Posts Tagged ‘story’

Todd // Let’s go…

August 12th, 2008

I have been drinking the church Kool-Aid for about 27 years.  My life has always been wrapped up in the life of a church community, and I can count on 2 hands the amount of times in my existence that I intentionally missed church on a Sunday.  I was born and raised into a church family, my mother is an ordained minister, and I sensed a call to ministry at the age of 12.  i never once wavered from that call, following it through my teenage years, into college, and then seminary.

I really like Erik’s sweet church planting story below where his heart felt strangely warmed after watching that video and he began to think seriously about planting a community.  Unfortunately, I never had a moment like that and I have always questioned that my skills line up with being a church planter.  However, I am passionate about the church and I want her to be the kingdom of God on earth.  I feel like a lot of people in my generation have a lot of negative things to say about the church (and they are right for the most part), but very few are doing the hard work to make the church beautiful.  For this reason alone, I am open to the idea of church planting as a really good way to make a difference.

I am not merely in the dreaming stages of community planting.  Through a long set of circumstances that I will not get into in this post, I am sort of in the middle of a church plant.  A little over 10 months ago, I started a house church where about 15-30 of us meet every Sunday.  I have been encouraged by our gatherings, and I am committed to this group of people and seeing where God might lead us.

I would like to use this blog as a sounding board for things that are actually happening in the house church.  I will be posting ministries that we are trying to start, problems we are having, complications we did not expect, etc.  I would love some feedback about what is happening, so I will cherish you comments/responses.

I really have no idea what I am doing with this thing.  However, I am coming to learn that if you wait to do things until you have everything figured out, you will spend the majority of your life waiting.

So, let’s go…

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Erik // My story of dreaming…

August 7th, 2008

There are two of us who will primarily be sharing on this blog. I’m Erik and Todd will be sharing as well [we will get some bio info up shortly]. I just thought I would begin by sharing a bit about how I started dreaming about planting a community.

It was the summer of 2001, I was getting ready to do an internship with an itinerate evangelist, Stephen Manley. I really felt like God was leading me into the traveling, preaching/teaching gig. I knew it would look a bit different than the guy I was going to be traveling with and a bit different than most of the guys and gals that I know who travel full-time as “evangelists”. First off I probably wouldn’t go by the title evangelist. But regardless of the unique expression my life might take I was feeling strongly lead into itinerate evangelism, being the traveling speaker guy.

Before my internship started that summer I lived with a family for about 4 weeks, the Moore family. {Side note; they were / are an amazing family. I feel like I learned a lot from living with them, interacting with them, and just watching them as they interacted with each other.}

Living with them had it’s perks, primarily the home theater they had in their basement and right next to the room I was staying it. I LOVED IT! Watched the entire Star Wars trilogy multiple times on the big screen during those weeks as the basement dweller. But I also picked up another random video. The video was a denominational video about ministry or something, not specifically about church planting. I watched the video for some odd reason. A chunk of the video happened to be about church planting and a pretty amazing thing happened. As I was watching there was a 10 minutes or so chunk of a guy sharing his heart about church planting and his story about planting a church. As I was watching this guy the Spirit whispered in my ear as he squeezed my heart and said, “plant a church, let this be your story too”. I began to cry (not something I do a ton) and sensed strongly that the whisper was the authentic stirring of the Spirit of God in my life.

Remember, I was about to leave on a summer internship to follow the calling I believe God had placed on my life to be an itinerate evangelist / speaker guy. So what was this all about. I didn’t get it. It seemed like God was giving me conflicting messages. How was I to sort all this out. I had the summer to think about it.

Throughout the summer I studied the book of Philippians and really started coming to a deeper understanding about community and connecting with people in ways that are formative in my life and theirs. The interesting thing was that Paul had these relationships but he was also a traveler, you might call him an evangelist or something. This interaction with Paul and his letter to the Philippians would play a large role in what I would soon come to understand as God’s direction for my life.

I had an amazing summer on the road. Learned a lot, met a lot of great people, and really felt a confirmation in my soul (my hunger, thirst, desire = nephes — Hebrew word for soul). It was a confirmation to be a traveling speaker, an evangelist.

Then I went to a denominational meeting and it happened again, God spoke.

There was a guy at this meeting telling his story. Guess what he was? You guessed it, a church planter. I would say crazy, what a coincidence but I don’t think it was crazy and it certainly wasn’t a coincidence. As he told his story I heard the whisper again and once again felt God squeezing my heart. Tears, prayers, questions, confusion, and finally clarity followed.

It was that weekend in August of 2001 that I felt God bring it all together for me. I asked him, do you want me to be an evangelist? He said, “YES”! Then I asked him, do you want me to be a church planter? Again he said, “YES”! So there it was, my clear answer? But was it clear? Actually yes, it was finally clear.

I have spent the past 6-7 years now dreaming of how my life will live out the dream God has stirred in me. The dream of planting a local church community while at the same time traveling, preaching the Gospel, raising up leaders, encouraging the church. I am still dreaming about how these things will come together but because God is leading me down the path I know they will!

The dream is to plant a church with a team. My hope is to learn to be the teaching pastor, cultural architect, lead visionary/dreamer. And while living out this role locally to also serve as a evangelist; speaker, teacher, mentor, church partner. To do this in & with other communities all over.

This is the dream. I am waiting for the right time and the right people to live it out. So for now I’m a speaker guy who dreams. Waiting for God to open up the doors so that the dreams he has stirred in my life can come to fruition.  The conversation that is this blog will hopefully flesh more of this out for me. I’m look forward to it.

Still Dreaming
Erik

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