Why God Speaks to Us

Trinidad

First - get this devotional book and read it every day! Hearing God Through the Year: A 365-Day Devotional, by Dallas Willard.

My definition of prayer, following Willard, is this: Prayer is talking with God about what he and I are doing together. God speaks to me about what he and I are doing together.

What are God and I doing together? We are talking about bringing his kingdom realities on the earth.

Willard writes:

"God’s speaking to us does not make us important. Just as when he spoke to the ancient people of Israel, his speaking to us gives us greater opportunity to do good and greater responsibility for the care of others. God speaks to us because he wants us to join him in some purpose of advancing the kingdom of God here on earth." (P. 45)

Seminar on Leading the Presence-Driven Church - Session 2

My book is Leading the Presence-Driven Church.

This coming Sunday, Feb. 25, 5 - 6:15 PM.

Redeemer Fellowship Church.

Anyone is invited to come learn about the presence-driven church.

If you have the book, you can prepare for this session by reading chapters 4, 5, and 6.

Chapter 1 Introduction 

Chapter 2 The Case for Experience 

Chapter 3 The “Presence Motif” 

Chapter 4 Presence Comes Before Purpose and Programs 

Chapter 5 How to Experience God’s Presence 

Chapter 6 The Marks of a Presence-Driven Church 

Chapter 7 The Language of the Presence-Driven Church 

Chapter 8 Leading the Presence-Driven Church 

Chapter 9 God’s Presence Will Win the Day

Women's Conference in Dayton, with Wendy Backlund from Bethel Redding - March 15-17

Many of us heard Wendy Backlund from Bethel Redding at our summer 2017 HSRM conference. Wendy will join some other excellent speakers for our HSRM Women's Conference in Dayton, Ohio, March 15-17.

REGISTER HERE

It's a privilege to sit under Wendy Backlund's teaching, speaker and author from Redding, California. Wendy and her husband Steve are part of the ministries of internationally-known Bethel Church, led by Pastor Bill Johnson. Their personal ministry is called Igniting Hope Ministries and their message does just that. Wendy encourages and empowers Christians in revival culture and victorious mindsets, and her experiences with God's love, his Word and the Holy Spirit have transformed her life and will impart breakthrough to you too. 

Julie Weyandt, founder and director of Beauty for Ashes Ministry, is a gifted clinical counselor. She is also a presenter at seminars and workshops, and an author who has developed recovery group curriculum for adult survivors of sexual abuse and trauma. She will bring her Godly and professional expertise as we explore sensitive women's issues of abortion and post abortion trauma.  

Aurora Newton, Prayer and Encounter Pastor at Dayton Vineyard  is also founder & CEO of Assert Now, Inc. She is currently finishing her doctoral program in organizational psychology. She is an advocate who is passionate about the safety and well-being of children, teens, and women. Her vast experiences have equipped her to empower others, especially those who are vulnerable or at risk. 

Event Site

Linden Avenue Baptist Church, 101 Linden Ave., Dayton, Ohio  45403. Directions 

Lodging 
Reserve your room today at any number of guest facilities. Some suggestions:

Extended Stay 

Drury Inn 

Holiday Inn   

In the Presence-Driven Church People Come Before Programs

Cancun

(My new book is Leading the Presence-Driven Church.)

As Jesus' followers live lives of abiding in Christ, the Holy Spirit shows them what to do, and what not to do. Most of the ministries in our church have begun because God spoke to someone, while they were connected to him.

We have also released people from ministries because God has told them to let go. We have, on occasion, stopped an entire ministry. At one time it had life in it, but we now discern it has run its course, in terms of what God wants to do.

Churches that are fueled and driven by programs can find this hard to do. Because "the show must go on," the show becomes more important than the people. This is a formula for burnout and resentment. Never put programs ahead of people. 

Presence comes before purpose. God presences himself in his people, individually and corporately (we are now "temples" that host God's presence). Therefore, because God's presence comes before programs, and since God presences himself in his people, people come before programs.

Presence is about the intimate relationship between God and his people. Within this intimate relationship, God directs our paths. As we teach our people to focus on abiding, rather than what they are to do or not do, we find that God tells them what to do or not do. Teaching people to abide in Christ is a way of caring for them, because God's presence is what our people need, with all its comprehensiveness.

