A Work in the Heart

Fall is on its way here in the Seattle area.  The leaves are beginning to turn and our morning temperatures this week dropped into the 40's once again.  Our weather continues to be second to none, but you can tell a change is already happening.  We have already lost almost 4 hours of daylight and the sun now comes up after 6:30 AM and sets around 7:30 PM.  Whereas people currently can be found outside enjoying the sun, very soon we will head inside to endure a cold and dark winter.  This reminded me again of our challenge in being here to plant a church.  There is a limited amount of time here to find people outside and connect with them.  Once they disappear into their houses, you might not see them again until next May!

 Sunrise over the Cascade Mountains.  The Lord drew me out onto our back porch several mornings this week to show me what He can create.  Psalm 19:1

Men's Retreat

Last weekend many of the men from EFC gathered together for the Men's Retreat. We drove to Maple Valley, Washington, a town pretty close to Mt. Rainier, and stayed at a resort with lake and mountain views. Friday evening started with some teaching from "Crazy Love" by Francis Chan, which is one of the top 3 most influential Christian books for me. All weekend we wrestled with the idea of what a lukewarm follower of Jesus looks like from Revelation 3, and were challenged by some of the more difficult teachings of Jesus including:

Matthew 16:24-25New Living Translation (NLT)

24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross, and follow me. 25 If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.

Luke 14:33 New Living Translation (NLT)
33 So you cannot become my disciple without giving up everything you own. 

Matthew 7:21-23 New Living Translation (NLT)

True Disciples

²¹ “Not everyone who calls out to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter. ²² On judgment day many will say to me, ‘Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.’ ²³ But I will reply, ‘I never knew you. Get away from me, you who break God’s laws.’

 Left to right:  Shawn, Steve, Dan, Me, John, Steve, Mike, Mike, and Darrell.  These are some great men and I thoroughly enjoyed our time together.

We played paintball (in the name of the Lord).  Here I await yet another opportunity to be painfully gunned down by a fellow brother in Christ.
We were challenged by these words because the American church largely doesn't teach on them. We are told that we must give up everything we own but that it's okay to hang on to much of the silly stuff that we buy or pay for on a regular basis. Yet Jesus commented that it is very hard for a rich man to get into the kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 19:23-24), and here we are the richest society that has ever been on the face of the earth. Even the "poor" in America are among the richest 20% of the world's population. We in the American church have been blinded by success and material things, forgetting that the only thing that truly matters is a relationship with Jesus. We "honor him with our lips, but our hearts are far from him." Matthew 15:9

I walked away from this experience thinking hard about where I am as a follower of Jesus and about what He might have me do next.

• What are we supposed to do with this big house we have?  If I say this place is His, what does that mean for us?
• What kind of work does He want me to do? 
• Am I supposed to cut back financially so we can be stretched in our faith?  Am I supposed to give more?
• What do we do with our neighborhood?

Then I got to some tougher questions like:

• Have I given up everything I own to follow Jesus?
• What in my life right now requires faith?

As I got back to the routine of this week, I encountered a great quote from a church leader here in America. He stated quite simply: "attempt something so great for God that it is doomed to failure if He is not in it." Wow. That really challenged me and was like a not so gentle nudge to me to step out in faith as we look to plant a church here in Everett. I'm going to continue pondering those words for quite a while.

Determining a Vision

In this interim time of waiting, I have felt pressed by the Lord to ask Him for a vision regarding what we will do here. I have to admit that my initial reaction to "mission and vision" statements is one of cynicism. In the world of education these ideas have unfortunately been perverted as an end-all, be-all way of making a great school. I've seen many good vision statements in schools and school systems that the employees didn't care about or aren't aware of. Worse yet, I have been around numerous school leaders who disengaged themselves from implementing these statements once they were created because they had suddenly completed the magic task of creating them. However, vision statements have a real purpose when it comes to starting a church. They define things like what we are striving to be in a community, what we will spend our time doing, and what kinds of people we will work with. I believe that if leaders will sincerely pursue the creation of a vision and mission by laying it before the Lord, the world should look out!

For me that has taken the form of prayer with the Lord and writing down ideas that come to mind. I have a lot of great ideas on what a church should look like in this community, but the worst thing we could do is start a carbon copy of another church. That doesn't work because every neighborhood is different and contains a variety of people from various backgrounds and cultures. If we want stale and boring, we will copy someone else. If we want vibrant, different, and real, we go to the Lord! It is my intent over the next few months to jot down ideas during prayer time and gradually meld those into a vision statement for our church. Hopefully once that is created I will be able to take it to our church leaders for their input. It has always been my belief that the Lord speaks through your peers, and this instance will be no different. If I'm off track they will be able to tell me. While this is one of those things that is done in quietness initially, I'm very excited to spend this time with the Lord.

With this in mind, last night I got home from the service at EFC and just felt that the Lord didn't want me to turn on the TV and disengage from the world. Instead, I opened the book of Acts and began to read it in a totally new way. Instead of doing my usual thing of reading it chapter by chapter, I decided to devour the book in just a couple of sittings, particularly examining what the New Testament church looked and felt like. If you have never done that I would encourage you to do so. While I knew that their church looked different than churches of today, I was really struck when reading the book in a huge chunk about how startling the differences are. They didn't have a building apart from the temple, instead meeting in homes. Needs inside of the church body were known and dealt with immediately as people sold possessions to help those in need.  The apostles were invited to local synagogues in various towns and preached to large crowds, and people committed to Jesus via repentance and baptism. And on top of that it seemed that the Holy Spirit always seemed to know those who had truly committed to Him at the moment and He entered them when He recognized a changed heart. I can't help but contrast all of these things to the churches in front of us today, and dare I say, how we sometimes flippantly say we have committed to Christ by simply saying a prayer. Now that's something to really ponder.

I had time to compare these ideas to what the Lord had me teach on this week, which is on giving to your neighbor who is in need.  I suspect that the world today is skeptical of Christianity because often we don't appear to be any different from the rest of the world.  We don't care for each other enough, we aren't known for our love for each other (John 13:34-35), and often are blinded as the world is by ambition and the collection of more things (1 Timothy 6:9-11).  When it comes to providing for the needs of our neighbors, we would rather throw money at a problem and remain disengaged and separated rather than be like the Samaritan in Jesus' parable who interrupted his life to help someone (Luke 10).  This challenges me because, if we are to be different here in Everett, what will that look like? 

I hope that you can see as I do that the Lord is working on hearts here, mine included, and is drawing us to something new and amazing.  Praise the Lord who called this family to do his work, and who is patient in teaching a hard-headed person like me so that He can "make all things new."  (Revelation 21:5)