We are working through redefining our people’s idea of what the church is at the same time kicking off opportunities for them to be the church Monday - Saturday and come together to celebrate and worship God together as a collective body on Sunday’s. I was looking around the web and found a church that is doing a similar idea called “Life Houses”. Epic City Church is also a doing a message series that is close to what we are doing soon and I can’t wait to see how they have done. Anyways, they use a great verse that we have over looked in Acts 5:42.

Acts 5:42 (NLT) “And every day, in the Temple and in their homes, they continued to teach and preach this message: “The Messiah you are looking for is Jesus.”

Why have we not done this before? How could we have over looked this passage for so long? I have noticed that some of the greatest golden nuggets in the Bible are found in little short passages like this one, but I have over looked them so many times and need to learn my lesson. Robbie is reading a book called The Present Future and he was saying that in it the guy who wrote it tries to prepare you for less, less people, less offering, less stuff to do. Is the (C)hurch, universal, afraid that if we begin to operate in homes and become what God had intent the church to be according to this verse we would have less funds to operate on, less people every week, less staff to run the lesser ministries we offer and do? A lot of people are saying be the church. But are we doing a good enough job of casting the vision that God has given for His church to His people? How can we better explain this idea? How can we live this idea? At Beachside we are giving our people the beginning ideas that we have for how to accomplish what we are calling mychurch. The first part of Robbie’s message on “mychurch” can be downloaded here

A lot of people are writing about an autistic high school senior in New York who has been the basketball team manager all four years of high school and who was asked by his coach to suit up for the final game. With 4 minutes to go the coach put him in. In those 4 minutes after missing his first two shots scored 20 points. It is a great story and one we should all share in his great day but maybe we can learn from it. When he is put into the game the crowd goes wild. And after each shot the crowd and the team goes nuts, they get crazier and crazier till he hits a three pointer at the buzzer then they rush the court and through him up on their shoulders. Its amazing to watch, check it out for yourself.

What can we learn from this situation? I think we have to be great cheer leaders for all our volunteers and staff. Are we going nuts when they hit one out of the park for the kingdom? Are we standing there cheering them on as they are accomplishing all that we want them to? Are we even cheering them on and helping them be better at the things that don’t come out the way we wanted them to? Watch the clip and get inspired to the biggest cheer leader on your team.

I am finding myself relearn how God deals with me. As I look around me and hear of how God deals with others on this joureny of life and more specifically of ministry I see that He deals with everyone differently. This is kind of a revelation to me because I had thought that He dealt with us more or less the same. I thought I had seen that but of course that is looking at it from the outside. As long as we focus on Him histocially taking care of His people and Matt. 6:33 (NLT, Message, NASB) we will be ok.

Tell me your story of God dealing with you in the area of Him working out His will for you.

Here is a link to a wiki dictionary of Emerging Church vocabulary.

Strategic Public Relations has written a neat blog post about using Flickr and web sites that utilize flickr for all kinds of different applications. It’d defiantly a worth wild read.

This week we are starting our new message series title mychurch. Part of it comes off the success of myspace and the community that it has created and the other part is a the church being the people not a build and that we are all priests and have different gifts that can be used in other ways that that might not able to be used in the gathering. Robbie is going to talk through passages like Romans 12:1-2, Acts 2:42-47, 1 Peter 2:1-12 and 1 Corinthians 2:1-7.

I have been reading the book The Shaping Of The Things To Come by Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch. And in the book they quote Tom Sine talking about church planning. He says, “every denomination and religious organization that I have worked with does long-range planning. Ironically, they do long-range planning as though the future is an extention of the present… As a result, we are chronically surprised by change. In the future we can no longer afford this luxury.”

What can we learn for this? How can we look at the future and plan for it and not as if we are planning for the present? What are elements of long-range planning that we need to take into account when planning for the future? If we plan for growth do we need to take staff, space, parking, child care and resources into consideration? What other ways can we do long-range planning and not be surprised by the changes the future holds?

There seems to be a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the notion of open source church resources. My friend Chris has talked about it, Matt Payne a church planter in Bethany, OR mentioned it today. Bob Hyatt puts Evergreen’s PowerPoint back grounds on his blog. Are there reasons not to share what we have created to further the kingdom of God? Should churches sell these resources to recoup the costs to create them; personnel, computers, audio equipment, web server space, software? To me the answer always comes back to motive. What is your motive behind selling your resources? What are your motives for giving them away? Personally I am going to work to give more of mine away. I paid for my computer to use it to further the kingdom where ever God want to use me. I spent the time to create them and I have used them for my purpose so why not share them once I am done?

Is your church or are you doing anything that you could share to help further the kingdom as a whole and not just your little piece of it? Could it be a postcard you designed, an experience you have going to two projection screens, or what tools you use to record, edit and publish your weekly messages? Whatever resources you have can you not afford to share them with others trying to save those lost from God’s love and forgiveness?

My friend Chris turned me on to markdown. So I looked into it and its benefits and decided that I would give it a shot. Markdown is just another way of writing HTML but simplified. John Gruber wrote markdown and the syntax and even has a page where you can practice writing markdown. Thanks John!

I have had some fun writing this post in markdown and learning something new today.

We finished our some what controversial teaching series, Desperate Sex Lives with Robbie teaching on forgiveness.  When have sinned against our body, against of wives or against God sometimes we turn inward an think they can’t forgive us and we just go on continuing to sin.  Unless we change our image of who God is we will never see that He is willing to take us back no matter what we have done.  Robbie taught from Jonah 2 this week and Jonah’s different responses to his sin and God and he retold a story we so often forget, the prodigal son.  I am always so amazed by this parable.  We way to often forget when we sin that God so desperately wants to have a relationship with us that He is there waiting and watching for us ready to except us back and bring us in and party like its 1999 because what was once lost is now found.  Forgiveness, it is what makes God so different from man and I think one way we can see that He is real, no man could have ever created a God like this and if you look back to all the man made gods they have nothing on the God of the Bible.