Home Sweet ER

Well, we made it back from a great week in Canada, and I even got to bring home a nasty ankle sprain as a souvenir. I rolled over on it while playing basketball with the kids at camp Friday, got it x-rayed Sunday after arriving back in the US, and now I'm on crutches for a week or two. God was incredibly good to us while we were there - it was a bonding time for our group, a great time of bonding with the people of Pickering, and a fantastic experience of involvement in the lives of some great kids. It's nice to be back home to my own little one now, but I do miss my friends up north. People of the Sanctuary, thanks again for your great hospitality (and doubly so for putting up with my gimpy self the last day), your love for Christ, his church, and the world. Hope to see you all soon! God bless!

Over the Humpday

We're now officially more than halfway through our week of Ignition Sports Camp, and we're all feeling it. Those kids have run us in circles, and today was the toughest day yet. Tomorrow, rain threatens to cancel our day, but we've been told that either way Wednesday is always the toughest day for the kids and staff - Thursday and Friday see a change in the routine, which keeps the kids more engaged - and as a result, the staff more sane. Thankfully, temperatures have hovered around 70 with a nice breeze, so though we're sunburnt, we're not ready to fall over from heatstroke. We're back at the hotel relaxing and cleaning up now and preparing to head to dinner with some more soon-to-be-new-friends from the Sanctuary! Should be fun!

Ready For Ignition

Today, we had our first day of Ignition Sports Camp with the kids of Pickering. It was exhilarating and exhausting all at the same time. After a great dinner and time hanging out at the Collisions' (including a screening of Hazel Wars!), I'm back at the hotel and ready to crash for the night. So, I'll talk to you all tomorrow, and I'm really hoping this sore throat I've come down with tonight doesn't decide to stick around.

North of the Border

Well, after a 10-hour drive, me, Heather, and the rest of the Canada mission team from Hazelwood have arrived in Toronto. It's nice to be here and settled into our hotel room, and we're looking forward to a great week helping our friends at The Sanctuary Pickering with their summer sports camps for the kids of the community. It'll be nice to lend a helping hand and hopefully learn a few things about how we can reach our own community back home. First order of business, though? Sleep.

Sola5 Wednesday Recap - 7/15/09

This weekly topic is an effort to recap the Wednesday night Bible study I teach at Sola5, my youth group. I hope it serves to help us all in contemplating the ceaseless riches of God’s grace as revealed through the Scriptures.

This Saturday, Heather, myself, and six others from Hazelwood will be leaving for Pickering, Ontario to assist our sister church plant, The Sanctuary Pickering, with their summer kids’ sports camp. With missions on our brains, we talked last night about what I hope to be our new focus in the new school year – living missionally in our own lives and community. With a name like Sola5, we’ve put a lot of emphasis on reformation over the past three years, both the importance of the historical reformation and the need for constant personal reformation to bring ourselves more in line with the truth of God’s word. However, in the coming year, our goal at Sola5 is to turn our reformation into reformission – taking what we’ve learned and making an impact on those around us who need the gospel.

As an introduction to that task, we looked at Acts 1:1-11 last night, studying Jesus’ final words and actions before his ascension. As we thought about our task, we thought of our missional mentality like a journey so that we could look at the factors that will get us from where we are to where we want to be as individual. What’s the engine that drives us in our pursuit? It’s the gospel. In verses 1-3, notice how Jesus spends his time with the disciples after his resurrection – demonstrating to them that he is alive by various proofs and speaking to them about the kingdom of God. He’s giving them their message, showing and telling them about what his purpose was in coming into the world. Before they could go and fulfill the task he laid before them, they needed to understand what he had come to do. The same is true for us – before you can make an impact on those around you, you must first understand how the gospel bears on your life. It must become your driving force.

If the gospel is the engine for our reformission journey, the church is the vehicle that it drives. The disciples are still, after all Jesus has done, confused about the kingdom he’s come to build. They ask if its finally time to toss out the Romans, and Jesus brushes their inquiry aside. His kingdom, after all, is not of this world. He has called us out of the world to live as his body, empowered by his spirit – and that’s an identity we keep when we scatter throughout the week as well as when we’re together on Sundays. This brings us to our third factor – how do we communicate the gospel to those around us? Our culture is our avenue, it’s the road we’re traveling down. Jesus told the disciples they would be his witnesses. That word most likely calls to your mind a courtroom scenario. What does a trial witness do? He relates what he knows, what he has seen, heard and experienced, to the others in the court. That is our task as followers of Christ, and we relate to those around us through our shared culture. We’re all aware of our culture. If I were to ask you about your friends’ favorite songs, books, movies, causes, biggest pet peeves, etc., you could likely rattle off an extensive list. But when was the last time you thought about why your friends love or hate the things they do. What is it about reading Twilight or watching Lost or listening to Coldplay that triggers something inside them. What is it saying? What deep-seated emotions and beliefs to these things stir? If we can answer those questions, then we’ll begin to see crystal-clear ways to inject Christ into people’s lives. Get to know those around you, and you’ll have deeper opportunities for ministry into their lives.

