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We are launching a brand new series this weekend at all fresh life locations and broadcasts. At fresh life Billings we will be joined for the series premiere by Aaron Gillespie! I hope you will bring a friend and join us. You can also send out invites here.

Today it has been five years since fresh life began! If there is one word that encapsulated that day it would be the number 14. It was Sunday, January 14th, the temperature was 14 degrees outside and there were 14 people that came to our first service. It is very special now to look back on the small beginnings of the great things we have seen God do. We have put together a very special film to preserve our history called, The Fresh Life Story. (If you haven’t seen the trailer check out this post!)

It will be played this weekend at all fresh life campuses and online experiences so make sure to catch one of them if you can. I can’t think of any project that has been more difficult and exciting than trying to encapsulate what we have seen God do in these 5 years in Montana in this documentary. I pray God uses it in big ways! If you can’t make it to a fresh life campus or webcast this weekend we will be making it available for purchase in the coming days so stay tuned.

As a fresh life birthday celebration warmup, I thought I’d prime the party with a little video I shot for my blog, with my phone, explaining how and where I made the decision to move to Montana. In case any of you are reading this post during a layover or are killing time with nothing to do…let me just tell you this, God can move in a life and in this world cataclysmically through an hour in an airport. I marvel now when I think back to how much God has accomplished as a result of this hugely pivotal moment that seemed arbitrary at the time.

Paul McCartney was once asked when he knew the writing was on the wall for the Beatles, as a band. He pointed to the summer of 1965 and specifically their sold-out performance at Shea Stadium. Because the screaming of the crowd was was so loud, and there wasn’t such a thing as in-ear monitors to block out noise back then; they could not hear themselves play their set. Paul said that he knew in his gut that it was the beginning of the end when they could no longer hear the music but they kept performing anyway.

I think that is a haunting lesson for anyone who is passionately pursuing any dream. Failure, as trying as it can be, is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Success can actually be worse. This is true in ministry and in business. You can get so big and so successful that as an organization you are no longer lit by the same fire you once had. You have to fight to retain the original passion you had when you were starting out.

There are two things that we have been intentional about doing at fresh life, as we have grown, to keep us on mission and fight the forces of entropy. One is being careful to remember our history. This is vital. New hires and those who join later on need to understand what they are a part of or they will take the sacrifices paid early on for granted. The second is to make sure that the core values that lead to the success in the first place are instilled afresh, again and again, so that they are not forsaken.

A while back a friend of mine, Pastor Steven Furtick from Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, gave me a book that really opened my eyes to seeing the need for these things to be specifically nailed down and not allowed to remain nebulous. The book is called The Orange Code: How ING Direct Succeeded by Being a Rebel with a Cause (you can buy it here). That and the book Onward by Howard Schultz (link) are two phenomenal resources for any leader looking to create clarity in their organizational culture.

One things for sure, it’s a war you must wage if you want to continue to hear the music. It doesn’t happen on accident.

Check out this video where I explain what’s unique about the culture at fresh life to our church.

It’s hard to believe it, but this weekend we will be celebrating five years of fresh life. These sixty months in Big Sky Country have been an incredible journey. We have seen God move in power. And we have been working hard to record our story so we never forget what we have seen and heard.

In the Bible you see a big emphasis on this kind of thing; God’s people being intentional about not forgetting God’s faithfulness. The Israelites were often instructed to set up reminders, usually piles of stones, so that their kids and their grandkids would bump into them and unleash memories of epic things the Lord had done. That is why we have put this film together, so we can tell of His mighty works to another generation. (Psalm 145:4) That’s what this project is to us, it’s sort of our digital pile of rocks.

Simply put, since God has done big things we are making a big deal about them. And I’d love to have you join us as we paint the town red–fresh life red!

This weekend in the Clutch series we looked at the life of Peter. If being clutch is having the ability to perform well under pressure, Peter’s story started out with him being anything but clutch. It seems that every time he came to a crucial crossroads he choked. Whether trying to talk Jesus out of going to the cross, falling asleep during Jesus’ greatest moment of need or literally denying Christ 3x on the same night he swore he would die to defend Him; he proved himself to be a serial choke artist.

In the book of Acts, though, we see a completely different Peter than we witness in the gospels. He is bold instead of just brash, humble, more of a team player and most impressively he learned to keep a cool head when things heated up. Where before he pulled his sword out and chopped off an ear, later on he fearlessly unsheathed the sword of the spirit and 3,000 were saved. Early on he could be unnerved by the smallest servant girl but he went to the grave as fearless as a lion. He had become clutch.

It was a remarkable contrast and a testimony to the reality of the resurrection and the raw power of the Holy Spirit. I think that when these two things are neglected, perhaps more than any thing else, will drain us of the strength, energy and ability that are ours for the taking. If we are not daily emboldened by the wonder of Christ’s power over death and infused with His Spirit we will be sickly and anemic, and our performance will be pitiful.

As I covered Peter 1.0, the Peter we see perpetually stuck in struggle mode, and chronicled his list of failures I intentionally omitted something others might have included. I’m talking about the night where Jesus came to the disciples walking on the sea of Galilee and Peter got out of the boat and then after only a few steps he sank. I’ve heard people make a big deal about his failure to keep his eyes on Jesus and how he could had kept going had he not gotten distracted by the wind and the waves. That’s all true and a worthwhile thing to think about. But I personally don’t classify that episode as a fail. I think it belongs on his highlight reel not his blooper reel.

Yes he might have sunk, but let’s remember, he walked on water! None of the other disciples came close to drowning, but none of them had the guts to get out of the boat either. Ok, so he got in over his head and Jesus had to intervene, but back to my first point, HE WALKED ON WATER. It’s easy to criticize people who try big things because there will always be some amount failure when you are willing to get out of the boat. But a fail is not a fail when you fail taking steps of faith. It’s just par for the course and part of the experience.