Contagion

One of the first things a house needs is a foundation. This part of the process will determine what the finished process of the house will look like. It will determine if this house will be solid, weak, straight or crooked. If precision isn’t used and wisdom isn’t valued, this house will not last long. This is where we are at as a launch team.

We have been meeting for about a month now and things have been going really well. As we’ve been discussing how this church will look, we’ve determined 2 things: This church will be completely about the lost and it will primarily focus on the community in which it is a part of (which most churches do). Accompanying these two factors are a few challenges that we have addressed.

If this church is going to be primarily about the lost, how are we going to reach them? Up until this point, our approach has been to put together a very well designed and run Sunday morning for the lost to come to. As we reassessed this approach, we decided that it was a little niave to think that people who haven’t gone to church a day in their life would just decide to come once they heard about our “cool, hip and trendy church meeting in a movie theater.” We still want to do our best to make Sunday’s as good as we possibly can so people aren’t falling asleep in the theater chairs . However, there has to be a more strategic approach to reaching mission than to just put on a show and expect the lost to come running, which leads to the second challenge.

Everyone currently on our launch team lives in Abbotsford and because we have determined that this is a church that will focus primarily on mission, we find ourselves in a bit of a pickle. How do we reach a community that we aren’t even a part of? This has been more of a challenging obstacle to get over but we have come up with a few solutions.

First off, Bek and I feel that as the primary leaders of this church, our family needs to relocate to mission. So we are actively pursuing the possibilities of how this can happen sooner rather than later. Second, as a launch team, we have GOT to be actively involved in the life of the community. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone needs to move but it DOES mean that we each have to commit to being a part of the community every chance we get. What this looks like will be different for each of us individually, but as a group we are committing to do a few things like being in the Canada Day Parade, Volunteering for and putting a soap box in the Annual Soap Box Derby, Passing out water bottles at the Mission Speedway and being involved in the Christmas light parade. The possibilities are endless and these are just a few of things we can do to live incarnationally in the city. This will be a stretch for all of us but it is necessary if we are going to become a part of this community and fully understand who it is we are trying to reach.

Out of these oppurtunities our main purpose will be to serve as well as broaden our sphere of influence with those we are serving. Through these relationships that are formed we hope our church will gain profile in the community and the people will see that we care about the community and want to come alongside those already doing so and make it a better place. We feel that this time of integrating into the community is crucial and will be one of the things that will determine whether we are a church for the lost or not.

Our goal is to still launch the church in September, but will not go “fully public” with our gatherings until January. From September until January we want to take a very strategic approach to what we do. Our intention is to have monthly preview gatherings that will have a dual purpose of giving the community of mission the opportunity to get a taste of what our church will look and feel like as well as giving us the chance to figure out what we do well and correct the things we don’t do well. During the week after each gathering we will have a casual social event where people can come and hear a more detailed version of what our church will be about. Our hope is that we will have people who don’t know Jesus come to these events as well as Christians who aren’t currently connected to a church and are looking for a place to serve and reach the lost. On top of these events, we will have Undercurrents (incarnational small groups) where people can get plugged into. We are also currently in discussion about starting weekly worship gatherings that would be relaxed and informal in nature as a means of expanding our foundation of who will form the church.

By the time January rolls around we hope to have a healthy mix of people who don’t follow Jesus as well as those who follow Jesus and are living contagious lives focused on others. We feel that by having a strategic plan in place we are being much wiser with this dream and we are setting ourselves up for more of a win than we would by just starting a church and praying that the right people show up. We are fully confident that God is still in full control of this dream and that these minor changes are all part of the process and just the beginning of what will happen in the future.