Then, as God speaks to people about what he would have them do or not do, the pastors and leaders must listen to the hearts of their people. 

We want our people to know they can hear from God. When they believe they are hearing from God, we must not put pressure on them because the show must go on.

My Book Is on iBooks

My book is available for download on iBooks.

Go HERE. 

Churches - Nurture Your Strangeness

Monroe

Jesus (the Real One) didn't have a coolness factor. Jesus wasn't trying to be hip, dope, or whatever the word is at the moment. 

Jesus didn't come to be relevant. For more on this see Os Guinness, Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance. 

Jesus was different. Distinct. It is precisely Jesus' difference and distinction that captivates people. ("Nietzsche saw that independent thinkers would always be out of step with the conventional wisdom of their generation." Guinness, 19)

Jesus was weird. 

Jesus didn't fit in with the prevailing religious and political regime. Jesus was, as Michael McClymond indicates in the title of his book, a "familiar stranger." 

Jesus' strangeness, as it is lifted up, draws people. Russell Moore, in "Why Your Church Needs to Listen to the Culture," writes that relevant-hip churches are boring young people to death. If we listened to culture we would see this, and give up trying to make Jesus everyone's homeboy. 

Moore reflects on his own church experience with youth:

"The “unchurched” kids laughed at the Bible studies based on television shows or songs of the moment. They weren’t impressed at all by the video clips provided by my denomination’s publisher, or by the knockoff Christian boy bands crooning about the hotness of sexual purity. What riveted their attention wasn’t what was “relatable” to them, but what wasn’t. They were drawn not to our sameness but to our strangeness." (Emphasis mine.) 

Moore describes one teen who asked him, "Do you really believe this dead guy came back to life?" "Yes," Moore responded, "I do." The kid blinked and then whispered, "Dude, that's crazy." Yes it is. It is crazy. This kid stayed around to listen to more about this.

I don't know if Moore has read Yale theologian Miroslav Volf, but they sound the same. Moore writes: "Jesus didn't hide the oddity of the culture of the kingdom, and neither should we." 

At Redeemer I once preached a year-and-a-half project through the book of Revelation. Missing from my bucket list was to try to make Revelation normal. If it was normal, no one would be interested. Revelation is bizarre. It should be, to all who acknowledge that there is a God in heaven and, ipso facto, his ways are not our ways. We are talking about another reality intersecting and interacting with our unredeemed planet. This other, heavenly reality has to look different!

If you are a pastor or church I now free you, in Jesus' name, from coolness, and release you to difference.

Moore writes:

"Let’s listen to what our culture is saying, hearing beneath the veneer of cool the fear of a people who know that Judgment day is coming because it’s written in their hearts (Romans 2:15–16). Let’s listen beneath the cynicism to the longings there, expressed in the culture, longings that can only be fulfilled in the reign of a Nazarene carpenter-king. Let’s deconstruct what they — and we — tell ourselves when it’s nonsense. But let’s not stop there. Let’s run toward, and not away from, the strangeness of an old gospel of a Messiah who was run out of his own hometown, but who, oddly enough, walked out of his own graveyard. For real."

***
My two books are:

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.

I'm now working on...

How God Changes the Human Heart (Dec. 2018?)

Technology and Spiritual Formation

REDEEMER - COMING YOUTH GROUP EVENTS

Trevor Robinson sent me a list of some of our coming youth group events at Redeemer. They all look great to me - thank you Trevor!

Friday February 23rd Hangout Night

There will be snacks and drinks and time to just hangout and spend time together. This will be at Dayna and Aaron Oldenberg's house and their address is in the Church Bulletin. This will be from 7pm-9pm and we can't wait to see you!

The Pursuit Conference 2018

This is our Youth Conference. 

When: Thursday March 29th-Saturday March 31st

Where: Redeemer Fellowship Church

Cost: 25$ per student

The cost covers the food for the whole weekend.

For our Conference the students stay at the Church from Thursday night up until Saturday. We will have worship, prayer, time for activities and times of teaching and growing. More details to come!

YWAM Coming to Redeemer!

