One of ‘those’ church planting moments

Occasionally, in the midst of the stuff of ministry, I have moments when I suddenly realize: “This is what we always dreamed of! This is what church planting is all about! This is amazing!” I remember that feeling the first time our children’s choir sang. I get that feeling when we see miraculous life changes taking place. I get that feeling when I think about getting ready for church plant #2. They are “dream come true” moments.

Yesterday and today I’ve been laboring to get ready for our next Discipleship Institute class – “Bible Doctrine I.” I have a growing appreciation for my seminary professors: this is really hard work!! Meanwhile Sunday’s teaching and preaching responsibilities are looming closer and closer. I’ve been tempted to get a little frustrated and weary of digging through the nuances of a theology book. Then I had one of ‘those’ moments, when I realized that this is really a dream come true. I get to prepare to teach an institute course on Bible Doctrine to 10 or 15 people in our church family. When we started GBC, we didn’t even know 10 or 15 people in this area! To even have an institute is a dream come true, much less having 10 or 15 people who want to spend their Saturday mornings studying theology – what a joy!

A Bit of Light in the Cross-Cultural Ministry Fog

Cross-cultural ministry is a huge challenge for church planters. There are so many questions and difficulties. I don’t have any answers, but I am thankful for a recent experience that brought a tiny bit of light in the fog. We’ve had a Taiwanese Christian lady visiting our church for the last two months (she’s returning to Taiwan today). She knows some English, but communication is still very slow and difficult. She said she understood about 30% of my teaching. However, our church family was warm and open and loving, and she clearly loved being with us at church. This was refreshing for me: even if there are major linguistic and cultural barriers preventing ministry as usual, you can start with love. That seems to communicate clearly in any language!

A Big Expositional Challenge

Today we launched a pretty ambitious new sermon series. I’m calling it “Christ in the Old Covenant,” but that’s code language for “an exposition of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.” Of course I won’t actually be going through all four books one verse at a time, but Lord-willing we will at least touch on all of the content of all four books. I don’t know how long the series will take, but it will probably not be measured in months, but years. We covered Genesis 1-11 in 2005, and Genesis 12-50 in parts of 2006 and 2007. So on we go into Exodus! This is definitely a major preaching challenge for lots of reasons:

• the negative perceptions of the Old Testament
• the really negative perceptions of the law (commonly associated with Leviticus)
• the non-thematic arrangement of the content ( want to learn about the priests? see Ex 28-29, Lev 8-10, 21-22, Num 3-4, 8, 16-18, Deut 18 )
• a huge cultural gap between then and now
• the big questions related to OT theology in general (for example, the conditional vs. unconditional aspects of the covenants; the relationship of the law to new covenant believers; etc.)
• the sheer magnitude of it all: 135 chapters.

Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, [Christ] explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures. We can pray more literally than ever: “Open my eyes, that I may behold wonderful things from Your Law”!

Websites

[I know nothing about these people or these churches, so I'm not posting this link to endorse them in any way.] Eric True showed me this site: http://www.orchardgroup.org/, and I really liked it because it draws together multiple church plants in an attempt to build a church planting movement. Someday we would love to have a site like this one for Southern California!

Speaking of websites, we are very excited to have Justin Murphy and Chip Wiginton here right now to redo the Grace Bible Church website!! You can see more about them at Your Creative People.

An Excellent Church Planting Book

I highly recommend David Hesselgrave’s book Cross-Cultural Church Planting. You don’t need to be in any kind of cross-cultural setting to profit from his work. Here’s a sample quote: “The primary mission of the church and, therefore, of the churches is to proclaim the gospel of Christ and gather believers into local churches where they can be built up in the faith and made effective in service…. Both campaign evangelism and personal evangelism are to be encouraged. But as often practiced they do not place new believers in vital contact with local churches. Proportionately, too much emphasis has been placed upon multiplying converts – and not nearly enough emphasis has been placed on multiplying congregations…. Neither a missionless church not a churchless mission is in accordance with the plan of God.”

Southern California is…

According to a new radio ad I heard today, life in Southern California is about sunshine, surf, celebrities, sports, and speed. It’s hard to argue with that list, though it doesn’t mention anything related to money! Way back when we were on deputation, we use to say that people come here for “fun, sun, and the American dream.”