Why are we participating in this? 

Because In our world today… 

• Over 30 million people worldwide are infected with HIV/AIDS
• In the year 2007, 2.5 million more people became infected with HIV/AIDS
• As of the year 2005, 15.2 million children were orphaned around the world because of HIV/AIDS

But we’re also participating fora  deeper reason… Because we believe that as a community of people who are devoted to becoming deeply committed followers of Jesus, it is not acceptable to God for us to turn a blind eye to the suffering of our world. And if these numbers tell us anything, they are a vivid reminder of the suffering that AIDS is causing around the world. 

John Wesley said it this way. “The World is my Parish.” Now, the language of “the parish” is not something you probably hear everyday. I had an idea of what it meant, but I decided to look the word up anyway. What I found was, “a small administrative district typically having its own church and a priest or pastor,” and consulting the Thesaurus yielded a similar word that we do use on a consistent basis; a community. 

Perhaps this is just another example of how Wesley was ahead of his time, or an insight into the unique place we are in the history of our world today. What I mean by that is this. Today, we truly do live in a global community, and as participants in that global community we have the ability to bring about positive change on a scale unprecedented in the history of humanity. 

Amazingly enough, it is how God has always seen the world, and I believe the invitation of faith encourages us to see it the same. The great social upheaval that is happening in Africa because of AIDS today may be happening on the other side of the world… but it’s still my world… and even more importantly, it’s still God’s world. 

And because God cares about the world, I believe followers of Jesus should as well. 

I hope to see you on Saturday.

and here is one of my favorites from a few weeks ago.

Today, the Youth workers from our church are heading to Nashville, Tennessee for the National Youth Workers Convention sponsored by Youth Specialties. When I worked in youth ministry, this was one of the highlights of the year for me and a wonderful time of spiritual renewal. The energy of thousands of youth workers gathering in worship is really an amazing experience and sharing that time with so many who share a passion for reaching students is a great time of encouragement.

Jake & his wife Julie, Johnny, and Josh will be in Nashville through the weekend attending this conference, and it’s a great opportunity for us to lift them up in prayer. If you can find some time this weekend, I want to encourage you to pray for these dedicated workers. If you wondering how you might pray for them this weekend, here are some suggestions. 

• Give God thanks for each of them and for their courage in responding to the calling on their life to work with teenagers. 
• Pray for their own spiritual growth that they will be refreshed this weekend and encouraged to continue growing in their own faith and journey with Christ. 
• Pray for their families who support them in ways we may never fully appreciate. For Jake & Julie specifically that God would bless their marriage and their kids. 
• Pray for what they deeply care about… their students. Ask God to open up their hearts to receive the “words of life” that our staff is sharing with them through the teachings they share and the life of faith they are modeling for our students. 

I am a big believer in feedback and the idea that the success of any leader depends on the quality of the feedback that she or he receives. In other words, what often hurts your ability to lead more than anything else is that which you do not know. I think that great leaders intentionally work towards learning what they don’t know [obvious part of the statement] which includes hearing unfiltered feedback on how they are performing [don't like that word, but can't think of a better one] as a leader/preacher. 

So, brothers and sisters, I’m asking for your help. 

Over the next several weeks, I want to design a process for members of my congregation to give me their unfiltered evaluation of the effectiveness of my preaching. At this point, my thought process is to give them a list of questions for them to respond to for each message. I will be asking someone else to recruit these individuals and receive their responses each week they are able to attend for a three month period. I will also share with them the values and principles that guide my approach to preaching so that they can gauge whether those principles are visible in how I communicate. 

Today, I want to start with my principles. If you have some time, would you mind sharing your thoughts on this list?

1. What do you think is really important?
2. What is missing from the list?
3. What should be phrased differently? 

My Principles for Preaching

• That everything I share is drenched with a sense of God’s grace and love for the listener. 
• That the Bible, as a primary source for my preaching, is used in a responsible way that maintains the integrity of the Biblical witness. 
• That the way I use the Bible invites the listener to develop a “taste” for further study of the Bible. 
• That the listener does not leave completely satisfied, but with an increased desire to learn and grow. 
• That Monday is somehow different because of the time the listener has invested. 
• That my preaching would serve as an invitation for someone to continue forward in the journey towards becoming fully devoted followers of Jesus.
• That every person leaves worship feeling genuinely encouraged in their life. 

