Back from Vacation

Well here I am back from vacation in Markdale, ON and Washington DC. Check out Facebook for the photographic highlights. I've learned/relearned a few things while being away:

1. Layla and her car seat are not friends
2. I love hanging out and dreaming with my wife
3. Canada does a poor job of honoring its heros
4. My love for good theology increases everyday and that love translates into a deeper love for God.

While away I took the opportunity to engage my mind in several podcasts (20+ hours in a car will do that to ya) and while in Markdale I read "God is the Gospel" which I'm sure many of you have read as it's standard WLA literature, being Piper and all, but it took me this long to get to it. I was so completely impressed with Mr. Piper's grasp of the Word and his obvious passion for it. The centrality of Christ is such a lost art form and one that everyday I want to learn more of and make more real in my life - personally and professionally.

Add to this experience the hours of Mark Driscoll podcasts that I listened to and, well, I'm just really loving the love God is giving me for his Word and for his Son. Its deepening. Its changing my passions. I pray that God will continue this regenerative grace that He's showing me and that as far as it is up to me I will be faithful to study and grow in love and knowledge of my Father.

Why I Love David Crowder

You've got to admit...

American's know how to create a sense of awe. I went today and saw many of the famous sites of Washington, DC. As I looked at the White House, Lincoln's visage, the Korean and WWII memorials I kind of wished I had some part to hold in it all. The history is so rich, so storied and dispite an overly high view of themselves you've got to give the American's credit...there is something to be proud of and they show it to the world BIG TIME. They are patriotic to the core.

In Canada we don't get this. I've been to Ottawa several times. Its ok but its not like Washington. We have things to be proud of. Even then fact that we won our independance without a fight...that's something to memorialize. But we don't. We don't invest into patriotism. I think its why we don't invest in our Olympic programs and why the Americans do. But now I guess I'm rambling.

You know, its not just countries that ought to be committed to honoring and remembering milestones. Families should. Churches should. So many significant moments go by without recognition. Why is that? I think often its because either we don't see enough value in it (Canada's problem) or because our pace of life has tings zooming by so quickly that we just let the opportunities slip from our hands.

Mel and I talked today about marking milestones and living life to create milestones. We really want to pursue the accumulation of significant experiences not things. And as we accumulate those experiences as a family we want to celebrate and remember them. Take pictures. Journal. Buy small but meaningful souvenirs and don't let them collect dust. Do ANYTHING that will help you remember the life you life with the people you love and create a "patriotic" passion in your own family.

Fall in Love

Isn't it completely obvious when someone is in love with someone? They have that doe-eyed look...the flutter about...they sing randomly. It's just obvious. It makes other people wish they were in love, doesn't it? This is the scene in many a move where the two girl friends get together after a romantic night before and the in love friend is gushing and the other somewhat less attractive but still nice friend says "oh, I wish I had that!".

Above every other thing we can do to shine is to be in love - with Christ. I was listening to a sermon last night and it hit me like a ton of bricks...am I obviously in love with Jesus? Do I talk about Him all the time? Do I flutter about because of the joy I have that radiates from our relationship? If I don't have that I don't have anything! The kind of joy that comes from loving Christ is the best light I can shine...it's the only light worth shining.

Let's try hard together to love Jesus more. Let's love Him more deeply by spending time in His word and understanding Him more. Let's love him more passionately by letting every joy in our lives eminate from His love for us. Let's be the best kind of light...the light that's produced by love.

Find a good piece of land

Analagous to the "let your light shine" is the "City on a Hill" metaphor. The point is, let people see you that they might glorify the Father, right? So, where you are is as important has how you are. A light under a bushel doesn't do any good and a city that isn't readily found doesn't do much good either.

So my question is, how strategic are you with where you settle down or spend your time? I don't just mean your house but just where you go in your day to day activities. Right now I'm sitting at this coffee shop in St. Thomas. I go to the same one every time hoping that I can build a relationship with the people who serve me and get a chance to share Christ with them. I try desperately to go to the same hairdresser all the time. Her name is Michelle...I want to invite her to Christmas Eve service.

I need to remember that my neighbourhood and everyone in it should be view the same way. I've got some interesting neighbours but I want Christ to help me to be helpful to them too.

So what about it? What changes could you make to ensure your light is seen and is helpful to more people who need to see the light?

Find a good piece of land

Analagous to the "let your light shine" is the "City on a Hill" metaphor. The point is, let people see you that they might glorify the Father, right? So, where you are is as important has how you are. A light under a bushel doesn't do any good and a city that isn't readily found doesn't do much good either.

