Glorious Mud

We have the audio up from the Members Meeting last Sunday night where Darrin, Bob, and I cast vision for our campus transitioning into an autonomous local church.  It was a night full of good questions, excitement, and potential.  My previous posts amplified on some of this material. You can listen for yourself here .

So - we are transitioning our campus, The Journey: Metro East, into an independent local church.  As a result, we will be forming our own mission statement, core values, and, of course, a name.  Since we are a daughter church of The Journey, we will bear many similarities to our mother church - it is simply in our DNA. But we did have to come up with a new name.  Easy enough right?  Yeah, right.  We started by brainstorming possible names - and came up with an initial list easy enough.  The initial list was long but got shorter as we weeded out all the sarcastic suggestions.  It was eventually shortened to a few that seemed to stand out to us.  We were looking for names that would have spiritual significance and would speak to our unique identity in the Metro East. A conversation with one of my leaders drove home the importance of a church name.  She was walking far from God in 2005 when she was driving through Maplewood and saw one of ou...

You read that right - the Journey Metro East, a video venue of The Journey in St. Louis, MO, is hiving off into a church plant. Last night at our Campus Meeting, Darrin Patrick, Bob Bickford, and I cast vision for what is coming for the Journey Metro East: we are going to become an autonomous church plant.  The executive elders and I have been working toward this actively behind the scenes for the last year - and our campus leadership team and I have been at it hyper-actively for the last two months.  So it was great to be able to make it public to our people. Last night was an incredible flood of emotions for me.  Several people told me that I looked "giddy."  And, I think, that is an accurate description of how I felt.  God has made his will clear to me and the other elders and I am incredibly excited as I look forward to the continued unleashing of blessing as we make much of Jesus. But there were other emotions in there too.  I am a little sad and...

I had a thought this morning that floored me with its stunning incongruity.  It was simply this: God has invited me to warm myself at the fire of his holiness. God's holiness is the expression of all that makes God good - all that makes him "other" than anything that is different from and less than he is.  His holiness is the perfect expression of his perfection - and it is mainly symbolized in the Bible as light, smoke, and fire. God appeared to Moses as a fire in a bush.  After Israel was delivered from Egypt, God led them through the wilderness as a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of smoke by day.  And then - when they had arrived at Mt. Sinai, the Bible says: Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the Lord had descended on it in fire. The smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled greatly.  This is not a warm and inviting image.  This is not a crackling, romantic fire in your fireplace.  This ...

When I got married, I had only been a believer for about three years.  I was drunk with the gospel - I knew I didn't deserve God's grace and was excited that I had it anyway.  I was devouring the Bible and was trying to figure out what it all meant. One of the areas in scripture that challenged me was the Bible's teaching on roles in marriage.  Honestly, I didn't really want to be "the head" of the home - I had much more egalitarian leanings.  At the same time, I wanted to honor God in my home, so I set about trying to be the leader of my home.  Thankfully God's grace (and my wife's) was greater than my good intentions.  I didn't lead well in the early days - I led out of positional authority (I have the title so you have to do what I say) instead of from personal authority (I have won your trust through love and self-sacrifice, and therefore you are willing to follow me). Jesus leads us from a position of personal authority, and we need to do ...

I am exhausted and exhilarated.  Tonight was our first meeting in our own space.  It has been a crazy trip - and honestly, one where I spent most of my time just trying to keep up with what God was sending our way.  I mean, really - who would have thought?  A month and a half ago I was getting ready to ink the deal with the Edwardsville school district - we were going to rent one of their middle schools.  It looked like our best, and only, option. Lauren had been praying that God would give us the former US Bank space, but I had almost all but ruled it out.  There had been talk about a possible lead, but there hadn't been any action.  But then, on the last day of the last week, I got a call - we were invited to look at the space.  It is 13,000 square feet right in the heart of downtown.  I asked if we could tear some stuff out and build some walls - and was told yes.  I asked if we could afford it - and, again, the answer was yes (they...