Last year our Youth Group was blessed to have a team from YWAM (Youth With A Mission) come from Louisville, Kentucky to spend a few days with us. This year we are excited to have another one of YWAM's teams come spend sometime with us.

When: Thursday April 12th, Friday April 13th and Saturday April 14th

There is no cost for this and more details coming soon!

And....Steve Backlund from Bethel Redding is coming to Redeemer May 18th-20th!

At our Green Lake Conference this past Summer our students and Youth Leaders got to hear Steve teach and share. I appreciate how practical and easy to understand Steve is when he shares and teaches. I am excited to have him with us and hope that many of our students can attend!

Logic and Truth

BELONG - BELIEVE - BECOME

In my One-Hour Seminary tonight someone asked, "What should a church do if a same-sex couple begins coming to your church?"

I mentioned Mark Yarhouse's idea of how we should relate to transgendered people, if they come to our church.

Yarhouse writes:

"In response to the unchurched and dechurched transgender community, the Christian community needs to ask what it will look like to be missional in the years to come. Keep in mind that this is a group that will be asking, “What does the church have to offer me?” The perception (and too often the reality) is that transgender persons who have nothing to do with the church perceive that the church would reject them out of hand. They have either had poor experiences with the church or they view the church as largely unimportant or irrelevant in their lives. 

It has been observed that a traditional evangelical church focuses on behavior first, followed by belief in Christ and a sense of Christian community. It essentially looks like this:

Behave → Believe → Belong 

This approach begins with communicating expectations for change in how others behave. This may not be explicit, but it often has more to do with the comfort level of evangelicals who are sitting in the pews. They may believe the gospel is for those outside the church, but they do not want those outside the church to actually cross into the church until their behaviors change. What follows the expectation of behavior change is belief in Christ. Unfortunately, on the heels of the expectation of behavioral compliance, it can come across to those outside the church as, “Think the way we think,” which is a hard message after the expectation to conform to behavioral norms. Then the message is: Now you belong. It is a remarkably conditional approach to the world, and one that, in my view, is not sustainable in our changing sociocultural context. 

A missional church model offers a different outline: 

Belong → Believe → Become 

A missional church focuses on first being in relationship (belong) then moves toward an opportunity to live one’s testimony to an unbelieving culture (believe). Only when a person enters into that relationship is there any thought given to who a person becomes over time as they grow in their relationship with Christ (become). Some people will insert the word behave where I have become, but I prefer the designation become to behave, as it reminds evangelicals that the process of sanctification is not a checklist of behaviors but a dynamic process of growing in Christlikeness."

Yarhouse, Mark A.. Understanding Gender Dysphoria: Navigating Transgender Issues in a Changing Culture (Christian Association for Psychological Studies Books), Kindle Locations 2780-2800

On Religious Freedom - Resources (One-Hour Seminary)

Thanks to all who tuned in to tonight's One-Hour Seminary.

Here are some of the resources I mentioned, plus a few more.

THE CHRISTIAN ISSUE

My flow chart...

How to Formulate a Christian Perspective on Same-Sex Unions (and a Bit About The Nashville Statement)

Addressing the Two Debates Regarding Same-sex Marriage

"Arsenokoitais" (ἀρσενοκοίταις) in 1 Timothy 1:10 (et. al.)

What the Gay Marriage Issue is Really About

Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, by Ryan T. Anderson

What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, by Ryan T. Anderson, Sherif Gergis, and Robert P. George 

Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faith and Homosexuality, by Wesley Hill

God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships, by Matthew Vines

In Essentials, Unity; In Nonessentials, Liberty; and In All Things, Love

THE LEGAL ISSUE

Audio of December SCOTUS oral arguments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOyVEFOOobs

"Judge rules California baker doesn't have to make wedding cake for same-sex couple"

https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/08/us/wedding-cake-ruling-trnd/index.html

Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination, by John Corvino and Ryan Anderson

"Drawing a Line In the Gay 'Wedding Cake' Case," by John Corvino

"A Baker's First Amendment Rights," by Robert P. George and Sherif Gergis


***
My two books are:

Leading the Presence-Driven Church (Jan. 2018)

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God (May 2016)

I am working on books 3 & 4:

How God Changes the Human Heart

Technology and Spiritual Formation