So my question is, how strategic are you with where you settle down or spend your time? I don't just mean your house but just where you go in your day to day activities. Right now I'm sitting at this coffee shop in St. Thomas. I go to the same one every time hoping that I can build a relationship with the people who serve me and get a chance to share Christ with them. I try desperately to go to the same hairdresser all the time. Her name is Michelle...I want to invite her to Christmas Eve service.

I need to remember that my neighbourhood and everyone in it should be view the same way. I've got some interesting neighbours but I want Christ to help me to be helpful to them too.

So what about it? What changes could you make to ensure your light is seen and is helpful to more people who need to see the light?

Pay attention to the Little Things

How often do you look for litte ways to make the lives of those around you better? I know so often I get bogged down in the everyday stuff and forget that just a simple act of helping can speak volumes about the God I claim to serve. I challenge you to look today for just little ways you can go the extra mile. See if people don't notice. I bet if we did it consistantly that light would shine a whole lot brighter.

Stop being grumpy

I think I am grumpier than the average person. Sometimes I just don't feel like being around people. It rears its head at the worst times. For instance, I'll go to the grocery store and get up to the counter with a lovely cashier and just suddenly stop being socially interested and grunt my way through the transaction. I am certain that when I leave the till I've made the cashier's day worse and I certainly didn't help show her Christ.

We tend to think of Jesus command to be a light to mean that we need to do out of the ordinary acts of love and kindness. Although I think this is part of it I do think we miss many of the everyday opportunities to show his love in small tangible ways. Sometimes many small showings of love to a particular cashier, in amongst all of the grumpiness of the other customers, might just help to shine a light into their life that would illuminate her to the love of Christ. So, Tim, STOP BEING GRUMPY.

Where is our temple these days?

I had an interesting (at least I think so) thought yesterday. I was thinking about the Old Testament temple and the care the people took to make sure it reflected the majesty of God as best as it could. And then I wondered - what's the equivalent reflection of our desire to see God's majesty made known today?

As far as I can tell there are two possible outlets for this: the church or our bodies. It really depends on how you look at it. Either we look at if from a practical point of view and decide the church, the physical structure where God's people gather to worship is the equivalent or we take literally the biblical teaching that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and say that our bodies are the temple of the Lord. No matter how we look at it I think the North American evangelical community largely misses the opportunity to witness to the greatness of God.

I think most of us would agree that option 2 is the biblical option. But then are we living up to this reality? Are we seeing ourselves as temples? Are we doing our best to make the structure as well kept as possible? More importantly, in the heart, the holy of holies, are we working with the Lord to clean the dirty places of our hearts and allowing the overflow of our hearts to reflect the one who we say lives in us? It pains me to admit that I know I'm often not a great reflection of this. Recent studies would suggest that the average Christian isn't...we don't appear to be any different than those that aren't following Christ.

I think we as Christians need to be asking God more and more to make us look different. Help us to hate what God hates. Help us to loosen our grip on the material. Help us to shine a light that the world might see Christ and be attracted to Him. I think I'm going to try and come up with one way each day this week that this temple can reflect the glory of God better.

What ways is God calling you to be more accurate a reflection of His glory.

A message to Francis Chan: please continue to mess with my mind

So last Saturday I showed the WLA arts team a video that really messed with me in June. It was Francis Chan at the Willow Arts Conference. I recently read an article he wrote for Worship Leader Magazine in which he talks about how his church is trying to get back to a biblical model of church. Here's what he writes:

There are probably many of you who want your church to function like the early church, but how do we get there? Start with what you can control. In other words, start with yourself. It's wrong to blame others for the condition of the Church. And it's silly for leaders to blame followers.

The elders at Cornerstone (his church) started with what we could control. We can't control other people. We can't make the people at Cornerstone "break bread in their homes" or "sell their possessions". We also can't control God. We can't make Him do "wonders and miraculous signs" through us...I can however sell my possessions as others have need. I do have control over that, so that became our first step. As we do our part, we trust God to bring about the "awe" and "wonders" in His time.

It was a beautiful time of sharing as our elders laid "everything" at each other's feet. We surrendered the keys to our cars, homes, and bank accounts. I actually believed the elders who looked me in the eyes and said, "What's mine is yours. If anything ever happens to you, I will support and care for your kids as much as I would care for my own. I will be your life insurance."

He goes on to tell of how that mentality is now starting to spread in their church. WOW! How awesome is that! If we are to make God known through our love, how obvious must it be to those around them that they love God?

