WHY I LOVE THE CHURCH YOU HATE

Please read my blogpost on "why I love the Church you hate!" It's my heart in prose. It's personal and passionate, and I hope it captures your heart as well:

http://www.patrickgrach.com/2014/04/why-i-love-church-you-hate.html

Being Jesus in OUR Community- notes from Exponential Conference

Incarnational Ministry, by Michael Frost (author of several books including ReJesus and well-known missiologist)

Just as Jesus was God incarnate (in the flesh) to the world, we must incarnate Jesus into our communities.

How do we live incarnationally in our neighborhoods to reach people with the Good News of Jesus?

1. Listen to your neighbor- take to to both talk and listen. Listen deeply. 
2. Say YES to every invitation to engage your community and neighbors. If they invite you in, go in. Invite you out, go out. Don't avoid interaction with community.
3. Say “we will serve you” and mean it and do it!
4. Be a doggedly-loyal and intimately committed presence of God to your neighborhood and community. This commitment is the leading influence of Christian impact. We need selfless, caring, grace-filled believers to add salt and light in our communities.

My personal take-away is the re-affirmation of a passionate appeal that I often articulate regarding church- BE THE CHURCH! We don't go to church, attend church, or do church. We are the church. We live, gather, scatter as the church. I love the concept that church is a verb not a noun. 

Demystifying Leadership of The Church- Lesson 7 from 2010

Lots of people rightly complain that too many churches identify leaders based on an American political model. So, they'll say, "the church is full of and run by politics!" Agreed! And most of us hate politics in the church. Politics means that leaders are identified for these type  of reasons:

• influence: a person has influence in business, government, or finances SO we give them influence IN the church,
• popularity: a person is popular and everyone likes them SO they should be in leadership,
• the vast majority of people in the church like the person or vote for that person So they should, by virtue of democratic vote, be in some type of leadership,
• secular leadership: a person is a leader elsewhere SO they must be able to lead in the church,
• money: they give lots of money SO let's give them a voice for how that money should be used.

Okay, you read that list and could probably add lots more to it. But the point is, that we hate politics and hidden/ false agendas within the Kingdom of God.

So, how does the Bible state the leaders are identified? Let's Demystify the Leadership Code in The Church:

• Spiritual Maturity: Paul tells Timothy that leaders in the Church should not be novices, young and immature in their relationship with Christ (1 Tim 3:6). Maturity is not measured by years but spiritual growth, in essence, is a Jesus-follower a reading the Word, in prayer, and multiplying by sharing and showing God's love with others.
• Character: people who are growing in the Character of Christ can be entrusted with influence and leadership. The Church can only give influence to those who exhibit growing Christ-like character, and must remove from leadership those who consistently demonstrate a lack of character and are unteachable or unwilling to repent (1 Tim 3).
• Competence: obviously a person must be capable of either leading now or learning to lead, in order to be a leader in a particular area of the Church. This means they have the capacity, giftedness, desire, and willingness to lead well (Romans 12),
• Calling: along with giftedness, a person must have the heart or passion from God to lead. People don't ask to lead, they are asked by God to lead. Ephesians 4 makes it clear that God gives to the Church the gifts of Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors and Teachers for the equipping of the saints...
• Faithful: leaders prove themselves by being faithful in lesser areas of responsibility and influence. If a person is unwilling to do the unnoticeable tasks, they won't be faithful in areas of greater influence. Jesus taught that within His Kingdom, those who are faithful with little will be entrusted with much and vice versa. Luke 16:10-12.
• Fruitful: a person could be all of the above and still not be a leader, if they are not fruitful. Seed that lands of good soil, in Matthew 13, produces a fruitful harvest of 100, 60, or at least 30 times what was sown. We can recognize leaders within the Church by those who take the "little" that has been invested and given to them, and they produce "much" with it. They share and show God's love. They make disciples and lead people to Jesus. They develop others into servants of Christ, leaders in the Church, and help others grow.

There it is! Those ware the demystified keys of how we identify leadership within The Church according to the Bible?!