In conclusion, though, where is this all going? What’s our destination? In verses 9-11, we see that it is eternal life with Christ. The last word that the disciples hear from the angels is that Jesus is returning just as he left. Their expectation and hope in Christ’s return is what drove them into the future. Can we say the same thing? I know that in my life, all too often I can’t. I become so weighed down with this world that I lose sight of my ultimate goal and destiny – to be with Christ. People around us need to see the reflection of our destination gleaming in our eyes if they’re going to have any desire to go with us. We need to grasp with more depth and vitality the glory of Christ and the amazing promise that we will one day stand in his presence and experience the purpose for which we were made by basking in that glory for all eternity. When we do, we’ll find that we’ll have an unshakable desire to live as reformissionaries in a lost and dying world.

From the Heisman to The Least of These

Last night, a guy from my youth group and I attended a benefit dinner for Desire Street Ministries, an urban outreach project started in New Orleans. The evening's speaker was the ministry's executive director, former University of Florida and NFL Quarterback Danny Wuerffel. He spoke on the great importance Jesus put on helping the poor and hopeless, and talked about how that's prompted Desire Street to work for spiritual, physical, and emotional change in several urban communities - and New Orleans in particular, where the ministry began and where it is now leading recovery efforts. From church planting to opening schools to medical clinics, Desire Street seeks to transform communities from the inside out.

The group's approach to ministry was very cool, focusing on an incarnational model where the leaders move into and live in the communities they're trying to reach - echoing Jesus, who came to the earth and lived among us. As Derek Webb put it, "Like the three-in-one, know you must become what you want to save." Wuerffel really reflected and personified this philosophy. He was very much a down-to-earth guy. If you didn't know any better, you'd think you were in the presence of just another ministry leader, not a millionaire who was a superstar in the sports world. I was particularly impacted by an ESPN video that was played focusing on the New Orleans recovery efforts. Wuerffel and his family lost their home in the disaster, and as the video showed him touring the damage, I was struck by just how unremarkable the home was. It looked more like your average middle-class city home than the abode of an NFL quarterback. Many athletes talk a big game when it comes to faith, but in just an hour watching Danny Wuerffel it was quite clear that this was a guy who deeply understood Jesus' message and mission, and sought to follow in his steps. Praise God for his work, and I'd encourage you to seriously think about supporting the work at Desire Street.

To Every Tribe and Nation

This morning, our church sent out a team of seven individuals to spend a week ministering in Johannesburg, South Africa. I had the privledge of praying with them at the airport prior to their departure. The team is very excited about the opportunities for sharing the gospel that lie before them, both the ones they have planned and the ones that only God knows of. Please remember the team in prayer, asking that God would use them in a great way to his glory this week. Pray for me as well, as I will be preaching both services this Sunday while Eric is away on the trip.

Home Again

It's good to be back in the 'Ville. My youth and I had a great week at M-Fuge Camp in Philadelphia this past week, getting to share the gospel with those in great need and be further changed by it ourselves. Our Sola5 students were involved in ministry to inner-city kids, nursing home shut-ins, and some believers in rough places trying to be a light in their neighborhoods. From playing with kids at the nation's oldest Boys and Girls Club to doing renovation work for a local thrift store owner who cares for kids whose parents leave them to shoot up across the street, our team saw a great variety of ways to live out the gospel message while proclaiming it, a truly humbling experience. Our dependence on God was all the more focused as one of our students spent the week away from his grandmother who was in hospice care and not expected to survive the week. Our group was taught some powerful lessons about the importance of bearing one another's burdens and lifting up one another in prayer, and we saw God's amazing faithfulness as he sustained our student's grandmother (after her doctors said at midweek she had only hours left) until Saturday night so he was able to see her one last time. All in all, God blessed us tremendously in both joy and sorrow and did some amazing things in, among, and through our students. Pray that God would continue to be gracious to us as we seek to bring our calling home to Louisville and spread the gospel through our own community.

