Glorious Mud

I was asked to write a blog for the Acts 29 website to help promote the upcoming boot camp in Chicago.  By the way, it's on September 15 and 16, 2011, and you should consider going!  You can get info here .  Lauren and I will be there helping with leading, facilitating, and assessing and we would love to see you there.  I guarantee you will be challenged with a lot to think about. So, I wrote the blog - and I know the way these things go.  It may or may not actually get published over at Acts 29, but I thought I would share it here.  It was fun to take a little time and remind myself of God's blessings over the last 6 years! So, here it is: ........ God’s plan has a way of making perfect sense in hindsight – even if it is completely unpredictable on the front side of things. In 2005, I attended my first Acts 29 boot camp in Edwardsville, IL.   I had never been to Edwardsville.   I had only recently heard of Acts 29 .   I def...

This last Saturday, The Journey: Metro East (soon to be Trailhead Church) hosted our first Affordable Christmas at our space in Edwardsville, IL. Affordable Christmas was the brain child of Josh Wilson and the crew at Mission St. Louis .  They decided several years ago to try to empower a group of low income parents with a way to shop for their children's Christmas by giving them an event that offered new presents at drastically reduced prices.  This event has proven to be one of the most anticipated events put on by MStL.  So, this year, we jumped in with them (or, I should say they jumped in with us - they brought over a great crew to help us staff and run our event)!  We have been working over the last two years to build relationships with a group of families living at SIUE's family housing, and this even was a great way to empower them and continue to serve them with the love of Christ. It really was a blast.  We had fun.  The parents had fun....

Gratitude is a catalyst to gospel growth in our lives. Or, as Colin Powell would say, it is a force multiplier. I heard Colin Powell speak at a leadership event years ago and he talked about how military leaders are always looking for force multipliers - elements that are natural to the environment and will increase the effectiveness of your strength.  It might be a hill to come down or a ravine to travel up through or a line of trees to use as cover. In the Christian life, it is gratitude.  We can see this in a number of passages, like this one:     Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4-7 ESV) The Bible is f...

I meet with a lot of young dudes.  Many of them show real leadership potential.  But more than anything else, one of the first things I look for is a deep and real gratitude to God.  I am convinced that one of the first signs that someone really "gets" the gospel (and by "gets," I simply mean "believe") is a deep sense of thankfulness. In fact, probably the most accurate prayer someone could utter after hearing the gospel is not, "Lord, please forgive me" but "Thank you." Why?  Because the gospel is the message that Jesus has won for us peace with God.  It's a done deal.  The payment is complete.  When Jesus came as our High Priest and offered himself as the substitutionary sacrificial lamb, he fully paid our sin-debt to God and completely satisfied God's anger toward our sin.  He took the cup of God's wrath and drank it to the dregs.  So, when he rose from the grave, that was proof that the payment was absolutely comple...

So, here is a familiar scenario:  You are standing in line at the grocery store and your little angel has been teetering on the dark side of angelic all morning.  The tipping point comes when you hit the check out line and your child sees that bright and colorful something that was perfectly places to create a crisis for parents. It happens.  Your child reaches out and grunts - or worse, actually swipes it as you walk by.  And you take a deep breath and say the magic word: No.  And in that moment, your little angel crosses completely over to the dark side and becomes a midget demon.  The thrashing and wailing begin.  Other parents move slowly away.  The security guard talks quietly on his walkie-talkie as he moves where he can watch your every move.  The clerk stares at you with her blank stare and saucer eyes. And in that moment, you wish you had the silver bullet that would kill that tantrum and restore your child to "angelic" statu...

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I have been answering a lot of the same questions in different conversations about our transition from The Journey Metro East to Trailhead Church.  So, in an attempt to continue to shed light on what is seen (understandably) as an unusual situation, I am going to post this FAQ. I hope it is helpful. So, here we go: Why do this? The first and best answer to "why" is this: God is leading us to this. This shouldn't be surprising since The Journey has made it clear that it is a church-planting church.  We believe in church planting for a number of good reasons.  Local, autonomous churches contextualize the gospel to and lead best in their communities.  People in a church plant feel more pressure to take ownership of the church's life - which is a good pressure that encourages the development and use of the gifts of the Spirit in the church.  In addition, teaching content - not just illustrations - can be focus...

