Porpoise Driven Life?
November 25th, 2009A friend of mine posted this on Facebook. It’s totally absurd but very funny. If you need a laugh and have less than two minutes to spare it’s worth it.
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Coolest Thing I’ve Ever Seen in Church
November 24th, 2009Every church talks about how the ministry they are doing is “not about building up our church” and that it’s about God’s Kingdom. For the most part that may be true but quite often (in my experience anyway) most churches usually function on their own and separate from other congregations in the same community. That it’s about God’s kingdom but we would never help that other church over there.
The church we’ve started getting established with after our transition out of ministry is a very small congregation. Over the past number of years it has gone through a couple of splits and had some very serious issues. It is a very small congregation at this point. The average Sunday attendance is probably in the 45-50 range.
They hired a new Senior Pastor about three years ago and hired a second full-time pastor at the beginning of this year. These two gentlemen are doing an incredible job leading the church forward, helping shape the vision and structure of the church and facilitating healing from the past.
One of the really cool things they are doing is creating and leading in opportunities for multiple congregations in the city to work together on a number of projects. Between partnering with other churches to host community meals or jumping at every chance to take part in city wide worship experiences, they are trying to cultivate the attitude of being one congregation within a larger church instead of trying to be the only church.
There is currently a new and very small church plant in the city that is home church based and run in a very needy area of the city. There is no denominational affiliation with our church but our church invited them to have a joint service. We shared our facilities, the sermon for the morning was a joint effort and then we all had lunch together as well. It was a great morning.
Now, here’s the really cool thing. Keep in mind we are a church of approximately 50 people with two full time staff. We have a building and all the costs that come with that so money is super tight. At the end of the service our pastor turns around and hands the other church’s pastor a cheque. My mouth hit the floor. The other pastor looked incredibly surprised and was quite overcome by the gesture.
I have no idea how much that cheque was for. To be honest it doesn’t matter. In all my years of church attendance I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve heard how it’s not our church’s money and blah blah blah. I’ve seen churches send large amounts of money overseas or far away. But I have never seen a church give money to another local church just to bless them and help them in their ministry. To acknowledge that they have the potential to reach people that our church can’t and to help them do it rather than build up and protect our own group of people.
This simple act of showing (not saying) that it’s about advancing God’s kingdom by any means possible, even if it means supporting a neighbouring (or some people might say competing) church was one of the things that cemented my decision to get involved with this community.
I Hate Typing
September 16th, 2009Hey all.
So here’s the scoop. I’ve been thinking about a lot of things and have a lot of things I’d like to say here on wanting-more but as the title states I hate typing.
I thought to myself “I own a recording studio for crying out loud. Just record what you want to say and put that up.” Not really switching it to a podcast as I’d like to occasionally type somethings. So I’ve spent a chunk of time the last two weeks figuring out how to best implement this in WordPress and it was going to be too big of a pain and probably cause me to have to change my web hosting package. Not really interested in all this.
Then it was pointed out to me I have a camcorder. Why not do video posts then embed them from Vimeo or Youtube. I could even do it from my iPhone and upload from there.
While I really don’t like the idea of my face being on here it will allow me to share my thoughts a lot easier, quicker and without all the poor grammar. I do a lot of work with a video producer so overtime I might work on making it higher quality but we’ll see.
Don’t worry they won’t be long videos. Just short 2 minutes clips. It will probably be quicker to watch then to read. So over the next few days I’ll try it out and see how it goes.
Blessings
On a side note I just noticed according to the spell checker in WordPress, WordPress is spelled wrong.
Discussion
September 2nd, 2009There is an intersting post over at Fred McKinnon’s blog titled Who Needs Church. He asks some interesting questions and is asking for dialog so I thought I’d send all of you over there.
The timing is kind of ironic to me since I’m about half way through Frank Viola’s book Pagan Christianity.
Now go join the discussion!
(re)Joining the Conversation
September 1st, 2009Well I hope everyone is out enjoying their summer. Wait….what?!?!? It’s September 1st?!?!?!? It’s quite cold outside?!?!?!? School started today?!?!?!? But… But…. But….. there’s nothing we can do to change it?
Every year around this time we all start saying that summer just flew by faster than any other summer. Apparently summer is once again defying the laws of time and continuing to speed up.
It was an interesting summer for me and my family. I said bye to a grandma and a young man I use to spend a lot of time with. I realized how fast my children are growing up as I watched both of them learning to swim and my son play his first season of t-ball. During my baseball games I once again displayed a wonderful and positive attitude (note sarcasm). I grew an extra limb in the shape of an iPhone. I became busier and busier with work as my business continues to grow but am wearing down a little as lots of it is not in the core area I want to be focusing on. (Not that I’m complaining. Lots of people are without work all together right now and I realize how blessed I am to be working steadily as a full-time freelance artist).
As a family we decided it was time to once again begin committing to a family of believers and we chose a congregation we were going to investigate and begin worshiping with. We promptly followed that up by missing four Sunday services in a row. Oops. (I’ve missed more Sunday worship times in the last 7 months than I have in the last 10 years)
It’s now been 7 months since I finished my time in paid ministry. In some ways it seems like yesterday I was done and other ways it seems like ages ago. Some of that time has been spent in lowly places filled with struggle and resentment. However, I “tweeted” the other day that I’ve been feeling some rumbling in my spirit (For those of you that replied to that tweet I mean spirit not stomach). I am all about doing things full out, 100 percent and wanting to do them as correctly as I can and since I left paid ministry I’ve been having troubles figuring out how that works for me in my journey and as we look at getting seriously connected to a church somewhere. I am in no way saying you need to be staff at a church to be full out for God or the church, not in the slightest. But I’ve spent the majority of the last 10 years leading in some form or another on staff at a church so I’m trying to figure out my place.
So I’m declaring right here and now that I want to rejoin the conversation. I want to regain the passion in my faith and spiritual walk and do my part for God’s kingdom. I want to be part of the larger church community as we together wrestle with what a journey of faith looks like and how the church is called to minister to the world. I want more (sorry I know that last sentence was pure cheese).
