Bruce Jakola :: Friends blog

This church is making a very intentional attempt to engage the margins and stretch the tether of the Jesus way.  I hope you will pray and encourage these kinds of efforts to bring the conversation of redemption to those who might never hear it.

www.oversoldthemovie.com

www.elevationchurch.tv

A person reads an ad in the newpaper about a church that offers the full meal of Christ in their services.  By meal, I mean it's promised to be filling and satisfiying in every way.  To meet all their needs.  They arrive and are greeted in a friendly manner, taken to a place where they see slides advertising the meal, and they hear people talk about the meal, then we powerpoint the meal and send them on their way.  Unfulfilled, still hungry for the real thing.  Another analogy would be the wine and wineskin.  We have great looking skins, ornate in their appearance and beautiful to the eye, but the wine inside is not sweet and does not taste as wine should.  And people know when it doesn't.  Is the wine in the Church the true wine of Jesus. 

All the things in the Bible are important, but we would agree that the things that Jesus said are most important.  He boiled all the commandments and the law down to loving God and loving others.  Then He gave us a single command, in the spirit of the Shamah, whatever you are doing, wherever you are going, make disciples.  This is the irreducible core of the faith.  You can do more than this and follow Jesus, but not less.  Our churches can vary the wineskin.  But this is the wine.  It has to be there. 

Thoughts?

 Reference:  Howard Snyder:  The Problem of Wineskins, Church Structure in a Technological Age

As we have been praying this year for the Lord to send laborers, He has answered.  I want to share briefly about how this has come about. 

Over two years ago, I had hit a wall.  We had done all the strategizing I thought we could do.  We had new communities everywhere.  Thousands upon thousands of homes being built in the Phoenix area.  No land available within all these master-planned communities...without paying millions.  So I began to pray.  "Lord, you told me to pray for laborers in your harvest.  I know you have them out there somewhere, could you send them please."
Within a month of praying that prayer, I heard from no less than 3 planters who told me that God had put Arizona on their heart.  One was a 14 year veteran from California, another a 7 year veteran from Maryland.  Two more from North Carolina, another from Texas and yet another from California soon followed.  All of these guys were multipliers.  They had born the fruit in their ministry in the past and knew how to implant themselves into the harvest.  They lived incarnationally and know how to make disciples.  And they all came here.  At this time.  God is always very on purpose and on time with His moves and I can't imagine this being done for any other reason than to spawn a movement.

Within this group He has sent us, we now have coaches and mentors who are helping to create the environment needed to reproduce followers of  Jesus and new communities of those people.  As we have seen, He has also brought us fresh and young faces that are tired of being synical and want to see more from and for the church.  They have come into a community of personal and corporate discipleship.  They are eager to follow and to grow into the person they are called to be.  We have seen them begin to develop small influence groups that will provide the kindling for the movement.  They are infected and infectious.  They are learning to live out the essentials, the irreducible core, loving God, loving others, and making disciples.  They are doing so in a rabbinical community, where questions are asked and not answered easily, where tension and conflict are embraced as part of the learning process.  And nothing will ever be the same. 

For old guys like me (43) this is the most fun we've had in years.  Getting to coach these guys and unleash them on the culture with all the tools they need to change it and doing so without having to try and plan it all out.  Just following the leadership of the Spirit as He opens the doors and eyes of people all around us to the truth of Jesus through incarnational disciple-making.  Incarnational church planting.  
Yes, it has begun, and nothing will stop it now.  Not even us.
Praise God. 

And thank you,
David,
Mike,
Ray,
Dennis,
Mark,
Scott,
Mike C,
Judd,
Tim,
Bobby
For joining the movement.