More and more I’m seeing at the end of the day all we’ve got is our relationship with God and with people.  Not the idea of a relationship, but the reality of a relationship.  Ups and downs, pain and tears, weirdness and wonder, triumph and high fives.   The full package.  There’s no escaping it.

We’re launching a church and all that (if you haven’t heard), and the single best way to get people to come with you and eventually meet Jesus is to personally invite them.

But I know most of us are skittish on jeopardizing our relationships
over a church invitation.  Most of us are scared to open the
conversation.  I’ve been collecting random thoughts on how to overcome
these hurdles.  I hope they help:

• Pray for people. If you’re scared out of your pants to invite someone to church, tell God about it.  Then ask God to be with you when you chat with them.  Pray that God would move in their heart.  It’s amazing how God actually cares more about people than we do, but we forget that.  So pray for them (and yourself).

• Try talking about church, not God. We all feel awkward going up to someone and saying "so…what’s the state of your heart when it comes to Jesus?"  I do, and I’m a pastor. So unless you really feel you need to say that, don’t.  Instead, ask someone what they think about church.  Then tell them about your church and what it’s like, and you’ll have more than 3 minutes of stuff to talk about.  Last week, I had a 25 minute conversation with a 22 year old who hates church and whose body piercings had piercings.  Every third word was "dude"…but he and I engaged in a great conversation at length.  I was out of our community, but I believe if he would have lived in our neighbourhood, he would have come.  You just never know.  I’ve had a half dozen very surprising conversations with local people who either will be there or might be there December 2nd and 9th.  If you don’t ask, you’ll never know what might have happened…

• Admit you’re an idiot and don’t have all the answers.  First of all, they already know you’re an idiot and don’t have your life fully together.  Second, admitting you don’t have the answers takes pressure off both of you.  After all, very few people get ‘informationed’ into heaven.  Most of us get loved there.  A real dialogue with real people based on love goes a long way.  Be real.

• Talk to them about the kind of church Connexus will be.  We are really gearing Sundays to be (at the highest level we know how to) an environment you can bring your friends to.  A service where people can hear Green Day and Steve Fee music within minutes of each other and messages that engage real life can be a pretty powerful environment for God to meet people in.  Kids ministry kids actually like is another bonus.  And telling people they don’t need to have to carry a 32 pound bible or wear three piece suits or bad sun dresses is still a relief to many (remember, they haven’t been to church in 10 years…if at all…and they stay away due to stereotypes).  The fact that they might actually fit in will still surprise people.

• Pray some more.  Remember…God loves you more than you love yourself and He loves them more than anyone every will.  He’s just using you as a channel.

I hope you’re investing in people and inviting them now.

You yourself can get a sample of a Connexus service because this weekend we’re open at both campuses at Connexus.
You can go to Barrie or Orillia at 8:30 or 10:00.  It’s our soft launch in both cities — a real service done imperfectly (that’s
kind of what you get every week anyway, isn’t it?).  But we’re actually
open.  Which is amazing!

As we gear up for the December 2nd grand opening in Barrie and the
December 9th, it’s a chance to invite everyone.

Who are you praying for?  When are you going to chat with them?   What fears keep you up at night?  Anyone say yes already that shocked you?

I’ll spend a good chunk of today (Friday) planning out the message series for Connexus well into 2008.  The one thought I can’t get out of my mind is how powerful love is.

I posted about the song Under Pressure earlier this week. Parts of the song have been echoing through my head for two days since:

"keep coming up with love, but it’s so slashed and torn…|why can’t we give love one more chance? |    Why can’t we give love…give love…give love…| but love’s such an old fashioned word|and love dares    you to care for people on the edge of the knife|and love dares you to change your way of caring about  ourselves…"

Haunting words.  Great questions.

Why did people flock to Jesus?  Many reasons, but I wonder whether one of the most powerful reasons is because in Jesus, people experienced real love.

What do you crave most deeply in life? Love.  Why do many kids go awol on life and into deep rebellion by age 12 or 15?  Lack of love.  What drives marriages apart?  A loss of love.  What causes breakdowns in relationships?  Absence of love.

Love is the glue that holds it all together….love is what’s lacking in our lives (my life too often)….and God, the Bible tells us, is love.