After hearing some feedback, I’ll share some of the questions I’m thinking about using.

To read about Wesley’s experience on Saturday, click here. 

It is always an honor when other church leaders visit and have something positive to say about their experience.

One of the great honors of my life is the opportunity to participate in some wonderfully holy and sacred moments. Today, I have the privilege to share a few words at Dave & Lindsey’s wedding just prior to the moment when they take their wedding vows. Together with a whole community of family and friends who will celebrate this day with them, we will pray blessings on their marriage and the covenant they will make. I look forward to sharing these words which come from I John 4:7-12.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. 

Congratulations Lindsey and Dave!

I would love to share the many wonderful stories that happened this weekend involved with this outreach but for time sake I will share just one. A family in our church brought their two children up Saturday night. They were not there for the services they were here so the kids would be able to take their time and “shop”. We soon learned the kids were using their allowances money to purchase gifts for what we thought were family members. They went around to each agency and talk to them about how their money would be used and what kind of difference it might make. We later realized that it was not family they were buying for it was their friends! For example the boy bought a $15 basketball jersey for one student on the Methodist Children’s Home basketball team for his friend that he plays basketball with. WOW! That is a gift that will go beyond…

Thanks to everyone who participated in this new opportunity.

Our final session at the Young Pastors Network gathering was led by Rev. Adam Hamilton and was titled, “Strategic Planning.” These are the notes I took from this final session. 

Mike Slaughter, Brian McLaren, and Adam Hamilton each gave one of these three ideals in response to the question, what are the most important ideals needed in staff? 

• Integrity [Adam]
• Courage [Mike]
• Patience [Brian]

I liked Brian’s quote that he shared in relationship to his ideal. He said, “Loving truth takes courage, loving people takes patience.”

Adam’s follow to that thought was, “You may have a prophetic word, but you are always a pastor.” 

Adam talked about two different kinds of leaders. The first he described as downward spiraling leaders which are those who look at the work ahead and can only seem to consistently repeat how difficult things are going to be or how unlikely it will be that success is achieved. The second type of leader that Adam described was a leader that “radiated possibility.” These types of leaders are champions of the positives and tend to make everyone around them feel a great sense of energy and passion around a particular task. Adam shared some visuals which I copied into my notes. 

In talking about mission statements for the church, Adam said, that these guiding ideas need to be either written by the leader or meet the standard of something that the leader is deeply passionate about. If this standard is not met, the leader will not be faithful to keep that vision before the people. In the case of the local church, the preacher won’t preach on it, and it won’t become a part of your church DNA. 

Further, Adam said, “never allow a committee to write your mission statement. It’s the best way to kill your mission.” 

Also he said, “the mission has to be compelling to the leader first and then it has to be compelling to your people.” 

In developing strategic objectives for your local congregation, Adam shared the following ideas of what makes something a “smart” objective. 

• Specific
• Measurablle
• Aggressive
• Realistic
• Time-Specific

Adam said that for an objective to not only build a sense of energy and purpose but also get completed by the end of the year, the objective has to meet all of the above criteria. 

For 2008, Resurrection set the following three strategic objectives. 

• Double the number of people who were incorporating prayer and Bible study into their daily lives. 
• Increase by 20% the number of people in the Resurrection family who were participating in efforts to alleviate poverty in the greater Kansas City area. 
• Develop plans for future campuses for Church of the Resurrection. 

This post is from a series written following the first gathering of the Young Pastors Network at Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church in October of 2008. The rest of the series is available below. 

