Arriving at New Life

An update on K.C.'s India trip

In 5 hours K.C. and his team will be arriving at their final destination- New Life Children's Home, Visak, India. After 25 hours of traveling by air, a short night of sleep, 1 more hour of air travel and 2 hours drive I am sure they will be tired but ready for the amazing greeting that visitors get when they arrive there. Hundreds of children dance and sing and clap for you as they drape flowers over your neck and welcome your hugs and kisses. It is an experience you never forget!

I'm not sure what their schedule is for today, but I am sure it will be jam packed. Tomorrow they will be holding a youth conference for 1500 high school/college aged kids. Pray that the students would have open and obedient hearts to what God's Spirit will speak to them through the team. K.C. will be speaking on life change.

Below are today's prayer requests for the pastor's conference.

Friday, October 23 IIJohn 1:6

Pray that God would give the pastors at the conference a passionate vision for planting new churches and that they would respond in obedience.

Pray for a spirit of teamwork, camaraderie, and unity of purpose among the pastors. Competition and envy to be laid aside.

Off to India

Today I'm on my way to India. I will be traveling to New Life Orphanage near Visak, Andhra Pradesh, India. The last time I traveled to India was almost three years ago. I remember sitting in a room there praying and dreaming with members of our church about starting a new orphanage in India. In only a few short years, we now have over 160 children living at New Life Children's Home. 160 children now have food to eat and people to care for them. Praise God! I will be staying on the land we have purchased as a permanent home for these children. It only has temporary structures for the children right now, but I can't wait to see it.

On this trip, we have a new dream. We are praying and dreaming about the beginning of a church planting movement - a movement of simple churches that reproduce themselves to finish the spread of the Gospel in the area. It is a big dream! We will kick it off by training 200 pastors how to start simple churches that multiply. We will be asking them to in turn teach many more people these principles. Our hope is that the training will quickly spread to several thousand people who will all be working together to start thousands of small, simple, multiplying churches.
This will require a lot of prayer!

Will you pray for me and our dream? Although I don't understand it, I believe with all my heart that prayer matters. Michelle will update my blog with selected requests for each day. Thank you for partnering with me in seeing the spread of the Gospel around the world!

Psalm 67:1-7 (Living Bible) O God in mercy bless us; let your face beam with joy as you look down at us. Send us around the world with the news of your saving power and your eternal plan for all mankind. How everyone throughout the earth will praise the Lord! How glad the nations will be, singing for joy because you are their King and will give true justice to their people! Praise God, O world! May all the peoples of the earth give thanks to you. For the earth has yielded abundant harvests. God, even our own God, will bless us. And peoples from remotest lands will worship him.

Prayer requests for today:

· Our team members are: Schaun Colin, Jason Mills, KC Allen, Mike Viser, Troy Kennedy, Allen Crone and Bob Gettemy. Pray for each person’s health, and for the strength and power of the Holy Spirit to accomplish all that needs to be accomplished according to God’s plan.

· Pray that nothing would prevent whom God has chosen for the pastor's conference from attending and receiving all that He has in store for them.

Leaving for India in 2 days

Hey everyone,

I can't believe the time is finally here. I leave for India on Wednesday morning. 3 plane flights and 25 hours or so later I'll be in India ready for a short night in a hotel. In the morning, it is just 1 short flight and a 2 hour drive to get to New Life Children's home. Please pray for us. 5 of us are going from Westside, and we are meeting a couple more people from Thailand there.

Together we will be hosting a youth conference and a pastor's conference, as well as dedicating water wells in some remote villages, and loving on the 160 kids at New Life children's home.

We are expecting 1500 high school and college age people to attend a youth conference on Saturday. We will be sharing the Gospel with them, and I will be closing our time together with a 30 minute talk on 'How to change your life'. Please pray for that!

We are expecting 200 local pastors for a 2-day pastors' conference. I will be opening and closing each session so altogether, I will be speaking about 2 hours each day. I'm definitely not use to that so please pray that I would speak clearly and say what God wants me to say.

Each of the 200 pastors will be given 2 extra copies of the material so they can go back to their local area and re-teach the lessons. I'm praying that thousands will hear about these simple steps to church planting and as a result that thousands of new home-churches will be started. Please pray with me!

We're teaching them these 6 steps to church planting:

• Pray
• Evangelize
• Disciple
• Gather Together (Church)
• Develop Leaders
• Multiply

Also, please pray for my family while I am away. I will miss them!

I look forward to reporting back all that God does. Thank you for praying!

Many Lives Hidden in One Christ

"For you died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God. And when Christ, who is your life, is revealed to the whole world, you will share in all his glory." Colossians 3:3-4

I recently read this verse and was drawn to the fact that when Paul says 'your real life', he is talking to everyone who reads or hears his words, but, when Paul says 'Christ', he means the one, singular Christ. So Paul is saying that many individual lives are hidden in the singular Christ.

It happens again in the next phrase - "when Christ, who is your life". Christ is my life and is also the lives of many other people, yet He is one. This means I am not only individually hidden in Christ, but I am part of a whole that is ALL hidden with Christ. God sees ONE Christ and we are all included.

This changes everything.

