Children, Parenthood, and Jesus is a Friend of Mine!

"Children are a gift from the Lord: they are a reward from him. Children born to a young man are like sharp arrows in a warrior's hands. How happy is the man whose quiver is full of them! He will not be put to shame when he confronts his accusers at the city gates." Psalm 127:3-5


My feet hurt from stepping on Legos, my shoulders are killing me from throwing him up in the air, my knees hurt from crawling around the kitchen floor with him, Lins voice is horse, we are both sleep deprived and today while getting him ready to take a bath he peed on my leg and then laughed and I can honestly say I have never been more blessed , more happy, and felt more purpose than I have this week.

This week Lins and began foster parenthood. Because of the sensitivity of foster care I can’t talk about details of the children or of the situations that led to them being in our care. But I wanted to take this time to say how awesome children are and how much of a blessing he really is…

Now as you can all imagine I have had very little time this week to formulate an actual long weekly blog so I decided to post this awesome Rock Video…Enjoy!

Missional Community - Expressions of Christ's Church

And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
Acts 2:46-47 ESV

Lately I’ve been wrestling with the idea of missional community. That being a community of believers on mission with one another as Christ's Church. The struggle has been for me how do you balance a community of believers ( a local church) doing life together with the preaching and proclamation of the Gospel. It seems that some would say there is either one or the other in Christendom today.

House Church Movement

There has been a huge resurgence in the house church movement over the past few years. It is an awesome movement with many godly men leading the charge. Others terms for house churches have been new monastic communities, simple faith communities or simple churches. A great friend of mine pastors such a network of simple churches in Las Vegas and God is blessing them(http://www.oikoschurchlv.com/ ) . House churches ( we’ll use this term for the sake definition) are usually small groups of Christians who meet in a house where worship, teaching and fellowship is done with other believers. More simply put: they do life together. Other examples of such communities would be SOMA in Tacoma, WA (http://www.somacommunities.org/ ) and Kaleo Church in San Diego, CA (http://www.kaleochurch.com/ ). Often times these houses church networks do have a corporate worship service once a month for all the house churches within their network meet for worship and preaching.

Big Attritional Churches

There are then the larger churches that put a emphasis on the larger worship service. Now I am not talking here about “Seeker Sensitive” churches. I am talking about churches that are doctrinally sound and week in and week out preach the Gospel from the pulpit in large worship gatherings. Such churches include Mars Hill in Seattle , WA (http://www.marshillchurch.org/ ), and the Village church in Dallas, TX (http://www.thevillagechurch.net/ ). As with the former these churches often have home communities or small groups where life is done together and community is built.

The Conflict

The conflict in my mind has been where does God have me. Would he have me do one or the other? Or is there a way to balance both? Both types have their advantages and disadvantages. And I will say that all of the above churches mentioned would not call their way or expression of church exclusive or better that any other.

I guess my question is in what form will the Gospel go out the most effectively in my context here in the Medford/ Ashland Area of Southern, OR. I by no means wish to pin up one against the other. So I open this up to public discussion. What do you think on this issue? Can you have both? If so , How? What are pluses and minuses you see? What do you do in your Church or Biblical Faith Community? I would love everyone’s input as I pray through this!

A New Begining

Many of you may have noticed that this is not my usual blog and others may have notices that my usual blog has been shut down for some time. I had to delete my last blog. I was getting myself into a lot of trouble and honestly I was in deep sin in my blog. I engaged in political debate which in and of itself is not a bad thing but I had abandon any principle in the blog and blatantly attacked others views and positions. My blogs had no real missional,spiritual or practical value. I had to delete it, repent and start over.

Blogging has always been a healthy outlet for me. Many of you may remember before blogs I would pretty much do the same thing but in a mass e-mail format. I would send out mass e-mails to people about things that God was doing in my life and decisions that I was facing. Then came Live Journal, Xanga, Myspace, Facebook, and Blogspot.

My hope in this blog is to create a dialog. A dialog about God,Christ,prayer, Church, community, theology, and the like. Not a dialog about things we know such as the penal substitutionary death of Christ in my place for my sins. But a dialog about what God is doing in our lives,churches, community, family and so on. It is my intent to glorify Christ and his bride the church through this and to be an encouragement to thous who may read this. If I ever sway from that I give you the reader permission to call me on it.