I knew when I announced that The Journey: Metro East would transition toward becoming an independent, autonomous church that I was in for a lot of conversations.  I was prepared to work hard to cast vision clearly, honestly, and compellingly.  So, I haven't be surprised by the need to cast vision - and then to do it again in short time.  It isn't surprising - we are getting ready to do something that just isn't done very often.  Healthy hives are rare enough, but the transition of a video venue to an autonomous church is as rare as finding a snipe on a snipe hunt. I have come to see that church splits are actually quite easy at least in the beginning.  All you have to do is rally people around a "common enemy."  Just gather people together by what you all don't like or are angry about - and that gives momentum to the vision.  (This can only last for awhile, though.  Eventually all that sinful negativity will sap all the energy out of the church ...

Conflict in marriage is inevitable.  People are different - and when to you take two people as different as a man and a women (as much as they might love each other) and put them around each other for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week - they are going to fight. Most married couples are not well equipped to fight well because they simply don't understand how they should fight and what they should be fighting for.  The Bible gives us remarkable (and challenging) insight into how we are wired and why we end up in conflict - and when we understand that, we will be better prepared to fight well. The bottom line is that God gave us marriage to make us holy first and make us happy second.  Holiness can be an intimidating word - but it simply means that we are what God has made us to be.  When we are becoming more holy, we are becoming more of the person God has designed us to be. And as we become holier, we are in a better position to experience and share God's best in...

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 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...

In 2007, I taught a parenting forum at The Journey .  I posted the audio for that forum here, but The Journey has since cleaned up their media archives and this forum was taken down.  For some reason, though, this blog entry continues to be one of the most popular on my site. So, in an attempt to offer something of value, I am going to update this blog to reflect some of the best information we explored at that forum years ago.  Many blessings to you in your parenting journey. ..... Too often we as parents discipline out of wrong motives or for wrong goals. We want others to think we have it all together. We don't want to embarrassed in public places. We sure don't want to look like those "other" parents who have no control over their kids. How do we enter into parenting with true humility and raise "good" kids who are no more than legalistic moralists or moral relativists? The gospel tells us that we are both more broken and sinful than we care ...

Aren't grandparents the cutest thing ever? They stand in the background with their eyes sparkling as their grandchildren toddle around making strange cooing and gurgling noises. They buy way too much stuff for the kids at Christmas and then brush aside their own children's complaints with comments like, "Oh, dear, it is a grandmother's job to spoil her grandkids." The whole thing feels reminiscent of the Norman Rockwell painting, Freedom from Want - warm, fuzzy, and lots of good food. If you had grandparents like these, count yourself lucky. If your own parents are like these, your kids will have a richer and more joyful childhood because of them. Loving grandparents are one of life's great blessings, and our kids are likely to grow up thinking that our parents are perfect. The reality is, though, that we know our parents weren't perfect. Hopefully we can all assert that they did the best that they could (and, tragically, there ar...

As most of you know, The Journey made some waves last year. One of the many ways our church connects with our local culture is by hosting discussion oriented events at local gathering spots. One of the events, Theology at the Bottleworks (TATB), takes place at Schlafly Bottle Works, a local micro-brewery and restaurant, caught national attention, and generated more than just a little mis-information about us and our ministries. I haven't blogged on this topic up to this point because there was more than enough being written already and I really didn't want to add O2 to the fire. And I guess if I am being honest, I would probably have said a number of things that I might now regret, not because they shouldn't have been said as much as the fact that I probably would have said those things out of pride and anger (aka sin). OK, no "probably" there. I would have. This topic isn't so hot any more and the previous discussions tended to produce more heat than lig...

What could MTV, the inventor of such kid-friendly shows as Beavis and Butthead, and George Barna, the famous Christian researcher and author of Raising Spiritual Champions , possibly have in common? In what universe could these two culturally polar-opposites possibly agree - especially about the American family? For once they may actually agree on something. When MTV conducted a survey of people aged 13-24 asking them what makes them happy, you would naturally expect to hear about things that are the glory of MTV: money, sex, drugs, and fame. The results, though, were surprisingly (or, maybe not so surprisingly) in line with what Christian researchers like Barna have been telling us for years: parents are the single most important factor in a child's happiness and sense of well-being. Nearly 3/4 of those surveyed said that their relationship with their parents was a significant source of happiness. When asked about what activities made them happy, the respondents li...