These are the ways that Andrew Jones (Boaz Project) describes his ministry and I love it! Here are some of my thoughts/responses to that. This is part 2. Been a long time coming.

Throwing Parties

Just the idea behind party is a good one! Who doesn’t like to go to a good party? Would you rather go to a party or go to a church service? Well that’s not a hard answer for most of us. Jesus uses celebration, party and feast/banquet language all the time. In fact it is one of his primary metaphors for the Kingdom of God.

Which begs a couple of questions: 1) why aren’t our services more like a party/celebration? 2) what would it look like if they were? To simplify (perhaps overly) a bit, let’s go down the elements of a good party.

Friends are very important. Both friends you know now and friends of your friends who you’d like to meet and become friends with. So let’s invite our friends and their friends to our party.

Attitudes of joy and giving are important to a party. So let’s stop moaning and groaning about the end times or abortion or whatever else and tell the stories of how God is at work and play music together, and eat together and enjoy each other’s company! This involves a lot more people I think and lessens the pressure on the “service” planners!

Changing hosts. With great friends we throw the party and then they throw the party and then this other friend throws the party. Fun stuff. This not only diversifies leadership, it involves everyone at different times and in different ways, their ways.

Loving people sucks sometimes

So we have all these kids in the neighborhood. That is okay. Most of them apparently have no parents or parents who sleep a lot because we seem to never see them. Or perhaps we've stumbled upon a new millenium version of Neverland without a Peter Pan. But I digress...

The point of the story is that they come over a lot. Sometimes to play with our kids and sometimes to play with our kids and their toys and sometimes to play with our kid's toys. You get the picture. Today when I came home some kids were over and one of them was playing with my kids toys, but not with my kids. He was being a little rough with the toys. So I just asked him to not be so rough and moved on... no big deal. Then he started being rough with them again. And again. And again.

[pay attention here's the point of the story] I found myself not wanting any kids to be around my kids and their toys. It was kind of bothering me. And then I realized that if we really want to love people and if we really want to bring light into darkness and if we really want to be about restoration, then we've got to live with it and in it and it around us. I know it's really obvious and I know this all in my head, but I guess God was making sure it is in my heart too: love wins. Not control, not hate, not anger, not fortresses, but love.

God help me to love.

And now for a really good picture to make us all smile. [we do live in tv land after all]

Sleep, Block party and Soccer

Whenever I leave home, there are two things that happen. It is a law of nature or something. I know that this is true because many others have experienced the same thing. For us it is that someone gets sick at home and that something happens with the car.

So I just got home from being away for a few days... Good news is that nothing happened to the vehicle. Bad news is that someone got sick. Jahred. But he's over it. But now Kate's got it. Fever. Etc.

So last night we were up with her. Trying to help her, drugs, etc. We also had big storms roll through with much thunder and lightning. Isaiah joined us in our bed. But no sleep for Carol or I. Isaiah is a machine though and was up bright and early ready to take on the world.

So I got up with him and let Carol sleep. Then I took the healthy ones to the block party at Jacob's Well. Fun stuff. Fire engines, moonbounces, facepainting, food and music. We had a good time.

Then when we got home we played some of Isaiah's favorite sport of late... soccer. He can do it pretty well and he loves it. (David Rebello is smiling somewhere!)

Also listened today to some Prarie Home Companion. If you aren't into Garrison Keillor, then you should be. He is the greatest storyteller in the world. If you aren't into public radio you also should be, but that is where you can usually catch him. I put up with the rest of the show - not that into the country, bluegrass scene - but he is just awesome. We preachers/teachers have much to learn from him!

DLC

I returned yesterday evening from the District Leadership Conference (DLC) we held in St. Louis. It's a gathering of all the district youth presidents, district NYC coordinators, and district trainers. The main part of this year's conference was the passing of info from our office to the district leaders about NYC 07 (waterfirewind.com). It was a big week for us.

Overall it went well. We had a few snafus at the beginning of the week but the two main purposes of our time together went well: relationships with the youth leaders and sharing the information about NYC.

Some highlights for me:
1) spending time with friends - especially Kevin and Josh
2) worship services - we had Jon Shirley as our worship leader and he was awesome. Dave and Mark Holcomb shared in the general sessions. God moved in many ways and his presence was definitely there.
3) conversations - on Tuesday and Wednesday nights we had some great conversations with people from around the US, just asking questions and sharing stories about what God is doing and where God is leading us.
4) making connections - meeting people, making friends and connecting with folks in regards to NYC.

Some tough things were not being with my family and not being able to be with my friends in Maryland as they go through a tough time.

The main thing I took away from DLC was that there is incredible hope for our church and our future. So many people are ready to make changes and look at things in new ways to make disciples of Jesus!

Prayers are Good

We'd appreciate prayer for some of our friends. Four people from Bel Air were in a horrible accident early Tuesday morning. All four are in the hospital, three in ICU. These are all people pretty close to us, who have been part of our lives at Bel Air. Be in prayer for their families and friends as well. I'm struggling to be honest...

Jacob's Well

We have found a church we like a lot. It's called Jacob's Well. We started going there because the pastor, Tim Keel, and I have had some conversations at some events with Emergent. He is also on the board of directors for Emergent.

One of the thins that I have really loved so far about the church is their approach to children's ministry. Instead of operating out of the educational model only for kids, they are trying to operate out of a much more holistic method. They involve kids in the story, not just tell them story. Some times they'll be doing plays/dramas, sometimes they will be doing crafts, some times it will be just listening to the story. It's just great! I love that they are trying to value kids and their hearts for God and the expression that comes out of that. I wish we could teach more adults to value the same things!

I'm still searching out some outlets for teaching. Pray for me that way. Perhaps you blog readers will have a lot to put up with in the future.

Shamed into it...

I have admittedly been a very bad blogger of late. So I've been shamed back into it today by my friend, Tom Young, the cripple. See Tom you got your mention!

I've been quite busy as of late. Visiting the lovely town of Cleveland for a one day meeting and then two days in St. Louis for some important meetings this last week. While both visits had meaningful and good meetings, the highlight of both had to be the food. (I'm a Nazarene after all!) We ate at some very nice places on both visits and because I'm a food lover, it was my pleasure. I had steak one night, seafood (good too -as hard as that is to believe away form the ocean) and crab cakes another meal, and then some really good pasta another meal.

I'm learning a lot. For example, St. Louis is a big union town and that means you have a lot of negotiating to do with them. I will not be spending time talking ill of them here (but I do happen to think $42/hr to plug in a microphone is a bit steep). But in case someone reading this is union related or someone from St. Louis may be reading this... I LOVE THE UNIONS!!!