What if at Connexus, we accessed the love of God?  What if we just loved people?  What if somehow we reflected God’s love deeply and profoundly and He moved in us and through us and in spite of us?

That’s what I’m praying about/thinking about this weekend.  How about you?

Yesterday was a quiet day…back from a trip…no weekend service to prepare for…gray skies…cold.  No office even to go to (although we do have some great temporary digs).  I had a thought that I have several times a year… I don’t have to do ministry. 

If you think about the nature of freedom, none of us needs to plant a church.  I could get a job in the marketplace.  We could just stay home on Sundays, or we could form a church that is far less than what we imagine Connexus could be.  I’d have more time with my family.  More time for myself. 

I do actually think in those patterns from time to time.  I imagine what my life would be if we weren’t doing this.  And it looks attractive for a few minutes.  Sometimes it looks attractive for a few days.

But then I think it through a little further, and life for me begins to lose meaning, focus and purpose.  I am reminded that we really will stand before God one day, and everything that looks so fuzzy now will be crystal clear.  We’ll see all our relationships on earth through the lens of the cross, and we will realize what was at stake.  We’ll realize what could have been, and what should have been, and what might have been if we’d partnered with God to bring the reconciliation He longs for us to bring to people through the cross.  For whatever reason, God puts a call out to all of us (not just preachers) to partner in His work today, the implications of which will last forever.

Last night as I drove to another appointment, I was flipping radio stations and Rock 95 played one of my favourite 80s songs — Queen (with David Bowie) Under Pressure.  Check out the lyrics:
 

                It’s the terror of knowing

                What this world is about

                Watching some good friends

                Screaming let me out

                Pray tomorrow – high higher

               

                Turned away from it all like a blind man

                Sat on a fence but it don’t work

                Keep coming up with love but it’s so slashed

                and torn

                Why?

Under Pressure was sung by a couple of guys who struggle deeply with life and with their sexuality.  The pain inside for them must have been huge, and they saw it in everyone else.  It’s a song that actually asks questions about love and meaning that are answered in the cross, but I’m not sure they knew the answer to that heart-cry is the cross.  The song brought tears to me eyes.

A call to ministry is just the way Jeremiah describes it.  If you try to shut your mouth, it burns like a fire in your heart.  You can’t extinguish it.

I wrote the bulk of this post early this morning at the Second Cup in downtown Barrie watching the first snow gently fall. Somehow it felt like Christmas.  As I leave the restaurant, I feel refreshed.  Ready to answer a call God placed not only on my life, but on our life together.  A call that I can’t escape…and a call today that I again deeply want to embrace.  Too much is at stake. God has done too much to keep silent, to pretend there isn’t a solution to the pain, sorrow and sin that have taken too many lives.  There’s a fire that burns that just won’t go out. 

A short prayer for this morning: God, in some small way, I want to partner with you today to make a difference.  Help me.  Thank you for this opportunity. Thank you for the cross.

How do you process the whole business of how you serve God in the world?  What pulls do you feel in good and not-so-good directions when it comes to serving God?

Last observation from my time at the Willow Creek Conference Saturday in BC (thanks Willow for a great event). 

Having spoken at numerous conferences in a wide variety of settings over the last five years, I see a lot of checkerboard enthusiasm among church leaders and volunteers.  Some are passionate.  Some aren’t.  Some really want to
take risks.  Some don’t.  I wish everyone was passionately committed to reaching others and being the church Jesus has in mind.

And yet everyone I meet wants radical results.  However, not nearly as many are willing
to pay the price associated with radical action.  Because at the end of the day, church and even spiritual growth are too often about us, not about the world. Is it possible to have radically different results without radically different action?  Isn’t that like desperately wanting to lose weight while sitting on the couch eating bags of potato chips?  Something’s got to change for the results to be radically different. 

I feel SO grateful to be part of a community at home that jumps into
real risk, that is willing to embrace deep change for the sake of Jesus
and for the sake of others.  You are one courageous group of leaders, and your faith and willingess to risk inspires church leaders all over the place.

I
never ever want to think we’ve "arrived" because we have so much to learn and so much left to do. But when I think of a
bible passage like this,
I think we are starting to really embrace the radical essence of that
teaching.  I desire that so deeply and I’m so excited to be doing this with you.  Let’s not ever quit!