Today was a little bit weird at church for some reason. It was a really good service but I guess I felt a little bit disconnected. It was the first Sunday since Len, our associate pastor, left which kinda sucked seeing he and I were friends. There are a few other people who are on youth staff that were highlighted today because they are moving (Jaret going with Len and Stan moving to Montreal) which was a downer (even though I knew they were leaving) It just kind of all hit home this morning and even though I was in the middle of 600 other people I felt isolated a bit. I think the reality that I am moving on in Sept. is sinking in and I'm feeling a little bit separated. It's almost like the shift has taken place in my mind which I fully expected, just not this soon.

With all of that said, I've made a commitment to God, the church and myself that I will finish strong. As odd as it may seem with all the changes taking place, I'm gonna continue to give my all until the last day.

Call me a freak or a bad pastor, but I watched UFC 60 tonight and it was worth every stinkin penny! To top it off, like I said before, my wife watched it and was as fired up about it as I was. I said I was pulling for Matt Hughes and to my delight, he dominated the 39 year old legend Royce Gracie by knocking his brains loose. It's one thing to be confident when you are the welter weight champion. It's another to be cocky when you are a has been. I know this guy was dominant back in his day (13 years ago), but he only fought 11 fights while Matt has fought 44. Anyways, I know I'm a psycho for watching this sport (yes it is a sport), but I feel much better now and am anticipating the July 8 fight between Tito Ortiz and Ken Shamrock. Once again, the champion against a has been with one too many breaks in his nose!

You know what I find kinda funny about this event, was how many Christians are in UFC. One guy walked into the ring to "Agnus Dei" with a t-shirt that said "Property of Jesus". Kinda cheesy if you ask me but interesting that they are actually Christians. There were two that were for sure Christians and another guy that prayed and thanked God. They all thanked God for the strength to fight (read: knock other guys' brains loose) which I found kind of comical for some reason.

I was intending on going back to the gym this July and seeing myself get all wound up over this fight I think I should consider going back a little earlier. I've got too much pent up energy and with planting a church I think I need a healthy release valve (before I start walking around like some UFC fighter named "Dan 'the wannabe' Richardson". It's just a little embarrassing seeing these huge guys that probably bench 200lbs like it's nothing and then going to the gym and barely being able to lift 25lbs and trying to look like I know what I'm doing. Oh well, it'll be better than being a fat pastor!

I've never had to think so hard in my life! 4 days of planning and strategizing for our new church. We had to write out our core values the "correct way" which took me forever! I thought I knew that I was a visionary leader with a weakness in the creating steps arena before this week. Now that it's over, I realize that what I thought was true about myself...is. I was the last person at my table when it came to planning out steps. We also had to draw a picture of our vision on a big poster and seeing I am the furthest thing from a graphics designer, I successfully confused everyone else as well as myself in our final presentation.

Despite all of that, I came away with a wealth of knowledge that I am not going to reveal until after our launch team meeting on Sunday night. Things are looking good.

I'm heading off to a church planters summit for the next few days and seeing it's out in the boonies, I doubt I'll have an internet connection. It's gonna be nice being out in the wild but a nightmare with all of my emails and junk I'll be behind on. Maybe it'll be a good wake up call to stop being such a geek and live life without my second true love: my laptop. I'll fill you in on the details when I get back.

Dream Huge!

It's confirmed, I'm watching UFC 60 next Saturday night on pay-per-view at my parents' house. I'm stoked! I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or not seeing I'm a pastor. Is it morally wrong to watch two guys beat the crap out of eachother? Someone else said this and I'm gonna jump on the bandwagon, "If they are two consenting adults, it's okay." Haha...I'm in. Personally I want Hughes to dominate but I"m a little worried that Gracie is too sly for the youngster Hughes (who, might I add, is a Christian - figure that one out! Maybe that's what makes it okay.)

Now here is the kicker. You would think my wife thought I was a loser for watching this and that I was a bad role model for my kids. But that's just not the case! She is as stoked as I am to watch these dudes rip eachother to pieces. In fact, I can't get her to shut up about it. Oh man, what a great church planting couple we make. I can just see our next outreach event now: "UFC 61: Get your fill of blood and broken bones and remember to check us out on Sunday." I'd go to that church for sure!

