It’s Friday, so it’s time for another installment of “I Could Learn From…” It’s my weekly discipline of looking at the life of someone who’s influenced, or could influence me.  I list two or three things that I could learn from that person’s life.

Since the cat is out of the bag– I’ve got new position at my church and I’ll begin training my replacement over the next few months– I thought this would be good week to feature Chris-Yount Jones. Chris has lead me from afar in her role as Champion of Children’s Resources at Group Publishing. Here are some things I’ve learned and need to continue learning from Chris:

You Can Be Excellent and Authentic: Being around Chris, in person or in her writing, is a breath of fresh air. Make no mistake, Chris gets things done and done well. She’s leads vibrant teams and has her hands on the pulse of trends, educational philosophies, best practices, and bravely innovates. “Buzz”, the curriculum line she helped mastermind, embodies what the future of teaching digital natives should be.

At the same time, Chris’  voice is understated and down-to-earth. She writes about struggles navigating parenthood and how tough personnel matters make her insecure. The result is that Chris simultaneously disarms and challenges the leaders she encounters. That’s a powerful one-two punch. Continue Reading…

So there’s much changing at Grace Church. There’s been a major reorganization of the staff and I’ll no longer be overseeing the children, youth, or college ministries. My new position doesn’t yet have a title, and that’s ok. The growth here has everyone being fluid in what responsibilities we take on.

What I will be doing is…

• Working with the creative and sermon planning teams and developing small group curriculum that will make the sermons the beginning and not the end of the conservation;
• Overseeing the EQUIP Adult Learning Experience on Sunday Mornings;
• Developing Leadership Development curriculum and experiences;
• Family Ministry;
• And serving as a consultant with our children and youth ministry directors.

I’m excited by the new challenges, but I can’t tell you just how much I’m going to miss children’s ministry. I still believe that children’s ministry provides some of the most complex leadership challenges you find in the church. But it’s time I let the next generation of leaders make their stamp on that department. I might be dropping a series of posts about what I’ve learned in children’s ministry and what I believe is its unfinished business.

At the end of September, I’ll be traveling to Portland to attend Donald Miller’s Living a Better Story Conference. I registered with the goal of getting a model that I could use to create a system for spiritually coaching people at Grace. That still might happen. But I recently realize that I’m going for me. It’s time for some heavy editting as I begin my next leg as a pastor, husband, father, and author.

A note to my teams: Each of your emails humbles me and chokes me up. I’m so grateful that I am not saying goodbye to you, this is hard enough. You need to know that the church had the luxury of not transitioning me. We didn’t have to rush to fill the children’s director position. We made the move now because we have high trust in Jessy’s leadership skills. She’s going to be amazing. She’s going to be filling that kid’s wing with a new energy that we haven’t felt in a while. Thank you in advance for rallying around her and giving her all the support she needs.

My good friend, Will, invited me to take a road trip with him to Oil City, PA yesterday. Will is a newly minted pastor with the Salvation Army. He invited me to come see where he worked and to help him teach a mixed martial arts class to the youth group. This was the first time Will taught the class and he thought that it would be good to have a trained assistant.

Oil City got it’s name for being at the epicenter of U.S. Oil Boom. The first oil well was dug in nearby Titusville. Oil City quickly established itself around the hastily tapped wells just miles away.

Prosperity ended when the steel industry left Pittsburgh and Big Oil turned its attention overseas. Oil City is a shell of itself. Will drove me through blocks of blighted neighbors and abandoned businesses. Everyone who could leave Oil City has already left. Will and his team works with those left behind in this used husk of a town. Continue Reading…

I’m reading Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame in the early mornings on the elliptical machine. The novel centers around the Notre Dame Cathedral. In fact, the church could be considered the central character in the book. The church building marks the passing of time and the tumultuous changes facing Paris. The building is timeless and unchanging, the perfect foil to the unrest that give rise to words like:

“I tell you, sir, this is the end of the world. The students were never so riotous before; it’s the cursed artillery, bombards, serpentines, and particularly printing, that other German pestilence, No more manuscripts, no more books! Printing is the death to bookselling. The end of the world is at hand.” Continue Reading…

I sat down with my Bible, a stack of commentaries on the Gospels, my journal, and a mug of black coffee. I began reading the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke, making notes on each character. Next I turned my attention to the commentaries and searched for historical clues about the Christmas witnesses. It didn’t take much time to discover that one of the earliest recorded responses to Jesus’ entry to earth was cynical disbelief and faithless rejection. The witness who gave Heaven a derisive eye roll wasn’t a heathen but a member of the religious order, one of God’s own, a career priest.

