Pulled Together

We had a great night with our student ministry Wed. night. We did an open mic night where I encouraged the students to share what God had been teaching them that they could pass on to the rest of us. There were some really good comments shared by the students and even more after we were done. It is awesome to see the students really taking ownership of their faith and responding to what they see God doing around them. They want to be a part of His mission! I'm excited to see them continue to grow and to see what God will do as more hearts are open to Him.

Last night followed that up with a good time with our small group. We haven't all been together for a while, so it was great to meet again. There was nothing too urgent on the agenda, but it was great just to get together to talk and pray together and to bring together some resources to send to a great ministry's (3:18 Ministries) Christmas project. It's awesome to be brought into community with people with a pretty wide range of backgrounds & interests to encourage each other as we join God in His mission, and to be pulled into His momentum.

God is on the move in our community of faith. He's at work to rescue what's been wandering... to find what's been hiding. Today as I sit here reflecting on what's been a pretty good week, I'm so thankful to be able to be a part of it.

Know God and Make Him Known

It was really cool this morning to see my 8 year old taking his Bible to school. He's not trying to make a statement or stake a claim to some 'right' he perceives himself to have. He just wants to read it. He's liking what he's reading.

Too many times, we in the church become so concerned with staking out our territory in the public sqaure that we lose focus on what's really important. We need to know God and make Him known.

Coldwater Apps

Last summer, our youth ministry did a mission trip called coldwater. Basically, we packed up a van, truck, and camper and headed to an unknown destination to do whatever work we could find - small acts of relief for people who matter to God. We won't be making that trip quite the same way this summer, but we will be incorporating the concept this year through 'coldwaters apps'.

We're applying the same attitude of service, and showing people they matter.

Tomorrow will be our first official coldwater app. We'll be fixing up a yard that needs mowed and weeded at 9:30. If you want to help, meet me at the church building a little before 9:30. Bring some work gloves or rakes or just yourself! Don't get bent out of shape if you can't make it this time; there will be more. Call me if you need some details. (But remember, this is still coldwater, so there aren't many details to go around!)

Sparks Fly!

Last night with our small group, we shared some of the ideas that are being birthed in our group regarding moving forward after last week's experience at Catalyst West. These aren't fully formed yet and some may take a while to become functional ideas, but here's a quick list of what may be...

-Writer's Group - Many students believe the wrong story about who they are. This could be a way to help some of them understand the meaning of their story and more effectively share those stories. When I started talking about this as a thing for high school students, the group quickly pointed out it could be a great thing community wide for adults as well. So true!

-Mission Trip to Arizona - Hi Tory! What could we do at Christmas?

-Pastor's Wives Group - What can we do to connect the wives of local pastors? Pastor's wives are incredible (especially that WestWay youth minister's wife!); what awesome things could God be doing in our area if this group could be drawn together for support and inspiration?! Hosting ladies for Lori Wilhite's web conference later this year can be a good starting point.

-Housing - We'd like to help with the local Habitat for Humanity again, and also interested in the possibility of working with something like Casas por Cristo in Mexico.

-Foster Care/Adoption - How many kids are in foster care in our community? What agencies handle foster care? How can we help them - not only housing kids, but offering respite for foster parents... "Does God want our family to adopt a child?" Don't forget to ask that question.

-Denver Rescue Mission - What could we be doing to help there (the largest city close to us)?

-People of the Second Chance - What are we doing to offer grace, hope, and help to people needing to be restored to wholeness? Recovery Groups/Redemption Groups

-Lots of us Blog and others are considering it - How can we leverage our blogs to best serve the kingdom and help people in our community see God at work around them, especially those who haven't noticed Him before? Maybe a Scottsbluff area aggregate blog or something similar? Tie-in with a new church website?

-Hospitality for visitors - Lots of little touches could be done in our facilities to help people feel more at ease/at home when they come to our building. i.e. shelves in restrooms, less empty wall space, signs within the building to help people find their way, signs in town to compensate for unfortunate building location (outside of most of the community's flow) - but also remembering a sign or wall hanging will never take the place of the personal care we provide as individuals who collectively are the church.
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Those are some of the ideas that were sparked by last week's conference. We're still kicking them around and obviously we can't tackle them all at once. But God is at work in our hearts and stirring some incredible thought. If you're a part of WestWay and have some thoughts about how these ideas can be fleshed out, give me a call or comment below and let's see which of these sparks we can "fan into flame" together!

To Change...

I'm the kind of guy who likes to change things up a little bit once in a while. Just got my hair cut drastically shorter for the simple reason that I felt like it. One of the recurring witticisms of my childhood was "You should always try new things." So here, I offer to you, several reasons you should embrace change.

