Glorious Mud

This last week, Trailhead Church in Edwardville had our first Fight Club big group meeting.  We talked about why it is vital that we fight with each other for the right things.  So, I am going to post the notes from that meeting here in case you were not able to join us.  Read this and fight with us.  (Special thanks to Darrin Patrick for writing his great book Church Planter and to John Bryson for posting his fight club material online!) The Crisis of Manhood Welcome – and good morning Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. (1 Corinthians 16:13) Trailhead’s vision is to create a culture that encourages manhood, not to start another men’s program.  We don't need  – one more thing to do. We need a men’s culture – where men are expected to be men – where we have high standards for ourselves and for each other. This is going to be a huge challenge because we are facing a crisis of manhood in our culture. ...

I gave a message at the Journey Metro East a couple months ago about men, women, and dating. I spoke from 1 Peter 3 and sought to reverse engineer what the Bible has to say about successful marriages and apply it to dating (since the Bible is completely silent on the issue of dating). I try to prepare every message with God's help (and if it weren't for him, I would have nothing of worth to offer - ever), but even so God doesn't tell me the topics to preach on very often. That said, this was one of those sermons that I had to preach. I wasn't planning to - I had a great sermon on what it meant to be the covenant people of God ready to go - it was already outlined and submitted to the Journey teaching team for pre-preaching discussion. I was pretty happy with myself - for once, I was ahead of the game. Then one morning, about a week before delivering that sermon, I woke up in a fog having a conversation with myself. The words followed me up out of mists of slumberland...