The day has arrived. I’m in my last hour as a staff member at Christ The Rock. The journey here has been crazy. Megan and I have learned and grown so much over the past 3 years. People ask me how I’m feeling and the best answer I can come up with is surreal. It hasn’t fully sunk in yet that I’ll walk out of here on a Friday and on Monday I’ll be moving into my house in Peoria. It’s a crazy mix of emotions- one moment I don’t really want to leave and the next I can’t wait to get to Peoria.

The CTR community has been incredibly encouraging to us and it is so good to have their blessing as we go. We feel that in a way we’re being sent out from here. Words on the screen hardly do it justice.

But I’m incredibly excited about starting at Imago Dei and getting to work closely with good friends. I’m overwhelmed with the goodness that God is showing me…I don’t deserve to have a job that I love so much. 

Thanks to everyone in the Appleton area who has been a part of our lives for the past 3 years. Stay in touch.

Grace and peace.

My lack of blogging lately has been partially due to laziness but also partially due to not being able to write about some big things that were in the works. But this week our big news officially went public so I’m incredibly excited to announce that I will be going on staff at Imago Dei Church in Peoria! This means that Megan and I are moving back to the area in Illinois we’re originally from! While we’re really excited about this new journey ahead we are sad to be leaving Christ The Rock. We have grown a lot as people and we love the church. It has really become home for us. But we know that Peoria is where God is calling us now.

So here’s the story behind the announcement…

Megan and I were born, raised and married in the Peoria area. We moved to Appleton six days after we were married in August of 2005 because I had just gotten a job as the Graphic Arts Coordinator at Christ The Rock. But for the past year and a half or so when we would go back to our hometown our eyes were being opened to a lot of the hurt and the need for restoration in that area. We had a few conversations about what it might look like to start a new church in Peoria but we thought that if it ever happened it would be at least 5-10 years down the road. And in the back of our minds we thought it would be really cool if our friend, Charlie (former blogger), would be the lead pastor. It was an idea that would come up every once in a great while but in all honesty, I’m not sure that I really believed it would ever come to life.

Then at the end of last year I got an e-mail from Charlie announcing that the community of people which made up his small group had decided to take the leap and plant a church. I remember reading that e-mail and my jaw just kind of dropped. I instantly knew that this raised questions for Megan and I about where God would want us. I e-mailed Charlie right away and let him know that we would be praying about if this meant that God was calling us back to Peoria. A day or two later I got a phone call from him and we talked about their plans for this new church and Charlie told me that he had been telling people that I was the first person he wanted to hire. Now I about had to about pick my jaw up off the floor. God was clearly up to something.

So a few months went by and March came around. Megan and I drove back to Peoria to celebrate the public launch of Imago Dei on Easter Sunday with our friends. I think after experiencing that first Sunday with them we knew that we would end up back in Peoria sooner than later. But again, I figured it would take a few years for the church to get off the ground and be financially stable enough to hire me.

Then about a month ago Charlie and I had a conversation and he said it was looking like they might be ready to hire me this summer. So Megan and I prayed about it and I talked to a pastor at CTR who has been a mentor to me for the past few years and God kept confirming over and over that this was the move to make. A few weeks ago we went down to Peoria and spent some time with the Imago leadership team and really enjoyed that time (although it was way too short!). So now it’s official. As of September 1, I will be on staff at Imago Dei.

Of course the first question everyone asks is, “what will you be doing?” And my answer is usually, “Well, it’s a church plant- so a little of everything.” But my main roles will be leading music, creating graphics, developing/maintaining the website and church database and also being a part of the leadership team providing vision and direction for the community. I feel incredibly blessed and humbled that the Imago team is inviting me to be a part of leading their community. It’s going to be very challenging but I’m excited to see all the ways that God will provide for and grow this new community of believers. And I’m sure my job will flex and shift as the community grows.

So pray for Megan and I as we transition. Pray that the transition from Christ The Rock would be smooth and that they find someone to take my place quickly. Pray for Megan and I as we buy our first house. And also pray for Imago as this is a leap of faith form them as well as us.

I can’t wait to start this new journey. I’ve already spent quite a few nights laying awake thinking and dreaming about new ways to do worship through music, how Imago might engage the Peoria community and other creative ways to bring the kingdom of God to Peoria.

So that’s the short version of the story but this is only the prologue.

• What’s In A Name?
• What We’re FOR
• Everything
• Imago Dei Church, Week 1
• and lots of other good stuff in the Imago Dei cagetory…

Last week I was in Kansas City and had the chance to attend Jacob’s Well. I was going back through my notes and this quote jumped out at me again:

The gospel often gets preached as “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” So we wait for this “plan” to kick in and fail to realize that knowing God is the reward.
-Tim Keel

I’m in Kansas City this week attending the Intuitive Leadership conference with Tim Keel and the Everything Must Change Tour with Brian McLaren.

Tim’s conference ended this morning. It was a small conference but a really great discussion about what leadership looks like in a post-modern world. My notes were very sporadic so I’m just posting a few highlights that jumped out at me. They may or may not make sense without the context they were in.