When I choose to follow Jesus, I give up my right to make my mark in this world. As believers, we all combine to make just one mark - the mark of Christ. There is amazing freedom in this for me because my mark can look like a mess on its own, but within the whole body of Christ it is made beautiful. I can stop trying to make sense of all the bad choices I made that turned out right, and all the good choices I made that turned out wrong. I can stop attributing every bad thing that happens in my life to the punishment of God and every good thing to the blessing of God. I can stop wondering why Hugh Hefner is rich, and why I am ... well ... not so rich. I can take the good and the bad together and know that it will all work together alongside the lives of other believers to form the mark of Christ on the world. My mark, both the good and the bad, is hidden with Christ's. This is grace!

I can now hear Paul say "he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion" and know he is not talking about my individual life. He is talking about all of us - together! Our work will be carried on to completion. Christ's work will be completed and I am a part of it. This is real hope which is very different from the false hope that my individual life is somehow guaranteed to work out good.

This should be obvious. We all have seen people die at tragic times. God doesn't say - 'ok, your work is complete', and then send a serial killer after you. Death is tragic and painful, and it always will be, but our hope is this: 'the good work that was started in us' will go on. I can rest in that. I don't have to be an all-star; I can just be me.

So rejoice with those who rejoice, and mourn with those who mourn. Feel free to see the great things in life as incredible acts of grace and the horrible things in life as great tragedies. Understand that the people who die in a great earthquake, or when planes crash into skyscrapers do not die because they are better or worse than us. They die because life and death happens. And in the midst of life and death, we all get to make a choice to hide our living and our dying, our victory and our tragedy, within the victorious mark of Christ or to have it stand on its own. It is a choice to determine if you will find your life by losing it, or if you will attempt to gain the whole world, and in doing so, lose your soul.

V - I - M

I wanted to pass on something that has been very helpful to me over the last several years. It is a framework for change from my favorite author, Dallas Willard. The idea is that change requires:

Vision

Intention

Means


I love this because it is simple enough to remember. Whether it is the AA 12 steps, or any other number of methods for change, they can all be boiled down to these three things. This idea applies to both personal and organizational change. In fact, there is a book coming out called 'Switch' written by MBA types that looks at change. I heard the authors speak at the Willow Leadership Summit, and guess what? After all their research they came up with a metaphor that when you look at it, is just restating these three points.



So here are the points:



Vision - we must have an idea of a preferred future. We must admit we are not where we want to be, and then figure out where it is we want to go. The metaphor used by the authors of 'Switch' refers to this part as the 'Rider' on an elephant. It is the brains, the logical part of ourselves that thinks about where we should go.



Intention - we must actually intend to obtain the preferred future. In my opinion, this is where change almost always gets stuck. We never actually make choices to get us to change because we never really intend to do it. We just 'try harder'. At the Leadership Summit this was referred to as the 'Elephant'. It is the emotional, finicky, hard-to-get-moving part of us. At some point, we must get the elephant in us to actually want to move rather than just telling it to 'try harder'.



Means - we must know how to do go about achieving the change we want. The Bible gives us excellent tips here in the spiritual disciplines like solitude, reflection, prayer, Bible reading, confession, and real relationships. However, we in the church too often get confused and view these as the end goals rather than the means. We must realize that reading the Bible every day means nothing, if I'm not using it to change me. The whole idea of spiritual disciplines is not to appear spiritual, but to use them to lead us to where we want to go, or to who we want to become. In 'Switch' this was referred to as the 'Path'. In the metaphor, we must clear the path to make it easy for the Elephant to move across it.



So there you have it. If you get a handle on Vision (the rider), Intention (the elephant), and Means (the pathway) you can change. Simple, right?

Downward Mobility

Read about this concept at lunch today in "Organic Leadership" by Neil Cole, and thought it was good enough to share.

A good leader shows downward mobility - meaning the longer a person is in a position of leadership, the less an organization should be dependent upon him or her.

I like it! Now - I only have to apply it. That's more difficult.

Any thoughts?

My troubles with Sunday Services

Here are two questions I have been thinking about lately:

1. What have been the most effective things in my life that God has used to grow me spiritually?
2. Does that match my current priorities?

I think it is likely that the answer to the first question would be different for everyone. I would also bet that all of us have fallen into the trap of prioritizing what everyone else says to prioritize, rather than what actually helps us grow. It seems that in many ways we may have traded religious tradition for growth- at least I have.

Here is my ranking of things I feel have been most effective for my own spiritual growth:

1. Taking big steps of faith to serve Jesus.
2. Giving of myself to help others move closer to Jesus
3. Giving of myself to help others in times of need (poor, homeless, etc.)
4. My personal times of prayer and reflection
5. Attending retreats and conferences that present a lot of information at once, and allow for time to process it.
6. Reading good books.
7. Spending time with a small group of people being accountable and developing real relationships.
8. Attending other weekly Bible studies or teaching times where a sermon or talk is presented.
9. Attending Sunday services.

The very disturbing part to me is that I think I have tended to prioritize these things in my life in reverse order! So I am asking myself, why am I prioritizing going to church on Sunday morning over helping people in need? Shouldn't I be willing to skip Sunday morning if it would give me time to do one of the things higher on my list? Am I really that much of a slave to tradition?

What about you? In your life, do your priorities match up with what helps you grow?

Disclaimer: In my mind, Sunday morning service DOES NOT equal church. I consider almost all of these things to be done in the context of 'church'. I am not saying that I need to ditch the church.