You have left so much behind for Jesus.  All I can say is thanks for
taking this huge risk.  I feel privileged to be counted among the members of this community.

I love getting around innovative leaders. I had lunch and dinner yesterday with some of the other communicators at the conference I was speaking at in BC.  We had leaders from California, BC and Ontario in on the conversation, and we began to reflect on the changes happening in the church today.

Highlights:

• Something in the church is shifting deeply for people under 30.  They desire both anonymity and relationship (relationship on their terms).  Their tolerance for hypocrisy is minuscule. They are searching for something real, something meaningful, something personal and interactive. I’ve seen this in our community, and it’s a change that excites me.  We might be moving to an era where there is little tolerance for "playing" church and a deep desire to be the church.

• Two of the lead pastors were doing major series on hypocrisy.  The guy from California is in one right now, and I’m planning a major series for January 08.  We wondered allowed whether we could do 52 Sundays next year where all we did was say "love God, love others" and help people integrate that into their lives.  This is where most of us fall down.  We were kind of joking about preaching the same message 52 times, but I wonder what would happen if Christians were the most loving people.  What kind of teaching and what kind of environment in our community groups would lend itself to people truly being transformed into Christ-likeness. Isn’t that what people long for — to be different than we are?  Do we too often settle for breadth of information, and not depth of application of what we already know in our lives?

What do you think?

So this is going to be a strange weekend for a lot of us at my home church of Connexus.  No church services.  At least no church that we’re leading or directly involved in.  It’s the only weekend Connexus has off, but let me ask you, how will you spend it?

I’ve been thinking about how I’ll spend it. I’ll be stuck on a plane.  I’m speaking at a conference in Vancouver on Saturday and fly out at…yikes…6:30 Sunday morning. I’m so grateful for the clocks rolling back an hour…. I don’t get back to Toronto until 4:30 that afternoon.  I’ll be fortunate to make it for my niece’s baptism (really hope I can make it, Mandy) Sunday night.

But this whole thing made me think about how we engage God.  I find it too easy to duck God.  To fill up too much of my time in busy-ness for Him instead of direct engagement with Him.  I’ve got no stats, but my guess is that many Christians spend more time reading Christian books than they spend reading the Bible.  More time thinking about God than praying to Him.  Engaging Him.  I think I’m guilty.

What if we just deeply engaged God this weekend?  Sometimes I think we can use church as a substitute for truly engaging God. We go to listen, but not to be changed. Rating the preacher over lunch becomes the highlight, instead of actually engaging how the Word is speaking directly into your life at any moment.

Even if you do go to church (and I hope you do), what if you tried to engage God? What if we all did that next time we’re in church? What if we really opened our hearts and letting Him speak to us?  What if we stopped judging the music as though we had to text in some rating about whether we liked it or not, and instead, worshiped God and prayed for the people around us who were engaging Him for the first time? What if stopped evaluating the preacher and just listened – for God? What if we pray before we went to church, asking God to speak deeply into our lives?  Prayed while were at church?  Prayed after?  What would happen?

Man, I find being quiet with God a hard thing to do. Because then I need to face Him.  And I need to see myself for who I truly am.

Can you do that this weekend?  Can I?

So it’s day one as full time staff at Connexus Community Church. I am so excited and grateful for this opportunity to launch a church that really works for people.  Yep.  People.  Just plain people.  People who go to WalMart or Starbucks on Sunday, rather than to church.  People who think another hour of sleep beats meeting God.  People who are curious about God, but really don’t believe the church can help them.  People.

Leading people into a growing relationship with Jesus through irresistible, relevant environments is what Connexus is all about.  I’m so excited that our staff will meet today to pray, work for a few hours and then (actually) take our families out for dinner and a round of laser tag (yah…laser tag!) so we can celebrate this special time.  So much to do.  So much to pray about.  So much to plan.  So much to celebrate.  It’s so great being in this together, isn’t it?

Here’s a day one thought starter: Jay Hardwick is asking some great questions on his blog about why Christians don’t attract non-Christians into our life in Christ.  Most non-Christians think of Christians as uptight, dangerous and hypocritical people.  Why?