This is messing me up again. I realize how much I love my "stuff". I realize how much more I could do if I surrendered my stuff to God...sold some off to be more free to love and help others. I don't know what this looks like for me yet but I think I'm going to try it.

Jesus CAN'T be his friend...can he?

This is unreal. Probably the worst song I've ever heard (thanks Andrew :| )

To give you and idea...may favorite verse is:

Once I tried to run, I tried to run and hide
But Jesus came and found me and he touched me down inside (WHAT!)
He is like a Mountie (yes the red coat kind), he always gets his man
He will zap you any way he can. ZAP!

While we're remembering...

September 11th will always be different. The terrible tragedy at New York in 2001 is forever etched in our minds. It changed America. I changed Canada. I think it changed a lot of the world.

Everyone will be talking about it today. Here's a thought...as we remember that tragedy and pray for the families of those who passed on let's add in a prayer for the unnoticed tragedies happening today. For the thousands of children who will die from lack of basic nutrition. For genocide. Pray that God would use the events of 2001 to continually wake us up to reality of a hurting world and that he'd moblize the church to change it increasingly to be the kingdom he came to bring to earth. Remember them...and remember every injustice. Be righteously furious about it and commit to doing something about it.

Books without Pictures

If you've been around West London any length of time you've undoubtedly heard Pastor Mike crack this joke. He encourages to grab a book without pictures. What he means is read something theologically deep. Something challenging.

To be honest when I first got here I was very keen on this idea. Reading deep books was something I did in university and it was never very fun. You know what though? It's probably the best exercise I've been engaged in during my tenure at WLA. I've only read a few in two years but the ones I've read have literally changed my view of God and his Son and the Holy Spirit. The exercise has drawn me closer to the God I so desperately want to serve. It stretches my mind to ask tough questions about who God is and what he wants from us.

In a very real way the Word IS God and the Word WAS God. The Word became flesh. My relationship to the Word is directly linked to my relationship to Christ. The more I know about the Word the more I know about Christ. The closer I get to knowing the real Word the closer I get to knowing Christ.

So I encourage you...pick up a tough book about the Word. Don't be lazy. I know I tedn to be but as I'm discovering in all kinds of ways these days hard work is worth the pay off. In this case it's the best kind of payoff...knowing God more intimately. If you want reccomendations ask Pastor Mike...he's the king of books with no pictures.

Incidentally let me be direct with my female readers (boy I might get in trouble for this)...this is likely less appealing to you than some of the male readers. I don't know why that is but it's certainly not because you're not bright enough to make it through these books! The girls I know are incredibly intelligent. I think it's a left brain/right brain thing...but don't shy away from tough reading. Don't make excuses - try it. You might end up liking it!

28

I turned 28 today. I don't know that my age makes me feel much different but certainly a quick relfection on what's happened this year makes me feel different. Here are some things that have happened that make me feel different about life:

I'm a father
I've been more consistent in my time with God than ever
I'm praying more
I lost 20 lbs this year (55 in the past 3 years)
I feel more conscious of others
My passion for the lost has increased
I'm more stretched
I'm doing more about my passion for the lost
My heart has been broken by God more often

I'm sure there are more things to list but those are the ones that feel significant right now. I'm so happy. I feel blessed. I can only hope that God is as active this year as he was last year. Praise be to God for his abundant blessings.

Who's style is it anyway?

So the WLA arts team had a meeting on Saturday. We watched a great video from Francis Chan which I wanted to show to launch us into the new year thinking about how we can better reach our mandate of creating a church of joyful worshippers. Francis reminded us that although it's sin not to do the best we can for God there is more...effort is not enough. The point for us...let's pursue God first. Let's get on our face and recognize that it's only God who changes people and if we want a church full of joyful worshippers we need to seek God to do that. It's not our job to do it.

Close to the end of the meeting we got in a discussion about worship and style. I am not surprised by this as it seems to be the focus of most of the problems encountered by worship ministries. Always has been. In the 80s the discussion was do we move from hymns with piano and organ to a full time worship band with modern music. These days it usually has less to do with if we'll do modern music but much new stuff we do compared to the favorites of yester-year. This is a loaded question and one I think every church answers differently. As I said on Saturday I really think these conversations are missing the point a bit as I feel our selection of songs should be topically (lyrically) driven but the question does get asked and should get addressed. I think there are two things at play here - what's the stance and desired/believed mission of your church and what are you equipped to do. So for the sake of fleshing this out here is how I'd answer the question for us, today, at WLA.