Continue Reading…

There’s an extra-Biblical book, the Psalms of Solomon. It’s not canonized as scripture but it still has value because the book reveals what people expected from the Messiah. The Psalms of Solomon said that the Messiah would purge the holy city of Jerusalem of corrupt sinners and the Gentiles who defiled the land. The book opens with the author (not actually Solomon) lamenting that the downfall of Jerusalem was the result of both the invading armies and the moral rot of his own people:

I cried unto the Lord when I was in distress [ ], Unto God when sinners assailed. Suddenly the alarm of war was heard before me; (I said), He will hearken to me, for I am full of righteousness. I thought in my heart that I was full of righteousness, Because I was well off and had become rich in children. Their wealth spread to the whole earth, And their glory unto the end of the earth. They were exalted unto the stars; They said they would never fall. But they became insolent in their prosperity, And they were without understanding, Their sins were in secret, And even I had no knowledge (of them). Their transgressions (went) beyond those of the heathen before them; They utterly polluted the holy things of the Lord.

Psalms of Solomon 1:1-8 Continue Reading…

The medium is the message. Who experienced the first Christmas were enlisted by God to explain what the Gospel was. The results are always surprising.

For instance, the Archangel told the shephards of a baby was born in Bethlehem that was given to them. This baby was the long awaited Messiah. The angel described the child as “the savior for all people. Christ, the Lord.” As if to punctuate the moment, a choir of angels appeared and sang a chorus: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his peace on Earth.”

The shepherds were an unlikely audience to receive an angelic serenade, and not just because men who make a profession of living in the fields with sheep are less likely be cultured. Shepherds had a poor professional reputation. Today, you’ll find soft news stories cataloguing the most and least trusted professions. Our society tends to trust doctors, nurses, and homemaker. But we’re suspicious of lawmakers, mechanics, and members of the media, and clergy. If polled like these were conducted in Bible times, shepherds would belong to the latter list. In fact, they earn such a poor reputation that they weren’t allowed to testify in court. If a shepherd had witnessed a violent crime or a burglary his testimony would have been inadmissible in court. They were that distrusted. Continue Reading…

So I recently sat down with my remote to catch up on world events like every responsible citizen does: watching Stephen Colbert. I learned Fox News pundit Glenn Beck is receiving a one hundred year plan from God himself. This plan will reverse the course of American history. We will again become a Christian nation and our nation’s capital will return to its rightful place at the Creation Science Museum in Petersburg, KY as was prescribed in the Federalist papers. (I might have made that last part up.)

Glenn will be sharing God’s plan– his dream– for America at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th. What is the significance of this date and location? It’s none other than the anniversary and site of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech.”

Continue Reading…

It’s Friday, which means it’s time for another installment of “I Could Learn From…” These posts make up my weekly learning curriculum where I try to learn from the lives of the people around me, whether in my immediate community, or those from afar. To see past installments of “I Could Learn From…” click that category on the right side bar.

I’ve spent this summer researching for a class I’m developing for my church. Grace is a rapidly growing congregation and we’ve found that we’ve collected a politically diverse bunch. Unfortunately, we find our challenged during election years to talk about politics in a civil fashion. We’ve got godly people on each side of the political spectrum in disbelief that the other side could vote Republican or Democrat and still claim to be Christ-followers. The goal of this course is to open up some healthy dialogue and to provoke everyone to re-evaluate their political convictions against Scripture.

I downloaded Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics and have been devouring it this past week. Jim is the founder of Sojourner’s Magazine and has a prophetic voice for both the church and government. Here are three things that I’ve been reminded of reading Wallis: Continue Reading…

We’ve got a unique event coming up at Grace and I hope you’ll join us. We’re hosting a packing party with Operation Christmas Child. Kathy Schriefer is an inspiring leader who has a goal of this region coming together to assemble 13,000 gift boxes to send to children around the world. Last year, we pulled off 10,000– so…

We’re getting together Saturday, September 25. Hundreds of people from all over the community will be joining us. This is truly an intergenerational event– boy and girl scouts, Sr. Citizens, families– all unite to make this happen. Some do this in Jesus’ name, other work solely for a love of people.

Here’s a repost of how last years packing party impacted me. I hope you join us. Check in at whoisgrace.com for regular updates.

Continue Reading…