It’s official, I’m on my way to southern Mississippi in the morning with 4 vans and oodles of supplies. I’m a little nervous about the “unknown factor” but I can’t wait to see how God will use me.

I don’t know if I can make any updates once we get started. I will play with mo-blogging today to see if I can make posts with my camera phone.

Please pray for my team!

I’ll be able to document some of my life a little stranger now with mo-bloggin’. Should be an intereting experience.

Tonight I received one of those e-mails that you just file away somewhere. It came a bit unexpected and it came at a good time. Not that I am particularly discouraged or anything like that… But it is always nice to get messages like this. Here is what a current student wrote to me:

So I want to tell you how much I appreciate you. I want to thank you for everything. For picking me up for stuff, letting me hang out at your house, being there when I need to talk, and everything else. Your always here when I need to talk, even if I am being a compleate idiot about something (which happens a lot), you help me realize that I am being an idiot, without being mean. I’ve changed a lot of the past few years, and I think that you have really helped me, you helped me though a lot of stuff, and done a lot of stuff for me. I don’t understand why you don’t just tell me “GO AWAY!” I mean, I’m sure you probably think it, but I don’t understand why you don’t say it. You’ve done way more for me then I deserve. I really want to thank you for everything. But I want to ask you a question, why? why do you do it? i mean, i know some of it comes with the job, but you do way more then you get paid for, so why do you do it?

I think it is a fair question worth contemplating… Why do I do this? Why do youth ministry folks do what we do? What is it that keeps us doing the things this student is talking about? Are we mad or do we get it?

When we moved here we were told that we would love Romeo, but hate the Peach Festival. They were wrong. We love Romeo and the Peach Festival. The Peach Fest is one of the many things that make our small town unique… we think it is cool that all of this happens here and that oodles of people invade our town once a year for a festival celebrating a fruit we barely even grow.

So today is the day that my kids have been waiting for. We will get a chance to enjoy the Peach Fest and walk around to the different things. Sunday and Monday we will watch all the parades, but today we’ll get a chance to check out the children’s activities, the craft [crap] fairs, and of course the carnival rides. While it will be a day that mom and dad spend a lot of money… it is a day we will have a lot of fun building family memories.

Isn’t it annoying?

I will admit that there are parts of the Peach Fest I could deal without. I could deal without the massive, unchecked, teen public drunkeness and drug use. I could deal without the embracing of adults getting drunk int he beer tent just 150 yards from our house. I could deal without the carnival workers staying up all night and partying. I could deal with drunk carnies, teenagers, and adults staring at me when I dared to drive down the middle of the street when they were enjoying their drunken stuppor to their cars and trying to win their free ride in a Macomb County Sherrif’s vehicle to the Macomb County Jail.

is the church doing anything? But if this is the worst that the Pech festival has to offer, we are doing pretty good. For the most part, I love the Peach Fest and want to do whatever I can to embrace it as an opportunity rather than something we should avoid. Colossians 4:5 says, “Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity.” This is an opportunity. This is something I hope our entire church sees as an opportunity to reach the lost.

Practically speaking, this year is the first year we have corporately embraced the Peach Festival in several years. The puppet group has floats in all of the parades and the church is offering free parking and shuttle service on Sunday and Monday for people from our property to downtown. It’s not much, but I think it is a positive start in us living up to Colossians 4:5. I definitely feel bettewr about the Peach Fest and I feel like we at least have an answer to the nagging question… Have we made the most of this opportunity?

Mortgage: We close on our house next Friday. We aren’t nervous about this or anything. In fact, we’re pretty pleased with everything. The mortgage company did a lot to keep cash in our pockets. Probably not the best thing for building equity on the loan but it will do loads to help us with some of the projects we’re interested in for the house. As of right now, we may be moving in to the house before the end of September.

Light Force plan: I’ll be spending a lot of time tomorrow setting up a fall teaching plan for Sunday school and getting the ball rolling on our fall series through Luke: Tell me your story. I have no idea what to do with Sunday school! I have some goals but don’t know yet what I think needs to be taught. I might actually have to refer back to some undergrad class notes for YEAR 3. 🙂

Family stuff: Obviously, buying this house means a lot to us and has taken a lot of our attention. We’ll be spending a lot of our time in the next several weeks/months shopping for antiques, going to garage sales, and decorating. I have 1 or 2 outside projects that I would like to get rolling before fall sets in as well. Should be fun.

Megan isn’t going to preschool this year, so I have a feeling she will be getting involved in some other things like soccer and maybe a dance class. Paul is experimenting with his potty seat… That’s too cool! Also, he is just an amazing little talker.

The past 36 hours or so I haven’t been able to think about much else than what is happening along the gulf coast of our country. Everything else going on in my life seems to just go without words.

