Creation
Ex-tend Ministry Tour 2006
Where?
* 1st Baptist Church Sycamore
* Harvest Bible Chapel
* Willow Creek Community Church
* Orchard Valley Community Church
* Jesus People USA
* Willow Creek Leadership Summit
Why?
The Ex-tend course is designed to multiply disciplers, to invest in those who want to build God’s Kingdom (2 Tim 2:2). The team members are: Trevor and Emma Loughridge (team leaders), Paula-Jean (PJ) Thompson, Alan Lynch, Emma Boyd, Georgine McMichael and Audrey Martin.
The team have met for four residentials before spending two weeks in Chicago on a ministry tour. The tour is designed to be an investment in member which in turn will result in an investment in others as team members return and minister to people. The team will visit ministries who are impacting their local community for God. From youth initiatives to financial planning to home groups to social issues, members will experience the different ways that church is acted out. The final weekend will be at Willow Creek Leadership summit.
It would be great if you would pray for us!!
* Our desire is to see how God’s purpose for His church is worked out withing different communities and age groups so that we would be able to be inspired and bring ideas back to our own church/ministry situations.
* For safety as we travel (Trev’s driving!!)
* Great contacts
* That the individuals on the team will be future disciplers who impact many.
Praying for Change
Some thoughts from Glenn Jordan’s seminar on Friday morning.
Key passage: Luke 11: 1-4 “Lord, teach us to pray.”
* There is an unspoken assumption that we pick up prayer naturally, but the disciples intentionally asked to be taught how to pray.
* Prayer isn’t all about the numbers at prayer meetings or how often you pray for something – if you pray for something 80 times, God doesn’t just say, ‘Sorry, I needed 82 prayers for that.’ In those instances it almost becomes like twisting God’s arm behind His back to get what we want.
* All authentic speaking and working for God first comes out of silence. If we learn the discipline of breaking silence, when we do speak it means more. That is, before we speak, we need to be in a position of listening.
* The name God reavealed to Moses, Yahweh, is made up of 3 ‘breathy’ letters (they made very ‘breathy’ sounds when you said them). This was a constant reminder that God is as close as your very breath.
* Sometimes we can hide in our prayers – if we pray for justice, for example, sometimes we have to get out there and act to bring about the answer to that prayer.
The Latest
Two morning Bible studies with R.T. Kendall, two great seminars (The Church: Salt & Light in a Restless Neighbourhood, and Praying for Change), and two evening celebrations with Nigel Wright later, and here I am blogging again. Some great thoughts have been stimulated over the last few days. And of course it was lovely to spend time with some friends. I shall maybe blog up some thoughts from the Praying for Change seminar later, really got a lot out of it.
In other news, I leave for Chicago on Tuesday… yikes! Where did the last 5 months go to?? Very very excited about heading off… will post up our itinerary soon, and some prayer points and stuff that we’re doing.
Also, go visit James, he has returned to the blogosphere!
The Ground of all Grace to Sinners
Some more notes from Piper’s sermons at New Horizon…
* The universe exists to display the greatness of the glory of the grace of God.
* Rev 13:8 – Even before creation, in God’s mind there would be a slaying of the Lamb. This means that Jesus death was not Plan B!
* Rev 5:9-12 – God is not evil, to will evil, that he hates. (Struggled to get my head round this point at first… think I’m getting there.)
* Lam 3:32 – Translating the Hebrew word for ‘willingly’ literally here means ‘from His heart’. So God might ‘will’ evil, but it does not come from His heart.
* Every blessing we enjoy was bought by the cross, by His suffering. There are 7 blessings we receive through Jesus sufferings:
1) Jesus absorbed our wrath (Gal 3:13)
2) Jesus bore our sins and our guilt (1 Pet 2:24)
3) Jesus provided perfect righteousness for us (Phil 2:7-8)
4) Jesus defeated death (Heb 2:14)
5) Jesus disarmed Satan (Col 2:14)
6) Jesus purchased perfect, final healing (Isa 53:4)
7) Jesus brings us to God, which is the goal of the Gospel (1 Pet 3:18)
Summary:
1) The point was to give God glory
2) That plan came to its pinacle on Good Friday in His suffering
3) Therefore, we will praise Him forever.