• We have a fundamental assumption that when we are engaged with God things are stable.
  God allows the Israelites to be defeated because he’s more concerned with them being engaged in reality than in their assumptions. (1 Samuel 4:1-11)
• Sometimes our assumptions about God keep us from engaging from God in reality.
  God has a profound commitment to reality- not sentimentalism.
• Being lost is not a location- it’s a transformation. It can happen in the woods, but it can happen in our churches.
• “When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.” (a quote from someone)
• We are facing a profound crisis of imagination in the church
• “contemporary service” doesn’t mean what’s happening right now- it’s what was happening in the late 80’s (ha!)
• Emerging church is the next thing in a long list of tricks in order to try and re-orient
• We live in a culture that is all about duplication. When something is successful it is duplicated and immediately deprived of it’s wildness.
• In the western church the greatest sin is heresy. In the eastern church it’s schism- the breaking of fellowship
• The most acceptable form of idolatry in the church is ministry.
  We celebrate ministry more than the organic community that Jesus describes.
• Fruit is the byproduct of an organism deeply connected with it’s environment.
  Trees don’t make fruit happen and they can’t stop it from happening.
• Context and culture are lenses through which we look at Gospel and theology.
• The Gospel is an alternate narrative about what the reality of life is.
• The Gospel in Modernity:
  The acceptance of right content that secures your status positionally after you die.
• The Gospel in emerging:
  scope: Creation (how do we work with God in His process of renewal and the salvation of all things?)
  The Location: community of God’s people
  Position: instead of “in and out” we’re more concerned with “near and far”
  we look for signs of life and where God is at work in everyone
• The post-modern means of engaging the Gospel is hospitality.

Ben Folds
Originally uploaded by soundxposure

I have to say that so far our Lent commitment hasn’t been terribly difficult for me. In fact, I’ve wondered a few times if I should have given up something else.

But then UW-Oshkosh announced that Ben Folds is coming on April 17. Now if the show was in Milwaukee it wouldn’t tempt me so much. But it’s 20 minutes away!

You have to understand that Ben Folds is one of my all-time favorite musicians. I think he is one of the best song writers of our day. His music is largely what made me interested in playing piano when I was in jr. high/high school. I was lucky enough to have a piano teacher that could figure out songs by ear and then write up music for me and Ben Folds was one of the few people playing pop music on the piano. Remember the song “Brick?” (Technically it’s Ben Folds Five, but it still counts.) I can still play most of that on the piano today because it’s ingrained in my memory from playing it so much.

And Ben Folds is probably the only musician that Megan and I get equally excited about. For the most part we don’t mind each other’s music but there aren’t many bands that we’re both really “into.” But when Ben Folds comes on in the car we both sing along.

4 or 5 years ago, when we were dating long distance, Megan called me at work and said that she was driving up to Milwaukee (a 4 hour drive) with some friends because Ben Folds was playing. I cancelled my other plans for that night and drove down there (2 hours for me) and we enjoyed the concert together. I would say that it was one of the best shows I’ve ever been to.

So that is why it is really difficult to hold off buying tickets. If I wait and the show is sold out by Easter I will be quite devastated. It’s tempting to just buy them and then ask for forgiveness later. Terrible thought, I know- but don’t pretend something like that has never gone through your mind.

The worst part is that I know what the right thing to do is. I know there is a lesson about trusting God in this. But I want to wait and learn that lesson later- after I see Ben Folds.

Dan Allender (author and president of Mars Hill Graduate School) is doing a morning conference at Christ The Rock this weekend and we just got in some materials from him that we’ll be making available. One of them was a brochure about Mars Hill Graduate School and this quote from Dan was in there:

“If you don’t need the Gospel more than the people you’re sharing it with, you ought not be sharing it with them.”

I’m looking forward to hearing from him this weekend…he always brings good stuff!

I mean, yes, Megan and I have made significant changes in lifestyle over the past year or so. Many of them so that our lifestyle has less impact on the environment.

But really, it’s not about the environment. It’s about people. It’s about being aware of how the choices I make affect other people- even if they’re people on the other side of the planet.

So when we go to make a purchase, the bottom line isn’t simply the price. And it isn’t the quality. There are a whole bunch of questions we roll through and it’s becoming second nature to shopping. Questions like:

• Where was this made? Could I find it somewhere made locally?
• Was the person who made it paid a fair wage? Would I work in their working conditions?
• Does this product or food have unhealthy effects on the environment?
• Does the process for creating this product or food have unhealthy effects?
• Is there unnecessary waste created by over-packaging?
• Am I buying this simply because it’s convenient?
• Does this purchase promote an economy where everyone involved benefits?

And I can understand why someone would avoid diving into these questions. It’s really kind of annoying. You can’t simply go to the store anymore. Once you start finding out how our collective choices affect the world we live in you want to get out of the system that promotes it. And it’s a lot more work.