5 Reasons to Embrace Change

1. It's working great in the church down the street. Hey, if it's good for the Baptists, it's got to work here, too! Right?

2. It's working in the mega-churches. They're big and successful because they changed, so it follows that if we make the same changes, we'll be big and successful too.

3. It will make us more relevant to the culture. The world is changing, so we have to change, too.

4. Any change is a good change. The Bible says to "sing a new song". What that means is that anything new is automatically better than anything old. Shiny new stuff replaces old worn out stuff. It's the natural order God intended.

5. We don't want people to get bored. We need to randomly alter important things every once in a while, just to keep things interesting.

6. It will get rid of the dead weight. If we change the right things often enough, it will tick off the people who aren't really committed to Jesus. They'll take their hymnals and go play somewhere else, then we can really get things going here.

7. God is the ultimate transformer. He's "making all things new," so we should be changing everything too, you know... to help God out.

Here's to shaking things up a bit...

Or not to Change...

I've noticed lately that we humans can be very resistant to any kind of change. Recent changes to facebook have definitely brought out the best in us! Altering the tempo of a favorite song has been known to induce spasmodic hiccups. A little tweaking of vocabulary is enough to cause great consternation. So I thought I'd offer a bit of a defense for those of us who like to see things stay the same. Coming soon to an anti-change bumper sticker near you:

7 Reasons to Resist Change

1. It hurts - and everyone knows, God's highest value is your personal comfort. If it's difficult, it must not be what God wants.

2. Someone might be offended. Even if it seems like a good idea, change is sure to ruffle somebody's feathers. It's just not worth ticking people off.

3. Jesus already has the attention of everyone in your area that He wants. Those thousands of people in your community who drift through every day without knowing WHY... they need to learn to adapt and do things our way.

4. Young people don't really matter in the Kingdom. Our generation is the one doing all the work and paying the church bills anyway. They'll come around when they grow up.

5. All that new-fangled technology just gets in the way of the pure message of God, which he hand delivered to us with ink and leather-bound paper, not pixels and screens.

6. Everyone looks so favorably on you already. If you changed anything now, they might think you had some flaws or something. And if you have any chinks in that shiny armor, who will they look up to to lead them in the next round of "Just As I Am"?

7. It won't work here anyway. Things like that may fly in California, but around here people just aren't like that. Why go through the hassle of trying when we already know it won't work out?

Here's to keeping things the same...

WWmark 4 - Commitment to Local Service as the Church

A lot of churches think of service projects for young people as ways to keep them out of trouble, keep them busy, or to make them earn their way... If they'll work, they can get a camp scholarship, or we'll make a donation to the youth room, etc. There are a couple harmful byproducts of this approach.

1. The service is nearly always tainted with ulterior motives.

"I'll serve in the clean up day because I need money to go on the ski trip." Now, I fully agree that an important value to pass on to next generations is to not expect handouts. But it is very easy for students to get the message that if they'll jump through the right 'service hoops,' then the church will 'bless' them with assistance. This is a dangerously deceptive attitude that is often projected onto God, leaving students feeling like they have to live a boringly religious life of obligation in order to gain God's favor. Nothing could be farther from the truth of grace.

2. The church becomes the only place to serve.

Students begin to see service projects as something they do FOR the church. The yards we rake are usually the yards of the older church people. The families we do free babysitting for are usually church families. The garages we clean out are usually owned by church people. We are definitely called to "love one another" in practical ways like this, but if our service stops at the church membership list, we're missing a vital component of God's mission to reconcile humanity to Himself.

At WestWay, we want our students to develop a commitment to local service as the church. A comment from Rick Rusaw has really been sticking with me the past couple months. He said that we need to seek to be the best church FOR our communities. That's what I want for our student ministry. I want our Scottsbluff High School, Gering High School, Bluffs Middle School, Gering Jr. High, Mitchell Jr./Sr. High, and Community Christian School to be better places because our Wind and Water kids are going there to learn AND TO SERVE. (I hope I didn't leave any of our kids' schools off the list - Homeschoolers, make your home a better place, too!) We need to see service as something that the church does for the community, not just something we do for ourselves.

Roadside Cleanup

Last night about a dozen of us went out and cleaned up trash on the roadside. We were assigned a stretch of road that actually includes the area right out in front of the church property, so that was pretty convenient. It's a funny thing, picking up someone else's trash.

I didn't make the mess...

It's not my responsibility...

No one picks up after me...

I'm challenging our students to look for practical ways to be useful in the community. It's not enough for us to just say that Jesus cares about people. We have to show them that we care. In the stretch of road that we covered we picked up a whole bunch of evidence that people don't care. People don't care what the community looks like - so they throw their garbage out the car window. There are so many other ways that people say they don't care about each other, about God, about even themselves.

