Morning Wakeup

Up and at 'em at 5am this morning! Time to farewell our Canadian friends from the Atlantic District. Had good times with this seriously serving sextet... As always, I had to share them with the other churches and would have enjoyed some more downtime getting to talk with people.

Peter Moore brought an inspired message at ECW on Sunday just gone. Romans 14 and holiness stuff. More Wesleyan than the Wesleyan church, if you get my drift...also enjoyed Drew Donovan's worship leadership - gave me a chance to just be the keyboard player.

Sunday evening @ cession we started our new series "The Undivided Life". Things seemed a bit uneven and I was left feeling quite flat about the message. I thought the content was good and I gave my all in the execution...but it didn't seem to resonate. The good thing was we had a bunch of people sign up for cell groups to work through the parallel series we have prepared for the groups. We also handed out personal devotional journals we made - Melissa did an awesome job of these - the goal is to have people work through the material one on one with God, including specific processing of the message and application exercises based on the scriptures read.

Some things we have tried NOT to emulate from a certain other 40 days type resource:

• The idea of the "pop and play" small groups with the "all you need to know is how to run a VCR" recruitment strategy does not sit well with me. We've taken the obligation-free small group route but established groups with well trained leaders with a clear agenda for ongoing leadership development and multiplication
• There is a lot to be said for the devotional per day approach...but there are some weaknesses: do people really engage the scripture or just read the book? Is there actually a lot of time spent wrestling with God over the issues? Do people end up with information overload and little application? These questions led us to a more interactive approach - less information; more scripture. Fewer 5 A's of Alliteration; more spiritual disciplines. Lots of space to journal (without buying the companion journal...)
• A somewhat consumeristic paradigm (maybe thats the marketing rather than the original product's intention) We've incorporated a local missions trip into our worship slot...to put our muscle where our mouth is...

Anyways...it might flop and we won't get to sell millions of copies of a book with mostly empty pages! But we pray that God will deepen the community's roots in Him so that we can springboard into our year. We have some seekers with us for the series as well so hoping it will give them a clear view of what the Christian life can look like.

Well, the day is calling...and the shower adds its demanding tone as the post-gym sweat screams in falsetto...

Jonesbaritone