I guess if I had to pick a label other than “environmentalist” I’d choose “pro-life.” But unfortunately that term has been reduced to simply meaning anti-abortion- which is only one of many sanctity of life issues.

But then again, Jesus message was all about living a transformed life. So I guess “follower of Jesus” works pretty well too.

I always had intentions to, but never wrote much about my trip to Africa this past November. I wanted to post this story even though I’ve told it to most of my friends and family and was even invited to share it at the weekend services at church a few weeks ago. This story captures what God did in my heart while I was in the desert so I just wanted to get in on here for my sake more than anything else. The rest of this post is taken from a trip report I sent to some friends and family.

=========================================================

One of the most significant moments of the trip for me happened while spending an afternoon at the English school Christ The Rock sponsors. My friend, Jess, has been going to the camps for 3-4 months at a time for the past few years to teach english at the school. She had been there since October and assigned some of the more advanced students to prepare presentations in english about Saharawi culture for us. Three or four students in their 20’s and 30’s gave presentations about Saharawi marriage, traditional clothing and other topics. A girl named Ghalia gave her presentation and then as she ended she looked right at Jess and with tears in her eyes said “I just want to thank Jessica for coming here to teach us english. She comes and lives with us, she wears the mulfa and she suffers with us.”

She suffers with us. That phrase has stuck with me ever since I got home. I think it embodies who we are called to be as followers of Christ. It makes me think of the beginning of the story of Job. This man who has lost everything is in the middle of great suffering and his friends hear about this. And what do they do? In Job 2:13 it says “Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was.” They suffered with him.

My tendency is to want to fix things or figure out the quickest way out of the situation. But the Saharawi find themselves in a situation where there aren’t easy answers. So what do we do? We go and we suffer with them. I think the world longs not for more people with all the answers- but for people who are willing to suffer through hard things along with those who are most oppressed. Jesus came not just to tell the world how to live but to suffer with the world even to the point of death. This is what Calvary-style, Kingdom of God love looks like.

If you keep up on my wife’s blog then you know that we’ve chosen to not spend money for the Lent season this year. Check out her posts for all the “hows” and to get the details on the boundaries we’ve set up. (Yes, we’re still buying food and gas.)

In our journey over the past year or so, our eyes have been opened to how deep consumerism and consumption runs in our culture. And we’ve become aware of what this is doing to people in other parts of the world. Facts like these have made us increasingly uncomfortable with the average American lifestyle:

• The average U.S. person now consumes twice as much as they did 50 years ago.
• In the U.S., we spend 3–4 times as many hours shopping as our counterparts in Europe do.
• Average U.S. house size has doubled since the 1970s.
• Each person in the United States makes 4 1/2 pounds of garbage a day. That is twice what we each made thirty years ago.
• We [The U.S.] has 5% of the world’s population but we’re consuming 30% of the world’s resources and creating 30% of the world’s waste.
  [taken from The Story of Stuff- a short film you should watch]

All that, not to mention the fact that when our government wants to “stimulate the economy” they send us all checks and encourage us to buy stuff. And after September 11, one of the worst tragedies in our nations history, our President tells us to get back to life as usual by shopping. By consuming. (Which isn’t really a knock on Bush. I think any president would have done that.) This runs very deep in our American identity.

So out of a desire to remove ourselves from finding our identity in consuming, we asked a few questions:

• What would happen if we just stopped buying stuff today?
• Would we be content with only the possessions we have right now? Really?
• If not, then what does that say about where we find our joy?
• What do we really need?

We felt that we couldn’t really know the answer to these questions unless we really gave up spending for a period of time. And we have a feeling that God will be uprooting some of the deep-seeded greed in our hearts. There is a passage in 1 Timothy that says it very well:

“But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” -1 Timothy 6:6-10 (emphasis added)

I think this Lent season will only give me a glimpse into my heart and where I’m at with being content. Because even as I write this, I have well over $2,000 worth of possessions within arms reach (iMac, digital SLR camera, keyboard, guitar, etc.).

Simply put, I think we desire to have “godliness with contentment” and to be content with food and clothing. And as we prepare for Easter we want to put ourselves in a place where we might suffer at least a little bit to become more like Christ. Because his suffering, death and resurrection is what changes everything.

They both find themselves in the top five most viewed videos in the Word News section of CNN.com

I find this fascinating and sad at the same time. You have a situation in a country where hundreds (or more) of impoverished people are being brutally killed and injured and this news is being outranked by a millionaire pop star being checked into a hospital. (Which is a criticism of the media, not Brittany.)

It’s an interesting commentary on life. I have some friends that are planning on going to Kenya in the next week to work with victims of AIDS. Pray for them as they decide if they should still be traveling there at this time or not. It’s interesting to me that the people I know who are engaged with the suffering of the world are some of the most whole, complete people I’ve ever met. And then you have a celebrity who “has it all” (talent, looks, money, fame) and she is more broken and in more turmoil than ever- not to mention that she has to go through this with the entire country watching.

I think this might be an example of what Jesus means when he says “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”