Today I was able to be at the first service of Freedom church!
It’s incredible to witness birth!
J.R. & Todd have cast a compelling vision, built a great team, and developed exciting momentum!
I can’t wait to see what God does through this new church that is committed to loving God, loving others, serving Acworth and the world!
As a bonus I got to meet Zach the bass player. Any dude that names his blog “bootgun” deserves mention.
Christina Laun gives 23 ways to improve your website/blog based on what researchers have learned from through eye-tracking studies. (Thanks to Seth Godin for the tip. He puts this list in alphabetical order if that’s helpful to you…)
We’re BACK!
The Cincinnati experience was incredible!
We were able to spend a few days with some of our best friends and then we moved right into the retreat with these guys…
We spent the weekend in Matthew 6:25-34 which was really cool because these verses have kind of been our experience over the last six months!
I shared three big ideas:
It was awesome to be surrounded by God-seekers as together we worked to address worry in our lives and recommit to pursuing God above everything else!
On Monday through Wednesday we worked on the logistics of Walls Down Church! I love this stuff!
On Tuesday we spent several hours with Molly Cunningham from Crossroads church. These guys are adding amazing value to the community and helping people discover Jesus at a breakneck pace! I’m looking forward to learning more from them!
A few other things:
Several of you have wondered if we are in Cincinnati for good.
The answer is yes and no.
The “Yes” part is that we certainly hope to do good while we are in Cincinnati!
The “No” part is that we are only here for a week.
We will be in Cumming, Ga @ Mountain Lake Church until July, at which point we’ll make the trek to our new home.
I’ll be posting more about this later, but for now let me just say that this year of learning at Mountain Lake in conjunction with churchplanters.com has been the most worthwhile investment of my pastoral life.
Good grief…
Mother Teresa continues to rock my comfortable little world.
She writes,
“We know what poverty means, first of all, to be hungry for bread, to need clothing, and to
not have a home.”
“But there is a far greater kind of poverty. It means being unwanted, unloved, and neglected. It means having no one to call your own.”
“Do we know our poor people? Do we know the poor in our house, in our family? Perhaps they are not hungry for a piece of bread. Perhaps our children, husband, wife, are not hungry, or naked, or dispossessed, but are you sure there is no one there who feels unwanted, deprived of affection? Where is your elderly father or mother?”
“Abandonment is an awful poverty.”
Gosh, think about it… the elderly and senile in nursing homes; the prisoners in jail; the lonely teenager in high school; and the list goes on…. There are all kinds of people living in poverty, emotionally abandoned, and void of love and affirmation, and we bump into them every day.
While we don’t see breadless poverty a lot… we do see friendless poverty most every day.
God help us to serve those without love in this world.
Help us to share the love of God in tangible, life-changing ways.
Help us to breathe the love of God into breathless lives… just like you have done for us.
(If you’re interested in reading this book you can buy it here.)
We’re headed out for Cincinnati!
I’m looking forward to being with friends, eating Gold Star Chili until I’m sick, teaching, and hearing God in the land that will soon be our home for the rest of our lives!
Mother Teresa was the best at this! She writes,
“Poverty is necessary because we are working with the poor. When they complain about the food, we can say, we eat the same. They say, ‘It was so hot last night, we could not sleep.’ We can reply, ‘We also felt very hot.’ The poor have to wash for themselves, go barefoot. We do the same.”
“We have to go down and lift them up. It opens the heart of the poor when we can say we live the same way they do.”
“Sometimes they only have one bucket of water. It is the same with us. The poor have to stand in line; we do too. Food, clothing, everything must be like that of the poor. We have no fasting. Our fasting is to eat the food as we get it.”
This sounds like Jesus’ approach to service!
St. Paul said that Jesus, “though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” (2 Corinthians 8:9)
It may be true that, the only way to effectively, positively change someone is to identify with them. (Check out these verses too)
So here’s the question, “What am willing to give up to serve people?”
The effectiveness of my service may well depend on the extent of my sacrifice.
And the same goes for you…
OK, I don’t usually get this “under the hood” of the Peterson life, but Sherri has
discovered something that could really be helpful to a lot of people – thegrocerygame.com.
While I don’t know all the specifics, I do know it has something to do with coupons and when to use them.
Last night she went to Ingles. She spent $17.31 and SAVED $38.94!
Tonight she went to Publix. She spent $43.88 and SAVED $73.78!
If you haven’t checked the grocery game out… do it now! (click here to check to see what the “game” is all about)
It takes a little bit of time but believe me… it’s worth it!
If you’re a “disciple” of Casey Graham or Dave Ramsey… you’re gonna want to get serious about this “game”!
Jim Collins in his monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors, wrote some prophetic words,
“Social sector organizations [e.g. churches, and other non-profit organizations] increasingly look to business for leadership models and talent, yet I suspect we will find more true leadership in the social sectors than the business sector.“
Secular leaders are discovering that there is much to be learned from the leaders of non-profit organizations, and in many instances, from churches!
Forbes.com has recently pulled back the blanket on some of these great leadership lessons!
In the highlighted study they found that, “It turns out CEOs may have a lot to learn from their counterparts running evangelical megachurches.”
The eight leadership lessons they discuss are:
(Read the whole Forbes article here)
The article states, “many CEOs try to improve their leadership through precepts that ultimately have a biblical basis. ‘In the past, the church would go to secular leaders for leadership lessons, but now, it’s vice versa,” says Doug Schmidt, senior pastor of Woodside Bible Church in Troy, Mich., one of the nation’s fastest-growing congregations, where attendance is more than 4,000 each Sunday. “The secular books I’m reading on this sound a whole lot more like the Bible.”
This is a great illustration of the relevance and effectiveness of a biblical paradigm of leadership!
(Thanks to Todd for the head’s up on this article)
I have always been intrigued my Martin Luther King Jr. He was a great leader!
Reading from his autobiography I came across a quote worth sharing,
“It has been my conviction… that any religion that professes concern for the souls of men and is not equally concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried. It has been well said: ‘A religion that ends with the individual, ends.’“
God forbid that Walls Down church, or any other church, would ignore the needs of the hurting and disenfranchised among us.