M-Fuge Bound

Things will be pretty quiet around here for the next week. Tomorrow afternoon, I'm taking my youth group to Mission Fuge Philadelphia 2008. The team from Sola5 will spend a week doing hands-on missions projects in the city, ranging from putting on Vacation Bible Schools for inner-city children to doing construction projects for needy families to working at food banks and more. This will be combined with some great times of Bible study and fellowship together as a group. M-Fuge is always a great time of focus and refreshment for our group, so pray that God would continue to build us up in Christ. Pray also that I don't go crazy while spending a week away from my two-week old daughter. This week is certainly a jumble of mixed emotions for me, but I look forward to it with eager expectation and hope.

Sola5 Wednesday Recap - 6/18/08

This weekly topic is an effort to recap the Wednesday night Bible study I teach at Sola5, my youth group. I hope it serves to help us all in contemplating the ceaseless riches of God’s grace as revealed through the Scriptures.

Last night was a different night, a challenging night, and a very rewarding night at Sola5. During our first hour (which is normally our game and fellowship hour) we packed up the van and headed a couple blocks down the road to Iroquois Homes, a large government housing project in our neighborhood. Our students spent an hour hanging out with the 30 or so kids who came out to see what was going on - painting their faces, blowing bubbles, and playing a spirited game of kickball. At the end of the hour, we gave out snacks and one of our students, Jeff, taught the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead to whatever kids would sit and listen. Many of the kids we interacted with were Somali immigrants, so some of them didn’t speak any English and many more were disallowed by their Muslim parents from listening to any Bible stories. Nonetheless, a few kids listened, with one boy asking many questions of Jeff about Jesus and why we believe in him. All-in-all, the night was a great chance for our teens to get out into our community and experience the missions opportunities available to them. In our neighborhood, the world is quite literally at our doorstep. Pray for the kids we interacted with, and pray for those who heard about Christ for the first time last night. May God take our feeble efforts and draw people to himself.

When we arrived back at Hazelwood, we continued our summer Q&A series “You Asked For It” by taking a brief look at the question, “What do we do when our faith upsets those in legitimate authority over us?” We know we’ve been called by Christ to take the gospel to all the world, but how do we respond when our families or government tell us to stop? To answer the question, we looked at Acts 4:1-22, an instance in Scripture where Peter and John faced exactly this dilemma.

In the passage, Peter and John will reject the authority that the governing counsel tries to exert over them. So, after talking about the biblically mandated authorities (parents, government, elders in the church), in the first four verses we sought to answer the question, “Why?” What was at stake that caused these men to rebel against the authorities? The answer is the gospel. They were preaching the good news about Jesus, and the people were believing and following in large numbers. This greatly angered the Jewish religious and political authorities, sparking a standoff. It’s important to establish right from the start why this happened and what was worth rejecting earthly authority for – the gospel of Jesus.

We then began to examine the response that Peter and John gave to the questions of the counsel, who essentially ask them in verse 7, “By whose authority do you challenge ours?” It is here that the disciples give voice to their rejection of the council’s authority, but perhaps the most important thing for us to take note of here is not that they rebelled, but how they did so. The first thing we see is them giving respect to the authorities. They address them formally, acknowledging the rightful positions of authority that they held. They don’t respond angrily or hurl insults, but they respond with reasonable discourse. We took a side trek to Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Timothy 2:1-2 to see the high calling that we have as Christians to respect and pray for our governing authorities, even those we don’t like (as the Roman Empire was hardly friendly to the early church). Yet notice that while the disciples address the authorities with respect, they also do so with boldness. They pull no punches. At every opportunity they have to soften their message to their hearers’ sensibilities, they take the other road – reminding the council of their condemnation of Jesus, of the prophecy of the psalmist of the cornerstone being rejected by the builders, and stating the exclusivity of the gospel while closing every foreseeable loophole. They realize that they do their hearers no favors by altering their message, since, in the words of James Montgomery Boice, “what you win them with is what you win them to.” A soft, palatable gospel is useless to us – the hope of Christ must first show us the ugly reality of our sin before it can display the hope of the cross. The disciples knew that, and they gave us a strong example of how to proclaim the truth in love.

Finally, we looked at why we should rebel. What reasoning do the disciples give for their rejection of the council’s commands? They respond that they answer to a higher authority, that they must obey God rather than men. They also point out that they are deeply compelled to talk about Christ – they can do nothing else. These were men who had been so completely changed and captivated by Christ that silence was not an option. That is the only type of faith that will have the courage and conviction to stand in the face of fierce opposition. The question to ask is whether we’re displaying that type of faith now. If we don’t have that love for God when times are easy, we won’t be able to conjure it out of thin air when persecution comes. Dig into God’s Word this week with ferocity and pray fervently for a deeper love for him and passion for his glory. If we are leading lives like that, then when opposition comes to our faith we’ll have the courage to reject all authority save the one who is with us always, even to the end of the age.