You know, I can think of a few instances in my sphere of influence where a local church has really hurt someone recently.

And I wonder to myself, “How can we do this? Why can’t we treat people with more respect and love? Why are the people who give so much hurt so often?”

Then I am reminded that I am a Calvinist. We hurt because we are predisposed to hurt. To self-protect. To… we just do it because it is in our nature.

Dear Lord, fill our churches with joy and love that comes from you. Ours isn’t working.

You know, I got this article forwarded to me today. And it really hacked me off.

For the past 6 months or so the staff has wondered if we were past stuff like this. Apparently fundamentalism is alive and well in the hearts and minds of people in our church… people I really like. It’s a tiny but loud minority.

Why I think we need to have a major change in our church

1. I think fear [fundamentalisms only grasp on people] is holding us back from reaching our community for Christ.
2. I think fundamentalism is a different gospel than I believe in. Most fundamentalist I’ve interacted with believe intellectually in grace and mercy… but don’t practice it practically.
3. It frustrates me that articles like this are based on such crap journalism. Did they interview YS? I didn’t think so! The goal is fear-mongering instead of truth.
4. We need to focus on the future instead of holding onto the recent past.

Here’s my plan, even though no one cares what I think… and since it’s my blog I can dream a little

1. Make it known that we are distancing ourselves from fundamentalist. While we still love those who have gone before us, we’re past it and we aren’t looking back.
2. Drop our name and pick up a cool name for our church. We’ll still honor the last 165 years, but the name should go back to it’s original name.
3. Tell those who are holding on to grudges from years ago to get over it. The past is the past. Confess your sins and move on.
4. Simply embrace the future… let go of what’s holding us back… and passionately and relevently move on. I want to see us be the oldest church plant in the world!

OK, got that off my chest. Now back to reality!

This morning at my Bible study we talked a little bit about the “secret mission.” At this point, they are having a hard time even finding C. They are going to purposely have to seek C out and change their habits in order to make the connection. But they are still on the case.

Lemme share something amazing. I spent another “all Sunday” session with a former student doing work on my house. It leaves me thinking to myself… What is this all about? Am I on to something?

So far, 3 years into FT ministry, I’ve rarely been “successful” with guys. There are always guys in my group, I always invest in guys, guy stick around… But I’ve never felt like we were attractive to guys. All of “youth group growth” has come with ladies. Don’t know why, but it’s true.

So yesterday, we ran conduit in my back yard all afternoon and until 11:30 PM. It left me wondering… Is sharing my life like this, in essence pure masculinity, going to lead to more effectiveness in reaching men? I don’t know… I don’t worry about silly growth strategies… But it did make me wonder.

Long term effect: The conduit looks great. We’re not done yet, but it is going to add a lot of safety and value to our house.

Right now, 20 feet from me… is the motherload of Halloween candy. We’ve been told that our block gets hundreds of trick-or-treaters so over the last couple of weeks we’ve been gathering more and more candy. Well, yesterday Kristen decided to put all of that candy in a big laundry basket on the porch to get it out of the way. I gotta tell ya… when I pass that thing I have the hardest time not picking up candy. Especially since Skittles are in there. That is just wrong.

If you think about it, give Jonathon a jingle or drop him and e-mail. They recently left God’s country [Michigan] and relocated to SC. I think it’s fair to say that things haven’t worked out the way they had hoped and they could really use some encouragement.

With Sunday out of the way, my “big secret” is that I have a quiet couple of weeks. We have the harvest party on Wednesday night… so no tlak to prepare. Then we have the Chicago College visits this weekend… so no Sunday school. I’m looking forward to a nice easy week. That will give me lots of time to settle into our newly completed offices.

Here is my profound thought for Saturday morning: Whoever invested the coffee press, he’s a flippin’ genius. I could never make good coffee with our old Mr. Coffee coffee maker. Even if I followed the directions, set the timer, walked away, and came back at the perfect time… my coffee always sucked.

But with the coffee press, I can do it. I boil water, put the stuff in, wait 3 minutes… and push the plunger down. Next step, pour coffee. I can do that.

A private joke between my wife and I has now officially gone public. For the past year or so Kristen has been hooked on allrecipes.com. I don’t really know what she does there… but I know she goes there a lot and spends a lot of time looking at recipes. So much so that I started to joke with her that she was always on the PC looking at “girl porn.”

Well, I’ve joked with her so much that a lot of people know about her innocent addition. In fact, she is spreading her addiction throughout the ladies of the church.

In other news it came to my attention that two of my students have a date tonight. This was a shocker to me! I have been pretty famous over the past 3 years in sniffing out this kind of thing. But I missed this one and only found out about it when the girl’s mom called me to ask what I knew about the boy. Let’s hope that it both starts and ends well. My thoughts on adolescent love are well-documented here on All Blogs. These things are always like watching NASCAR. There is always a wreck. They call it “a crush” because it crushes. Oh well, I hope they have fun!

As of this moment, Kristen and I have no credit card debt. Incredible! I don’t even remember how we got in that mess to begin with. (8 years ago) But we are now out of it.

The only debt we currently have is “good debt” of our house. But that is a bigger project. Praise God for little victories like this. YES!

Last night at my 3Story training we ended up talking a lot about our humanity. The principle I taught in closing was that it is better to be real than anything else when sharing Christ with folks. The idea is that when we expose how imperfect we are, others see us in the same boat as they are… In desperate need of being saved.

This got me thinking… isn’t it amazing that a great big God loves little me? I mean, I am a failure in so many capacities… I think the thing I struggle with the most lately is that I don’t see myself as being very faithful to what I am leading people towards. It seems like the more I try to teach others about Jesus and God’s Word… The further from Jesus and God’s Word I feel. I could theologicize it by saying that I am just in full knowledge of my imperfection… But the reality is that I am a failure and I am overcome by feeling like a fraud. People have a radar for insincerity and duplicity and sometimes I feel like people look right through me.

Here’s another thought. There seems to be a real shift in ministry. There used to be a school of thought that told ministers “you need to be Jesus to those who don’t know him.” I remember hearing that coming up. I also remember thinking…. “Yeah, but if I really look at myself I know I could never be perfect… So why call myself a minister?” Now there is a paradigm shift to the other side. Now it seems like we are being taught to tell others what a mess we are. I mean, it seems like in order to be a good minister I need to be disclosing my failures all the time.

Here are a few pluses to that from where I sit in the boat.
– Failures are disarming.
– Acknowledging failures is part of dealing with them.
– Disclosing failures shows that I haven’t arrived yet.
– Letting people see my struggles makes me more human.

Here are some minuses.
– Some people aren’t looking for other humans, they are looking for people to help them!
– We assume that people care what’s going on in our lives.
– Acknowledging failures makes it seem like we aren’t working on fixing stuff.
– Disclosing too much can take over a conversation.

At the end of the day… I’m just working on this myself. I know I am a failure. I know that I am in need of Jesus every day. I know I can do nothing outside of his grace and mercy… But I am just not yet sure I want to go around disclosing all of that!

Ah man… we were excited for this thing to start… but the non-stop jack hammers and heavy equipment outside the building is a real drag. Half the time we can’t even hear ourselves think. Just about 2 months until it’s done. Ugh!