I've been mulling this over for the last little while and trying to figure out which we are going to be as a church. Is it wrong to want to be both? I want people to come to our sunday gathering and be creatively engaged in the story of God. I want people to be excited about it. I want us to think outside the box in our approach.

At the same time, I want us to be sent each week. I want us to see that we are the church and that you can't go to church. You can gather together as the corporate church, but you can't attend a church because it isn't a physical place. I want us to see that we are supposed to be Jesus with skin on. That every encounter we have with someone is significant. That Sunday should be the beginning of the week, not the end.

Many people would say that this can't be done. That you have choose one or the other. I'm not so sure about that and am going to attempt to do both. I'd like to see us not putting all our eggs in the basket of inviting friends to church to get them saved, but inviting them once we have led them to Jesus out in the marketplace so they have some sort of connection to a community of believers. Once they come, we don't want them to be bored. I'm tired of hearing that churches are the most uncreative places ever. Someone sings. Someone talks. We sit on hard benches. Read from books (hymn books...not bibles) that make no sense whatsoever. I wanna see us use our gifts to maximum potential and communicate in creative and innovative ways that engage the whole person. Will it work? We've just have to wait and see.

We've been trying to figure out how we are going to store all of our equipment with us having church in a theater and all. So far the solution has been to buy a trailer and just load and unload it every week. We were prepared to do that but I figured I'd shoot in the dark and ask the manager of the theater if there was any space where we could store our stuff. He then proceeded to show me a room under the stairs of the theater that we may be able to use that was fairly small but would do the trick. Then he took me over to this other room which he said no one used that much. It was huge! We won't need even a quarter of it but the fact that we get to store our stuff there is incredible! It will save so much time and headache each week. I can't believe it. I'm telling you, this dude is gonna get the socks blessed off of him. He won't know what even hit him!

Everything just seems to be falling into place. Now all we need is a whole wack load of cash so we can start right (at least start inside the theater and not out on the patio cause we don't have the money to pull it off!) I'm still confident that God will provide it.

I remember back to about 1.5 months ago and I was driving home from the church I'm at right now and I had this wave of faith sweep over me. I just started praying and blurted out "God, I know someone has this money and that they are looking for something to "invest" it in. Lead our paths to eachother." I've got 4 months to get this money. It will take care of our sound system, banners, website, drums, a year of rent in advance, and tons of other miscellaneous stuff. I'm just so glad that God is bigger than me and his dream is bigger than I can even imagine.

So I pull up to a gas station last night to pick up a slurpee and I see this lincoln navigator. If the wheels weren't sweet enough, I peered into the back window and lo and behold, I see 6 LCD screens (1 in each headrest, 1 on the dash and 1 one the console between the front seats) playing a Nelly video that is screeming through this dude's massive sound system. I ended up hanging up on my wife because he came out and we started talking. I told him I was a pastor and was planting a church in SilverCity Mission and was interested in creative forms of advertising. He went on to tell me that he was going to be putting two 27" t.v.'s in the back windows facing the outside traffic where he will hook up another DVD player that will have a presentation promoing his electronics company.

I decided to swallow my pride and asked him if he would ever consider letting me pay him to let us advertise in his truck. He wasn't too keen on the whole "religious thing" and I informed him we weren't a typical church, which he had already gathered from hearing it was in a crazy theater. We talked a bit about God and church and his kids and in the end, he gave me his card and we're gonna go out for coffee sometime next week.

Whether he lets us advertise or not, it was a cool connection that I didn't expect to happen. It's funny how when you are paying attention and open your eyes that you can run into the coolest people without even trying.

Well I'm not gonna go into all the details but we got the breakdown of our assessment today. Overall I'm pretty happy with the results. It was good to have verification of my strengths and also having my weaknesses exposed as well. I found it hard to defend myself because I had excuses but I don't think anyone is interested in those. Anyways, I'm so stoked for the months to come.

