Top 10 Reasons To Join A Church Plant
Earlier this year I wrote a post that received a lot of attention, Top 10 Reasons Not to Join a Church Plant. That post has significantly helped and protected our 44-day-old church plant.
In the same spirit, I now offer you my Top 10 Reasons to Join a Church Plant:
1. If you want to see Jesus do something new—if you’re sick of the status quo, join a church plant.
2. If you dream of being part of something bigger than yourself, join a church plant.
3. If you want to get into a fight—enter a battle—for the kingdom of Christ, join a church plant.
4. If you feel a constant itch to see people who don’t know Jesus come to know Jesus and you believe church planting is the best way for the gospel to advance, join a church plant.
5. If you want to give your time, money, energy, and talents to starting something new—if you want to make sacrifices in order for a mission to succeed, join a church plant.
6. If you fully support the vision, mission, doctrine, and leadership of a church plant, join a church plant.
7. If you want your faith to grow and you want God to fundamentally meddle with and change your life, join a church plant.
8. If you want to love your city, join a church plant.
9. If you want to watch God move in ways you never imagined—if you want an adventure (with all it’s discomfort and risk), join a church plant.
10. If you’re not afraid to bank your life on Matthew 16:18 (“I [Jesus] will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”), join a church plant.
PS. Credit goes to three members of Garden City Church—Danielle Vargas, Ian Hagerman, and Paul Nunez—who gave me some of the ideas for this list.
Garden City Church: Our First Baptisms!
Yesterday Garden City Church turned 35 days old and we celebrated our first baptisms. It was a Sunday we will never forget.
We rent space on Sunday afternoons from a very kind and generous church. For a variety of reasons we weren’t able to hold our baptisms on the church property. So, we put a hot tub on the back of a trailer, parked it on the street in front of the church, and held our baptisms on The Alameda immediately after our Sunday worship service. You had to be there.
Watch the short video and check out a few pictures. Thank you for praying for our new church plant. Please don’t stop.
Christianity is the Unreligion
I am loving Dane Ortlund’s new book, Defiant Grace: The Surprising Message and Mission of Jesus. To give you a taste, here is a quote from the book that I’ll be using in my sermon this Sunday:
Christianity is the unreligion. It turns all our religious instincts on their head…
The ancient Greeks told us to be moderate by knowing our inclinations. The Romans told us to be strong by ordering our lives. Buddhism tells us to be disillusioned by annihilating our consciousness. Hinduism tells us to be absorbed by merging our souls. Islam tells us to be submissive by subjecting our wills. Agnosticism tell us to be at peace by ignoring our doubts. Moralism tells us to be good by discharging our obligations. Only the gospel tells us to be free by acknowledging our failure. Christianity is the unreligion because it is the one faith whose founder tells us to bring not our doing, but our need.
Get Drunk on Grace
The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred-proof grace—of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the gospel—after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection your bootstraps—suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, nor flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.
-Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace
Many College Students Joining Garden City Church
My life changed my sophomore year of college when I committed to a local church. I began worshiping weekly with 7 year-olds and 70 year-olds, was discipled in a community group, served in student ministry, was mentored by my pastor, was “adopted” by a family who treated me like their own son, lived “on mission” with my friends, caught a vision for what the local church could be, started preaching at a homeless shelter, and became 100% convinced that God was calling me to be a pastor. I had dreams of one day leading a church that would minister to college students in the way I was ministered to.
So, I am pumped that many college students are beginning to experience the same thing at Garden City Church. Where we meet on Sundays is located just a mile or so from both Santa Clara University and San Jose State University. I’m thrilled about the impact Garden City is started to have on these campuses and the impact that these students are beginning to have on Garden City. The best way to reach college students with your church isn’t to simply go out and recruit a bunch of students to your church, but to cast vision for everybody over age 22 in your church to pour their lives into discipling college students. This is beginning to happen at Garden City.
Garden City Church is 31 days old and Jesus is on the move.
Today I was thrilled to read a blog post from David Bibee, a student at Santa Clara University who has jumped head first into Garden City Church. Read these words from David:
I just got home from my neighborhood group (small group) from the church I have been attending, and I couldn’t help but take a few minutes to just write down some things.
Before I came to school in the Silicon Valley, I attended a wonderful little church called Foothill Community Church in Angels Camp, CA (population next to nothing), where my faith found its roots and was able to thrive under the pastoral guidance of Pastor Dave Mattson and the personal mentorship of the youth pastor Dusty Bach.
Coming to Santa Clara was somewhat fearful because I didn’t know what kind of spiritual climate to expect. As a Catholic university, I knew that it would have its own Christian culture and I knew that there would be much more sympathy towards those of faith than other secular universities, but I didn’t know what kind of friend group I would have or what church I would be able to call a home.
Due to my own stubbornness, perhaps a bit more freedom than I knew how to handle, I often slept in more than go to church on Sundays. I didn’t really commit to any local body, and only sporadically attended any of the local churches. This summer God really convicted me of the absolute necessity of being involved with the local church, submit to a local body of elders and pastors, and grow among a community of believers. As an intern at my home church, working with the youth, God worked in such mighty ways through the life of Foothill that it was impossible for me to deny the power of a community dedicated to loving Jesus and seeing the Gospel proclaimed. And I knew that I had been cut off from community, by my own doing, at Santa Clara. I was isolated from the local church, and that is a detriment to both the church and the individual. The church is fundamentally weakened when Christians are not connected, and Christians stunt their growth when they are not dedicated to contributing and being blessed by a local church.