It’s not because we’re "spiritual".  People are attracted to spiritual Yesterday, the Dalai Lama visited Toronto and attracted  30,000 people at the Roger’s Center.   People were drawn to him.  Why? 

I wonder if Christians (me included) have missed the boat entirely
because we decide that maturity consists of breadth of knowledge (the I
just did a 75 week bible study on Revelation and know a lot kind of deal). But the
truth is, we come home from Bible study and yell at people and kick the
cat. No wonder outsiders avoid us. No wonder people flee us.  Unlike the Dalai Lama, we fail to exhibit love, humility or peace. And while the Dalai Lama may be "spiritual", he is no comparison to Jesus, who perfectly exhibited the character of God, which is love.

I wonder if maturity is not breadth of knowledge, but depth of
application: taking the simple-to-understand-but-difficult-to-do teachings of Jesus and scripture like love, grace, and humility,
and applying them at every level of our lives.

I hope that’s what Connexus is about.  I hope that we are able to offer relevant environments that draws people into the full depth of God’s love.  How deeply would you want love to be integrated into your life?  If we can begin to think like that, maybe the revolution might begin….

So today’s the last day our whole staff/leadership team here at Trinity has in this building and ministry.  We’ve got a lunch set up for everyone, a lot of packing, and then a new launch tomorrow as the Connexus team.  I think we’ll all probably put our feet up tonight and chow down on some candy when the kids get home (I’m going to hockey with Jordan…Toni is doing the trick or treat deal).  And we might just pray a deep prayer of thanksgiving for all that has been and all that is to come.

So many people have emailed or written in to say thanks for the way our team has conducted itself in taking what people call "the high road".  I’m so totally proud of our team.  I just love working with them every day.  They are first rate, first class people.  But as far as I am concerned, I just want to go on record as saying that when it comes to me personally, it’s all grace, man.  It’s all grace.

My instincts run in such an evil direction that I’m embarrassed to talk about it.  A good friend of mine once said that if the average preacher’s thought life was projected on a screen as he or she entered the auditorium Sunday mornings, the congregation would flee.  Yep, he’s right.

But there’s a difference between where our instincts run (can’t control actually having a thought) and what we do with them.  I can choose how long I dwell on a thought.  I can choose to submit every thought to Christ.  I can choose to bite my tongue (hard for a preacher and lawyer).  I can choose to do the right thing, even if my heart wants to do the wrong thing.

How do you get the strength for this?  That’s my point.  I don’t have it.  Christ has it.  And the more I lean into Him, the more He reminds me how little I bring to the table, and how much He brings. 

So don’t thank us, thank God. 

Grateful for all of you today.

So there’s basically a month to go until Connexus Community Church publicly launches in Barrie and Orillia, and just two weeks until we start meeting on Sundays to train our volunteers (both campuses — be there Sunday, November 11th at 10:00 at the Barrie Galaxy). 

I was thinking about how I’m going to get ready spiritually.  If I’m not careful, I can end up trying to do way too much on my own strength, not leaning hard enough into God. So yesterday, I changed my devotional plan.  For years, I have read through the Bible every year, and that’s good.  But I was going to end up spending half of November in Ezekiel, which is a great book, but it’s basically a bunch of numbers and measurements, especially toward the end.  I wondered whether that would do the best job of really getting me personally ready for the launch. 

So I picked up a devotional book I got a few years ago where essentially, you only read a verse or two of scripture a day and then spend about 15-30 minutes praying over it, reflecting on it, asking God to apply it to your life, journaling about it, and  then praying.  Sometimes just two verses, really digested and applied, can be transformational.

A great teacher, Terry Wardle, helped me overcome my tending to treat Bible reading as a "duty" or something you "check off".  He taught me that the Bible and prayer position you for intimacy with God.  Rather than being an "end" in themselves, I’ve come to see scripture and prayer as means that help me encounter Christ personally and deeply, the same way a fine dinner on a date positions a couple to have a time to catch up and really grow in their relationship.

Man, that’s what I want as we head into this launch.  I’d appreciate your prayers for me and for the whole team as we get spiritually ready for what’s ahead.  And if you’re part of the launch, I hope you’ll think about how you might prepare too.