We went out to the theater yesterday to test for power and find out if it would be possible to have enough lighting for video cameras. I'm kind of adamant that we find a way to make this happen because I would like to go multisite as soon as possible. Before we do that, we will look into the possibility of linking theaters together and having a room for overflow, possibly even a full second gathering if we can pull it off.

As I stood at the front and just looked up into the seats (it's a different configuration with the stage being at the bottom and the seats teering their way up. It'll be different because the door is actually at the front of the theater, not the back, so there will be no sneaking in or out. We'll see how that works.) I felt like I was standing right where I was supposed to be. It just felt right and got super stoked thinking about when I get to start preaching regularily.

I think one of my favorite message series' is gonna be "beLIEve: 4 lies about Jesus you thought were true". I ripped off the beLIEve from my friend and then just came up with the lies. I think it will stir the pot but I'm excited to challenge people's preconceived notions of who they think Jesus is.

TXC has an amazing launch team! We've only been formed for the last few weeks but we have definitely got all four C's going on (Character, Commitment, Chemistry and Competence). Tonight we met to discuss the first half of the first practice from Andy Stanley's book "7 practices for effective ministry". The practice is 'Clarify the win' and so we waded through what a win will look like for our faith community as a whole. Next week we'll look at what a win is for individual ministries.

The premise of this practice is that in order for the staff and volunteers to know that progress is being made as a community, the win has got to be clarified. Just like the players on a baseball team understand that in order to win they have to put numbers on the board by getting around the bases and crossing home plate.

We came to the conclusion that a win for TXC has to coincide with our mission statement which reads: Becoming people who contagiously follow Jesus with their whole lives. How we measure if people are being contagious is by filtering them through each of our core values: Purpose, Generosity, Community, Adventure and Passion. I'll go over what these mean to us at a later time, but we will basically be able to see if we are winning in a broad sense by looking and people and seeing if each of these values is in operation in their life. If one is missing, they aren't as contagious as they should be and maybe we need to figure out how to get the percentage a little higher.

Anyways, I was quite pleased walking away from tonights meeting. I think we are going to see some amazing things take place in the coming months that we never thought were possible.

Dream Huge!


By the way, If you want to subscribe to our weekly update, go to www.livethemission.ca and you'll see the link on the front page.

That we passed our assessment! I'm stoked! Now everything that I'm dreaming about can become reality without there being any hesitation that I might get shut down. Now all the money that people give can be released so we can start on the process of puchasing the things that we need to get the show on the road. God is awesome and I just hope that everything that happens from here on out will lift him up in the city we will be reaching. That people won't see us for everything we've been doing but see something different in us that is contagious and points them to God. The adventure has officially begun!

Dream Huge!

Tonight is our visioneering meeting for the people of our mother church. It's not a recruiting meeting by any means. We just want to make sure that we cover all of the bases as far as communication is concerned. It should be just a casual evening of sharing vision, eating cheesecake and drinking coffee.

Oh the sweet sunshine. Today is definitely a gift from heaven. I'm thinking of starting a postmodern type of pastoral ministry where every meeting takes place on the golf course. I figure if all the high rollers can close deals on the course, so can I. Maybe the conversion rate will kick up a notch while I'm at it.

I have huge dreams and they are in the hands of others...or so it seems. I've found myself praying relentlessly the last few days reminding God (more like myself) that I give him my dreams. It seems to me like my dreams are in the hands of others because it's them that determine if the dream can become reality or not. What my human brain fails to understand is that God is in on this. It's actually not my dream but His. He's just been gracious enough to give it to me to be fulfilled at this time through my obedience. Many times I forget that the way I think things should happen aren't necessarily the way they should happen. Maybe there is a detour up ahead and I'm gonna have to take a different route or maybe it will happen the way I imagine it too. Either way, if this is in fact God's dream, it will happen.