I know that WLA is very committed to the entire body of believers. Young and old are equally valued and important to us. In order to facilitate worship for the whole body of believers every church who tries to do this makes compromises. Some churches choose to run multiple service or multiple sites/venues. This allows them to give people more of what they want. That philosophy can work. This is not the choice we've made up to this point. These days we're choosing to try and do services that makes compromises on both sides and hopefully creates a worship environment that gives everyone a similar opportunity to worship. It's true...we do music that is more modern than traditional. However, we make our best effort to put music from many eras into our sets - new music, older choruses and hymns. However, we also choose to tone down some of the newer music both in volume and edginess in order to be as broad in appeal as we can. I think it's important to remember both sides are making compromises every week. Maybe neither side is ever completely happy...but that's ok. People do need to always remember that worship is not about them...it's about the body worshipping God. It's God's honor we're primarily concerned about. Fortunately there is no biblically mandated worship music style that we need to adhere to. As long an our hearts are right and our theology is in check then God can be honored.

The second part is to do the best we can with what we have. Some of this is staff oriented and much of it is volunteer oriented. For instance, these days we don't have any hymn specialists active on the team nor am I aware of any who want to be active. To do an all hymns service on a regular basis we'd need people like this to pull it off well. Also, we don't have enough of the kind of musician necessary to do an all Hillsong United style service, just for instance. We have people how can, for a short time, do either of these things well enough to make it through a song or two but not to carry the weight long term. God has blessed us with a team of people who have a breath of talents,styles and abilities and as we select our music for worship and put together teams we keep this in mind. Fortunately it happens to support the view of worship the church wants to have for the time being.

I'd be daft in a post like this not to admit that the people who are selecting the music don't have influence in this. And yes it's true that 3 of the 4 worship leaders and right around the 30 mark and so fall into the younger half of our church. This is intentional as WLA is doing our best to rejuvenate the church and grow up new leaders. We are doing our best though to make sure these leaders are choosing from a large, broad list of songs. It's important to remember that if the list of leaders were a bit older we'd lean a bit more to the older side and thus the younger people in the church would be more dissatisfied than they are now.

So where does that leave us? I think it leaves us to admit that no one's philosophy will ever make everyone happy. Also, we must remember that God's glory is the ultimate goal here. Division in the body over music style does not achieve that goal. We're all making compromises from our personal desires and that's the way the body should be working together. As far as I'm concerned and my job is concerned I'm committed to doing my best to create an environment where as many people as can be welcomed into worship are welcomed. If someone is ever feeling like they can't worship at WLA I'd warmly encourage them to give me a call, send me an email or walk into my office one day. I'd love to hear from them and see what of their wisdom can be fused with that of the rest of the body to create the kind of worship environment we're striving for...the kind where God is glorified and His style is paramount.

Sola Gloria Dei

The fourth is like the 3rd

Community. You may think to yourself that loving one another is akin to being in community but I beg to differ. I think love is a command given to us by God and we have to obey it. Community carries more choice with it. So my prayer for love is more one that we would obey God more in his call to love. My prayer for community is that through common joy and struggle in serving at WLA we will increasingly WANT to be with each other, share with each other, pray for each other. I want us to WANT to do life together, not just be obligated to do so.

Prayer number 3: Love

Jesus said "By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another". One of my deep desires is that the Arts team at WLA would be a place where people find love and support. I believe it's the foundation on which being able to work together is built. I pray that we will increasingly be a group who loves one another in action and deed, bearing one another burdens and celebrating life together, and by keeping each other accountable. May God bless us with radical love for one another and for WLA and for London.

Prayer #2: Unity

I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. - John 17:22,23

This was Christ's prayer for us and for the sake of our community of faith I'm praying it for us as well.

First week of the new ministry year: what I'm praying for

This is the first week of the new ministry year for just about every church in North America and for me it feels like New Years. I don't really see January 1st as the start of a new year I see September 1st that way. So as I look towards this year I've got some things I'm praying for. I'll try to articulate them in order of importance this week but perhaps it will become to monumental of a task.

I do know what's most important and most pressing on my mind: that God would be so pleased as to send the Holy Spirit on our congregation in such a way that there would be a tangible difference in the people and congregation of WLA

I think talking about the Holy Spirit has become old school or something. It should be something we talk about more. When Jesus left this earth he said that it was good that he was leaving because only through his leaving could the Comforter come. In essence saying the Comforter is better than having me in person. Soak that in. It's good that Jesus is gone because now the Holy Spirit is here. I want desperately for the Spirit to come on us in power so that our church will be a place where there is no doubt that God is up to something amazing, for his glory. I'd be pleased to know there are others praying for the same thing.