1. Home from Ohio
2. Self Leadership
3. Prophetic Leadership
4. Strategic Leaderhip pt. I
5. Strategic Leadership pt. II
6. Strategic Planning

It was a historic night in America as the first African-American was elected as President of the United States. I was deeply moved by the outpouring of emotion and felt like both candidates gave excellent speeches last night as this incredibly long election season finally came to a close. 

Today I thought I would share what our Senior Pastor wrote to our congregation today. 

I was born in 1953 when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.  He was newly elected after leading the Allied Forces during World War II.  I was in Mrs. Tanamachie’s 5th grade class when she came into the class room with tears in her eyes to tell us that John F. Kennedy had been shot.  In high school, during the height of the Vietnam War, it was shocking when the President from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson, announced that he would not run for a second term even though he won his first election by a landslide. It was a scary time as the Vietnam War continued to escalate and my brother and I were only a couple of years from facing the draft.  I can still remember Richard Nixon getting on the helicopter with arms raised in a singular gesture he often used after his resignation as President. I still remember Jimmy Carter as president who was broken by high inflation and the Iran hostage crisis.  I have an image of Ronald Reagan standing before the Berlin Wall proclaiming, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”  I believe many of us can still see in our minds George Bush standing at Ground Zero after 9/11 surrounded by firefighters and police seeking to inspire a nation as, together, we entered uncharted waters after an awful terrorist attack on American soil. 

This morning we awaken to a newly elected President, Barack Obama.  What do I think?

America began a great journey more than two centuries ago; a journey called democracy — democratic ideals based in freedom.  When the call came from many to make George Washington king or at least allow him to be president for life, this magnanimous hero said no.  The people of this new country would decide its most powerful leader by giving every American the right to vote, regardless of economic class, rank, place in society, or education.  It was an amazing thing to have a nation “by the people and for the people.”  Most of the world felt that the common people could not decide for themselves much less rule themselves.  They waited for democracy to fail. 

But the Christian ideals that supported so much of American ideals, rejected the elitism of most of the world and celebrated the intrinsic value of every man.  During this season the major blot on this amazing (and I believe God wrought and God inspired American dream) was slavery, which I believe was and still is (they say there are still more than 20 million slaves in the world) a stench in the nostrils of God.  Even after slavery was abolished at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives in the Civil war, racism continued. Even though African Americans were officially given the right to vote in 1871, it took the 1965 Voting Rights Act to actually make it happen (democracy at work).

When a soldier fights for freedom, whether it be on the beaches of Normandy, the hills around Gettysburg, the heights of Bunker Hill, or on the road between Basra and Baghdad, aren’t they fighting for men, women, young, old, poor, rich, white, black, Hispanic, educated, uneducated, people of many different opinions, yet all Americans, having the right to choose their president?  In a sacred way, these men and women (who we will celebrate at a special Veteran’s Day Service, November 11^th at 7:00 p.m. in our Sanctuary) fought for Barack Obama to be President, or whoever Americans chose to vote for, have voted for in the past, and will vote for in the future.  

It’s the unique American way, a way with a touch of Divinity that celebrates the spark of God’s love for everyone.

Even though sometimes those I vote for win the election and sometimes those I vote for lose. Even though our leaders sometimes fail us and other times rise to the occasion, I am proud to be an American.  Not because of who our president is, but because we have a sacred freedom to choose our presidents. Just as we have a sacred freedom to choose Christ and the way of grace in which He calls us to live.

I am a Christian, first and foremost.  My patriotism extends from my faith with  a great amount of love for a country I believe has and does so much good and a nation I also believe God can still use for a special purpose. I will pray for our new president as I prayed for our last one and have for all our previous presidents. I will struggle to teach people to embrace Christian values, give their hearts to Christ, love their neighbor, grow in Christ centered living, reach out to the least, the last, and the lost, embrace the Jesus Christ in courage and faith, and encounter Biblical faith.  

I will seek to be a blessing to my wife, my children, my grandchildren, my church, each of you, and the America God has given me to love.  May God bless each of us. May He use our Church to do great things in our world. May America grow in greatness and positive impact in our world, and may God bless, with great wisdom, the President-Elect, Barack Obama.