To a world that doesn't care about anything, what does it say when the church says "We care."?

Deeper Than Teacups

It was really good this morning to hear Kyron (my youth minister in Jr. High) speak. Partially, it was just good to see him and his wife again, but also, what he talked about is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. It's one thing to pray on behalf of someone who's filled out a request card - it's another thing to pray with someone who's just poured out their need to us (or had them exposed despite their efforts to appear to be well). Kyron talked about the thought of us carrying the light of God to dark places by praying with people who are hurting.

A couple days ago, I finished reading Red Moon Rising, the story of the beginnings of the current 24-7 prayer movement (which is an echo of Celtic and Moravian prayer movements in their own days). The book shares the story of a bunch of people around the world coming into a desire to pray light into dark places. They've started prayer rooms that are covering the globe in prayer 24 hours a day, and going out into the world to love people like Jesus does.

I wonder, if the church really is as shallow as pop culture seems to perceive her, is that largely due to being out of rhythm with the heartbeat of God? Can we learn to pray in ways that lead us to rediscover the depth of His love for humanity? What will be the cost - and will we be willing to sacrifice?

I have a ton of questions churning within me about praying. I'm convinced that a lot of what currently passes as prayer is only scratching the surface of what God desires. I'm convicted that I personally have often relegated prayer to something other than my expression of total dependence on God. But I don't have a lot of answers.

I talked with my small group and with my students and a few other people about the idea of a 24-7 prayer room. What would it look like to do something like that in our valley? I even went and looked at a building that is for rent downtown that would work out pretty well. Is it in the budget? I don't know... What will the other leaders of the church think about this idea? We'll see... Will people actually sign on to this idea and come to pray for an hour to 'staff' the prayer room? I don't know that either... But I do know that in the past few weeks God has been fanning a flame within me that has a lot to do with praying creatively and missionally and leading others to deeper streams of prayer than the teacups we've settled for.

I'd really appreciate your prayers as I continue to process through all of this and find the way forward.

Producers 1

*This post is the first of a few of follow ups to last week's "Making Donuts" post.

"Our people must learn to devote themselves to doing what is good, in order to provide for urgent needs and not live unproductive lives."
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Last Sunday, I got to take a group from WestWay to a new church plant's launch service over in Laramie. The church plant is a great example of people who are making sure they're not living unproductive lives. Church planting itself is always exciting to me, but this plant in particular has some extra interest due to several factors:

1) It is in Wyoming, where I grew up. Many churches in WY seem to struggle (both with external, 'hard soil' issues and internal, 'stuck in a rut we created' issues) so it's exciting to see this new endeavor taking shape. I haven't lived in WY since I left for college almost 15 years ago, but I still have a heart for the church in WY.

2) My parents and brother are a part of the plant team. After 15 years in one place (which is by far a record) my dad closed his counseling center, sold his buildings and has moved the family. (The house has not sold yet, so if anyone is looking to move to Cody, WY let me know!) He and my brother have been playing with the worship band - with mom back at the sound board. I love that my parents are still willing to jump over the edge into another adventure with God. "Always try new things." right Brian?

3) WestWay is one of the supporting churches. Our people have been praying for the church plant. I'm hoping the close proximity and connections we'll develop will breed an excitement among us at what God can do through new church work and that their innovative approach will provide the "old dogs" of the area some new tricks to learn. Also, though we'll miss him and his guitar being on our stage, it was great to see Adam leading worship in Laramie and exciting to see him grow in his role in ministry there.

4) The church is making adventurous living a part of their DNA. As a new church, there is no pattern of placation to follow. They are there to take a new trail as God leads. This may lead them to make decisions that most churches cannot or will not make. Even their name is a reflection of this spirit of adventure: White Water Christian Church.

Things seem to be beginnning well for White Water. At the service, a lady and a couple early teen boys were sitting behind us. During a moment of introduction after some upbeat songs, the boys commented that they were surprised by seeing "that many people having fun... at church." Church doesn't have to be boring... Happy Birthday White Water. I'm excited to see God continue to work in you and your community as you live productive lives.

Tell Your Friends...

Local Teen Drinking Issue

I read this article today in the Star-Herald that shares some interesting statistics from Derek Weimer's first year as the Scotts Bluff County Attorney. Just thought I'd pass along the link, just in case you thought this stuff didn't happen in our nice little town... Read the article, but here's the one that stuck out most to me:

"453 minor-in-possession cases"

"'The MIP number ought to bother everybody,' Weimer said. 'Four hundred and fifty-three is an obscene number.' Combined with 80 cases of adults procuring alcohol for minors, Weimer said there is a serious problem in the community."