Suffering in the Body for the Missionary Cause
Some notes from John Piper’s sermon last night at New Horizon…
Key verse:
Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and fill up on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church. (Colossians 1:24)
* Pauls life was a life of freely chosen suffering.
* 1 Cor 15:30-32; Paul only lives this way because he absolutley believes it, there is a better way if all you want is pleasure.
* In the western world we have made Christianity too domesticated… we must learn to accept risk.
* Col 1:24; The incompleteness mentioned is not that Christ’s suffering is inadequate in atonement for our salvation without our suffering, but that others observe His suffering through our suffering. M. Vincent comments that what was lacking was a “presentation of His suffering by the church.”
* Christians have the chance to suffer so they can magnify Christ in their lives. (Gal 2:20)
* During suffering, although it is sorrowful, we must also rejoice! Think of Paul in the Phillipian jail – awaiting death and yet singing in the middle of the night!
Excitement
Birthdays are great for getting books… I now have 6 more books I wanted to read! So currently in the book queue is:
A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren
The End Of Poverty by Jeffery Sachs
God Created The Integers by Stephen Hawking
Turn by Max Lucado
Captivating by John & Stasi Eldredge
Wild At Heart by John Eldredge
Ohh excitement!!
In other news, I have been up at New Horizon for the last few nights, heard John Piper give two amazing sermons… hopefully heading up for all day Thursday and Friday, so I can get to seminars also. Very exciting indeed… I shall post up some notes from Piper’s sermons later.
The Joys
So, being off school and having free time is super for catching up on reading!
Finished Eat This Book last week, althought Peterson demands an immediate reread, so much in it I just haven’t fully grasped, so it’s on the cards for this week again.
Also just finished off Good To Great yesterday, thanks to Scott for that! Great book with some super ideas in it… need to take some time to start implementing stuff now.
Started The 360-Degree Leader this morning. Looks like it is going to be a good read also.
Off to read, find me curled up somewhere with a good book…
Those lemmings the literalists!
“All translation is inherently mistranslation. The particular genuis of a language cannot be carried over into another. By this criteron every translation is an adulteration of the original, a watering down, a reduction. And if the language being translated is the word of God, and translation by its very nature is falsification, then we’d better not do it.
Oh?
Preference for the literal has a long life. But I have come to believe that it is an unthinking preference. My experience… cautions me that the peril of the literal is that it ignores the inherent ambiguities in all language, takes the source language prisoner and force-marches it, shackled and chained, into an English that nobody living speaks. The language is lobotomized – the very quality that gives language it’s genuis, it’s capacity to reveal what we otherwise would not know, is excised.”
An excerpt from Eat This Book, by Eugene Peterson.
(Interested in the title of this post? It is a quote by Luther, grandfather of reformation translators. Not what you expected, eh?!)
It’s rising up…
A generation is rising up…
Over the last few weeks I have had numerous conversations with a variety of people about the state of Christianity in Northern Ireland and in this generation in particular. Some of those conversations were promted by SonShine week in Ahoghill, others by StreetReach in Belfast, and others by the Twelth celebrations taking place. Generation 24 is here…
This generation has a faith that is different to that of our parents. It questions. It searches. It doesn’t settle for second-hand knowledge. Whereas our parents generation by and large accepted what they were taught – and why shouldn’t they, they had no reason not to trust – our generation does not. It doesn’t accept something just because it’s what we’ve always done, what our parents/grandparents believed. The ‘church’ has become tainted… child abuse in the Catholic church, gay clergy in Anglican church, affairs, arguments over styles of music, baptism, etc… for many it is no longer acceptable to trust what the church teaches simply because the church teaches it. We ask questions… Why do we do it this way? Why shouldn’t we do it that way? Whats wrong with this? My generation is one that is searching for answers, but will not accept off-pat answers and cliched responses. We want an authentic faith… we want God, not religion.
Sometimes that searching gets us into trouble… Sometimes we may be viewed as irreverant for questioning the church, or as having no respect because we don’t wear a suit and tie to church. But our heart is in the right we place. Like David in the Psalms, we want to know God the way our forefathers in the faith did – intimately.
“I know, dear God, that you care nothing for the surface – you want us, our true selves!” 1 Chron 29:16 TM
For more on this topic…
Leadership Journal has a great article on leadership styles in Boomer churchers and GenX churches here.
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