I was reading from 1Cor.12 in my devotions this morning where Paul is talking about the fact that the Spirit gives certain gifts to people and not to others and vice versa. For some reason it made sense to me this morning. I've been a youth/young adults pastor for 7 years now and have preached every week for the most part of those 7 years. And the one thing I've always wanted to be was...funny. I got the bum wrap growing up as my brother is the funny guy and people are always gravitating towards him and telling me to "lighten up". Now I'm not sure if humour is a gift from the Spirit or if it's a personality thing (which I guess is a gift...) but I don't have it. It's not that I can't have a good time or laugh (at myself most of the time) it's just that I don't have that "on-the-spot-wit like some people do. So earlier in my mininstry days I would try and insert humor into my messages. Ya...that bombed. The worst is when you think a joke is soooooo funny and you tell it and you're laughing as you tell it and then no one laughs! I'd rather jump off the roof! So I've realized over the last few years that how I am wired is how I am wired. My strength is not in being Mr. FunnyGuy. My strength lies in Vision/Passion/Inspiration. I have found on occasion that my style turns humorous but only when it isn't planned. Those times I attribute to the Spirit using me in a different way for a purpose that is only known Him. I'm looking forward to leading my peers to contagiously follow Jesus with everything they are. Whether I'm funny or not, I'm clear as to who I am and for me, that's all that matters.

Our website has gone live. www.livethemission.ca Overall I'm pretty happy with it. It isn't as versatile as I would have liked as it is flash (which I know nothing about) and costs a fortune to keep updated. But I love the fact that the vibe you get from walking through our "front door" is somewhat the same vibe people will experience walking through the doors on Sunday. It's still in raw form as some of the pictures need to be updated and some of the text in construction phase. I'm just glad that we have something to point people to that doesn't suck as the buzz starts buzzing about what we are doing in September.

Bek and I had our assessment today. It wasn't quite what I expected. I think I was expecting questions that were very direct about behavioral issues that were more obvious (money, integrity, lifestyle issues, leadership style etc). Instead they were asked in a way that was vague and the assessors extracted what they were looking for out of my answers. I found it challenging just because I'd rather them ask me direct questions and I could then answer them directly instead of skirting around the issue. However, I think I did okay. I know I'm going to have a few yellow flags that I'll have to work out. This next few weeks is going to be interesting as I wait for the results. I'm not super patient when it comes to stuff like this. The results of this assessment will determine what route we take in planting this church. I'm hopeful that we are going to keep moving ahead at full speed like we've been doing the last few months. I know that God has given me this dream and passion for a new kind of church. It's in his hand now. That will help me sleep tonight.

Some good news...since our intro to the launch team, we've had two couples say they are in. We've had a few others say that they don't have time to commit to the launch team right now but once the church starts they want to be involved. I had another guy come up to me at church on Sunday asking if he could be a part of TXC. Interestingly enough I wanted to talk to him but decided not to just so that I couldn't be accused "cleaning out APA", even though i've been given permission to ask whoever I want. Anyways, he came up to me so i'm stoked. He got saved through AA over a year ago and is passionate about Jesus. He doesn't have any church history which I love. He just knows that Jesus is the hope that people are looking for...those types of people are who I want to be in this church...our launch team meetings officially start this Sunday night...it's looking like we'll have 7-10 couples involved...I'm not sure if that's good or not, but it's what we've got. The people that will come to the church as of now is around 50-75...we'll see what we can get to by the launch date. Tina (Kids Pastor) shared a little bit about her vision and passion for kids which was really good. It put a lot of the potential "launchers" at ease knowing that she was going to be the one in charge. She's going to be planning out the first year in advance which I'm excited about. She's going to be writing her own curriculum which I'm also excited about. As long as Jesus is being preached and the kids are extremely excited about coming back and inviting their friends, I'm happy. Our website should be up and running within a few days www.livethemission.ca...so stay posted...and pass it on.