I don’t think I know anyone personally effected, but I am just overcome by the need. People here are whining about gas prices… who cares… it’s not a big deal compared to what is coming across cable these days.

In the past 3-4 days I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about this simple thought… what is evangelism? The context of that seems to be that while our team was in Northern Ireland some folks have a hard time describing what we did there as “primarily evangelism.”

Here’s why I think it is evangelism… But first I have to challenge major assumptions about it.

Evangelism is a process and not an event
The very word evangelism means the process of evangelizing. To share the gospel with someone shouldn’t be just a one time occurrence and it shouldn’t result in anyone inviting you to church… It should be a process of inviting lost people to come to Jesus. Jesus and church are two different things!

I like to challenge people with thinking about evangelism as a process where you are helping lost people find out about and meet with Jesus. He is God! He can overcome any obstacle… But He also allows Christians to enter into the process by having us be “wall builders or wall destroyers.”

Evangelism is about introducing people to Jesus, not defending Christian beliefs
A lot of people think that because they get into debates about stuff… That they are sharing their faith. Nope, that’s an art called apologetics. Evangelism is about Jesus, not Christian politics or even morality discussions. I can lead someone to Christ who is a practicing homosexual who lives with his partner, votes Democrat, has a NOW sticker, and gives money to PETA. Don’t like that thought? Look at what Jesus told the Pharisee’s when they didn’t like him hanging out with tax collectors!

Evangelism is a spiritual gift… And a skill you can learn
Too many people say “I don’t have the spiritual gift of evangelism so I don’t need to share my faith.” Maybe that sounds good to you… But it is unbiblical. Each believer is given the same charge to make disciples. It doesn’t have an out clause if you’ve scored low on evangelism in a spiritual gift profile or if you aren’t comfortable.

Evangelism is too hard to do
So is seeing lost people suffer. I like to go back to an old movie called Medicine Man. In the jungles of the Amazon Sean Connory’s character stumbles across a drug that kills cancerous tumors in mice. But his drug company rep is worried about the profits and the patent… She tries to stop him from telling the world about his discovery too soon and he yells at her, “If you knew the cure for cancer, wouldn’t you want to tell the world!” It’s a powerful question for believers. If you know Christ, you know the cure for something for more important that cancer. You know the cure for sin… Something that separates people from a Holy God. Don’t you see the need to tell lost people how they can know God?

Evangelism is just about getting people to heaven
True, those who know Christ go to heaven and those who don’t know him, the Bible teaches, they are separated from God and punished in hell.

But evangelism is more than just about the afterlife! It’s about living a life for Jesus here and now. A life free from the entrapments of sin and guilt. To be forgiven is to be truly set free to live! A lot of people think they are living great lives but they are dead in their sins… Knowing Christ will help people live a more abundant and fulfilling life now. [Not monitarily, bigger than simple money!]

As Kristen and I went to sleep last night, our thoughts were on the people of New Orleans as the massive hurricane was set to hit them “dead, solid, and perfect.”

It didn’t really hit me that this storm was so massive until I saw a comparison with 2004’s hurricane Charlie. Katrina is 5 times larger than Charlie. Charlie was something like 40 miles wide when it slammed into the Ft. Myers area… it was about 400 miles wide when it hit low lying Louisiana.

I just hope people heeded the warnings and got out of the way of this monster.

Today is the day! About 4-5 months ago I was sitting in Dave Rahn’s Equipping Strategies class at Huntington when I realized that what I was experiencing there, we must experience at Romeo.

It wasn’t a fancy idea. It was life touching life stuff. I knew that at my church we had teachers who were passionate about teaching our children and adults, but who lacked drive and skills. I knew we had teachers who were burnt out and needed a break but didn’t know where it would come from, and I knew we had a church that was growing but in danger of outgrowing it’s Christian Education. As I sat in that classroom I decided I wanted to be a part of a massive turnaround that changed our church from an abusing teachers model to an equipping teachers model. In order to do that we had to turn a corner… We had to start pouring ourselves into teachers instead of using them until they quit. We needed to train more than teach.

So that is today! Beginning in just a couple of hours, a gaggle of teachers will be coming to Romeo for a morning of mini-training seminars. I’ve heard grumbling, I’ve heard people trying to get out of it… But I keep telling folks the same thing…”It’s not what you think it will be, it is the start of something that will hopefully transform our church to where we need to go.”

It’s been a lot of work to see this from that classroom until today. The bottom line is that I think it is worth it. I hope this is the beginning of a turnaround at Romeo. Sure, we’ve grown… But not by much. It’s my “great scheme” hope that trying to become an equipping church will help the people really believe that Romeo can be bigger than they are. We see God doing something here and we want to be a part of it… It’s started all over in tiny pockets and we want to see it spread. Training teachers to train others is a big part of it!