The new church plant in San Jose, Garden City Church, has become a home to me in the first few weeks that it has been operating. My neighborhood group is full of the most wonderful people, dedicated to loving Jesus and serving one another, and I feel so remarkably blessed in such a short time. I feel impassioned to preach the Gospel and tell people of the wonderful things that God is doing at Garden City.
Jesus is doing a marvelous thing among the people at Garden City and I am so joyful that I have found a community in which I know I have found a love that comes from God and far exceeds what the world has to offer! Jesus commanded us, and I can say without any hesitation that Garden City is taking it to heart:
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. -John 13:34-35
If you are in San Jose or the surrounding area, need a church, want a loving community, or just want to come and see what this whole Christianity thing is about, please come check out this awesome place where Jesus is proclaimed and sinners are loved with a love that is unconditional!
Pray For Our City: 37 Homicides in San Jose
San Jose is the 10th largest city in America. A lot of people live here. And, right now, a lot of people are being killed here. So far we have 37 homicides in 2011.
San Jose has been known as “the safest big city in America,” but this year that title is being challenged. The homicide rate hasn’t looked like this in a long time.
The map above shows where each of the 37 homicides have taken place (Click here for an interactive map that details each of these homicides). Our new church plant, Garden City Church, meets on Sundays right in the middle of this map, very near to most of these homicides. You’ll notice that most of these killings have happened on the east side of the city–I believe this is typical, that it’s most often in “the east side” of our cities that homicides happen. Is this true for your city?
Pray for San Jose. Pray for the killings to stop. And please pray that our church (and many other churches here in San Jose) can be used of Jesus to bring new life to a city that’s experiencing a lot of death right now.
Authentic Manhood
My friend John Bryson and his partners are putting together some exciting material for men. Watch this 2 minute video.
33 Trailer from Flashlight Media Group on Vimeo.
Sermon Notes
Someone from Garden City Church sent me this picture of her sermon notes from Sunday. I thought the picture looked interesting.
You can subscribe to the Garden City podcast here.
Steve, Silicon Valley, and Jesus
I live six miles from Apple’s headquarters. Yesterday I drove those six miles to have lunch at a restaurant across the street from Apple with an Apple engineer who is part of our church plant. I was impressed by this man’s passion for working at Apple and for sharing the gospel with his co-workers at Apple.
I told him about my old friend who is very high up at Apple, a Christian who has watched the gospel spread in exciting ways within the company. I told him how at the breakfast meetings I used to have with this old friend, Steve Jobs would sometimes call or text my friend during our breakfast. That’s the closest I ever got to Steve Jobs.
But Steve Jobs got close to me. His products are in my house and in my pocket. Steve’s inventions are in your home too. Steve’s stuff is everywhere.
That’s the exciting thing about living and working in Silicon Valley: what happens here impacts the world. I don’t think there is another geographic region quite like it, a region that has such an exponential world-wide impact. Think about it. Silicon Valley is home to: Apple, Google, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Netflix, Hewlett-Packard, Adobe Systems, Cisco, Oracle, Intel, and many other paradigm shifting companies that have changed the way we live.
It’s not just what’s in my pocket, but the pockets themselves that Steve Jobs has impacted. I often wonder if the reason I preach in jeans is because Steve Jobs presented in jeans—is Steve the one who made it normal for a leader to stand in front of a large crowd and deliver important information while wearing jeans? And several times now I’ve referred to the former Apple CEO simply as “Steve.” That’s the culture here in Silicon Valley: casual. You call the CEO of the richest company in America, “Steve,” not “Mr. Jobs.” Twenty years ago that was not how you addressed or spoke of CEOs or others in positions of authority. Here in Silicon Valley and all across the world, Steve has impacted our technology, our clothing, and how we talk to each other.
Steve accomplished a staggering amount in 56 years. In my opinion, my life and your life is better because of a man named Steve. And now, Steve is dead. The man who improved our life has lost his life.
What I like to think is that in his last days Steve placed his faith in Jesus. It’s entirely possible. I know that Steve was coming into regular contact with Christians and hearing the gospel at Apple. Only God knows where Steve sits today.
Jesus lived on earth for just 33 years in a place far less sexy than Silicon Valley. He never invented anything, yet he changed the world. He died a far more brutal death than Steve. Jesus didn’t merely die, he was killed. Two thousand years later, Jesus is everywhere—all around the world people are still talking about, worshiping, loving, and following Jesus. We will be talking about Steve for a long time, but as the decades roll by those conversations will fade. And Apple won’t live forever.
Steve gave 56 years of his life to improve our life.
Jesus gave 33 years of his life to save our life.
That’s the big difference between Steve and Jesus. Steve came to improve. Jesus came to save. One man thought that improvement is what we need most. The other man thought that saving—rescue—is what we need most.
The gospel of Silicon Valley is improvement. I live and minister in a place that is improving lives here and around the world. I dream of impacting this region that’s impacting the world with a different gospel. Steve is great. But we don’t need Steve, we need Jesus. I’m thankful for the man that improved our life. But we need to know the man who lost his life to save our life.