The WHY behind "Don't Go to Church" Sunday

In case you're curious...

Here's NOT why we said, "don't go to church" on Sunday, October 31st:

• to save money- we didn't do this to be cheap or try to save on expenses. We believe reaching people for Christ and leading people in life transforming experiences on Sunday mornings are worth the investment,
• to get out of the theater- we like meeting in rented facilities that gives us the flexibility of keeping our focus on reaching the unchurched and serving our city by showing and sharing God's love. Meeting in the theater allows us to do that.

Here's the BIG whys behind why we lead Lifehouse to "don't go to church":

1. To say "YES" to God. First and foremost, this was a God-led idea. We didn't come up with this in a planning meeting. I had been sharing some ideas with our team that I felt God had placed on my heart, but I kept wrestling with them, and finally shared that it wasn't the right timing. However, i also expressed that there was something BIG that God wanted us to do to conclude the Bare-Naked Faith series, but I didn't know what it was. The next morning, in our staff prayer meeting, Lois Quesenberry shared an idea and my spirit leapt. I said, "That's it! That's the thing God wants to do." That's the genesis of the life group Sunday. It happened on a Tuesday, we announced on Sunday. When God calls us to respond, I've made a commitment to always just say "YES!"
2. To teach Lifehouse and our community that we DON'T GO to church, we ARE the Church. Church isn't a location, a building, or a Sunday morning experience. The Church is people gathered through their common faith in Jesus Christ for the purpose of worship, spiritual growth, building community, and sharing the Gospel with unbelievers,
3. To model our commitment to taking bold faith-risk steps. We, at Lifehouse, will do WHATEVER IT TAKES to teach and lead people to being devoted Jesus-followers,
4. To break us out of our routine of Sunday morning "church". Sometimes we need to be shaken out of routine. Even good routines can lose their effectiveness if we forget why we're doing them. So, Lifehouse's leadership takes bold, God-led steps to mix things up, surprise you with creativity, and catch you off guard with how powerful the Christian life is everyday,
5. To empower our life groups and leaders that they can effectively lead a life- transforming worship experience in their home,
6. To tease our community and Lifehouse with fresh ideas. I don't know if we'll lead a "Don't Go to Church" Sunday again, but I do know that we'll continue encouraging people to meet in homes for life groups. Who knows? We may even develop an idea of launching video church campuses in homes all around this region... Who knows?

Thanks for understanding the "why" behind the "what".

pastors in prayer

Started today off by meeting with a group of pastors for our weekly prayer gathering. These are pastors from a variety of denominational and theological backgrounds but who share a few things in common:

• we believe in the Bible wholly and fundamentally,
• we believe in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior,
• we believe that the Church has been commissioned with the Gospel and is the only hope of the world,
• we believe that we, as churches and leaders, are more powerful and effective together than we are apart,
• we believe in the power of prayer,
• we believe that we agree on more than we disagree,
• we believe that unless we unite and serve together the Church will fail and continue to slide towards irrelevance and stale religion,
• we believe that our prayers and unity of faith will matter for eternity so that the population of heaven will be different because we got out of bed and prayed.

What are we praying?

• renewal of our city- true transformation to sweep through this region that will lead to physical needs being met, less crime, more caring, communities serving one another, and a significant drop in corruption,
• The Church- that The Church would be unified, powerful, and effective in both showing and sharing the Gospel of Jesus with a city desperately in need,
• salvation of those who are far from God- that the many who don't know or follow Jesus would be reached and discipled into true Jesus-followers, not so we can have more converts or fill churches, but that their lives would be rescue from the grip of sin and their souls freed from the bondage of hell, and that each person in our city would discover the eternal life of Jesus Christ,
• holiness- that we, as pastors, would live God-honoring lives, and in turn, those who profess Jesus as their Lord, would begin to live more like Jesus- in word and deed.

Ok, we're praying tons more but those are just a few things that are weighing on my heart as we pray.

Thought I'd take a moment and share.