled about it your stomach’s upset by the thousands of items lining the shelves from floor to ceiling, aisle after aisle. You haven’t thought it through. You’re unprepared. Where do you begin? It’s too much! Now the manager is about to give the signal to begin… in your heart you feel sick.  You’re winging it, and you know it.  You’re about to waste a once-in-a-life-time opportunity!

Hybels said this is a picture of many of us. We’re like that frustrated shopper facing the shelves lined from floor to ceiling with countless things to do begging for our time. We’re overwhelmed by the sheer volume of worthwhile activities available to us, all wrapped in brightly colored packages just waiting to be claimed… Read more ›

People on the move

We’ve just finished-up a sermon series on our Core Values. I hope finding out that we’re more than a bunch of nice people that go to church on the weekends helpful. I hope finding out that we’re actually people on the move, becoming a new kind of human beings, participating in a mission initiated by Jesus to remake the world into a better place to live, encourages and inspires you. It certainly does it for me.

“Fellowship-ing”

This reminds me of something that not many people know about the name, “Vineyard Christian Fellowship”. For the longest time the Vineyard referred to itself as a “movement.” We were an association of churches drawn together by a life-giving culture that was both distinct and intangible. At times we felt and experienced who we were as a movement more than we could define it by some formal statement. We eventually distilled this culture into our five core values. Read more ›

After a postponement due to a tornado we met on the roof for prayer again last night. Seventeen of us gathered to worship God and continue to seek his direction for our church. Our first rooftop prayer meeting a month ago seemed to have marked the beginning of something God’s doing with us that I guess you could say has energized us. At least over the past couple of months that’s the feeling you get when we’re together.

A change in plans

I had an agenda all set for the evening… sing to God, report in with each other on how things are going, continue to ask God for what we need, and then giving him thanks and going home. But we’re dealing with a living God here and it soon became apparent that he had his own plan for the evening. Read more ›

Making room

Last night’s rooftop worship and prayer was an announcement of sorts. We were making it official with God and with our congregation that “we’re making room…”

We’re making room for the Spirit to lead us out of the box of “business as usual” and off the map of “we’ve always done it this way”.  We’re making room for God to speak and act among us so we don’t just go to church we become the church- a group of people putting flesh and blood on the saving actions of God in the world… Read more ›

Here’s a bit of church history I came across that lit my fuse…

There was an early church society that called themselves “The Parabalani”.  In order to understand their interesting name you have to go back to Paul’s letter to the Philippians where he writes:

Meanwhile, I thought I should send Epaphroditus back to you. He is a true brother, co-worker, and fellow soldier. And he was your messenger to help me in my need. I am sending him because he has been longing to see you, and he was very distressed that you heard he was ill. And he certainly was ill; in fact, he almost died. But God had mercy on him—and also on me, so that I would not have one sorrow after another. Read more ›