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I’m not good at fishing but some of my favorite childhood memories involve trying to catch fish. Growing up, my dad would take my brothers and I on excursions where we would camp and fish. These “manly man fishing trips”, as they were called, involved a lot of laughter and running around in the woods but I don’t recall all that many fish actually being caught. Maybe that’s because my dad hardly ever got to drop his line in the water because he was too busy untangling our rods from the tangled mess we had inevitably gotten them into because we hadn’t listened to him.

I had a mickey mouse fishing pole and I vividly recall my dad doing everything for me. He would set it all up: hook, bait, weights, and even cast it out, telling me to sit still (so as to not scare the fish away) and keep my eyes on the bobber. That was it. I just needed to not be hyperactive and when I saw the bobber bounce just slowly reel it in. When ever a fish was caught he would even take care of getting the hook out of it’s throat and do the dirty work of cleaning it. All I had to do was reel it in. He took care of everything else.

The cool thing is that I have discovered when you follow Jesus’ instructions and go fishing for men it works the exact same way. God takes care of everything! He is the one who nailed our sins to the cross making it possible for us to have a relationship with Him. He is the one who works in hearts, drawing people to Christ and giving them the option to respond to Him, He is the one who sets up situations where we can invite people to church and share the gospel with them, and He is the one who knows whether someone is genuinely saved or not. All we have to do is to be faithful to cast out the net and reel it in.

As we preach the gospel and bring people with us to hear the gospel we must not trust in ourselves. For all practical purposes, we are like me as a little boy, sitting there on the dock with my mickey mouse fishing pole. But just like I have a great dad, we have an amazing Heavenly Father who sets everything up for us and, even though we often get things tangled up and make it more complicated than it needs to be, He loves us and allows us to play a part in the ultimate fish story!

Matthew 13:47–50 “Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a fishing net that was thrown into the water and caught fish of every kind. When the net was full, they dragged it up onto the shore, sat down, and sorted the good fish into crates, but threw the bad ones away. That is the way it will be at the end of the world. The angels will come and separate the wicked people from the righteous, throwing the wicked into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

By the way, there is an opportunity for you to go on a fishing trip tomorrow night! Skull Church is the first wednesday of every month and for the month of May that is tomorrow night. After music by the skull church band and our guest artist we are going to be casting the net and dragging it in. Is there someone you could invite to come with you (if you live in this neck of the woods) or to come over to your house to watch the webcast with you? It all starts at 7pm MST and streams in HD at www.skullchurch.com.

I sat down to think about the year that has just passed. Reflecting on the past 365 days I can only marvel at all the things God has done this year. My spiritual resolution at the beginning of 2010 was to follow the Lord like Caleb, who was a contemporary of Joshua. Six different times in Scripture we are told that he followed the Lord fully. No matter how much Caleb had seen God do in the past, he faced the future at full throttle, desiring new mountains, new challenges; he wanted to see God do more. My desire for 2010 was for God to pump that kind of blood through my veins, that He would ignite my heart. With the year now fully in the rearview mirror I can definitely say that God answered my prayer for new mountains and challenges.

It was a beautiful year. It was a difficult year. It was a phenomenal year. God did exceedingly above all that I could have asked or thought. I used a blank piece of paper to write down my top ten list of memories from this year and was overwhelmed. I ended up with a lot more than ten and had to ferret it down. Here they are:

1. The Birth of Daisy Grace
The happiest baby I have ever met. I love her. (c’mon–is this like cuteness overload or what?)

2. The Release of the iPad
It is the ultimate preaching machine. period. It is also cool that if you google “preaching ipad” the two blogs I wrote on the subject are the top hits. That probably explains why those are by far the most visited blog posts I have ever written. It was also super sweet that the first message I ever preached on it was on the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter. That’s what it’s all about baby!

3. Skull Church.
Everything about it. It is my favorite day of the week. I loved: the bands from this past year (Family Force 5, Charlie Hall, Robbie Seay), the different series (High Fidelity, Spoiler Alert, Forerunner), the energy, the merch (Thanks Hurley!), the text-messages, but ABOVE ALL the hundreds and hundreds of people who have made professions of faith in Christ–that’s what it is all about! I want people everywhere to experience what God is doing through Skull Church.

4. The pregnancy of the Fresh Life Whitefish Campus (specifically the Night of Worship)
The Campus will officially be born in 2011 but the whole process of preparation has filled much of this year (in fact it began in 2009). But it has been one of the most difficult, exciting and adrenaline filled adventures of my life. We have had to exercise muscles of faith that we didn’t know we had. The barriers, opposition, and roadblocks have been MANY. But through it all we have held onto the fact that OUR GOD WILL FIGHT FOR US! We know that the battle belongs to the Lord. End of story. Even the night of worship in preparation for the launch was wrought with hardcore drama and came close to being canceled. But at the end of the day hundreds of people gathered in Whitefish, Montana and lifted high the name of Jesus. Tears fell down my face and my heart was filled with faith as I praised God for what we knew He would do through this campus and the others that we believe are to come after it.

5. Being a part of the Greg Laurie Harvest Crusade in Chicago
Over 220 churches came together to make this event happen. Chicago has a long legacy of evangelistic events with men like D.L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham having held meetings there in the past. Remarkably, this event was the first time churches worked together to put on a large-scale event like this in fifteen years. Exciting. God has His hand on Greg Laurie’s life and it is an extreme honor to get to host his crusades.

6. Reaching the 50 mile benchmark on my road bike
boo-yah! Next year I wanna hit 100!

7. Rock this City
Giving 3,000 hours of community service to the Flathead Valley through the Rock This City Initiative was awesome. I conquered my fears and gave blood for the first time. take that, Needles!

8. Killing our Youth group.
We decided we haven’t been called to be a church with a youth group but a church that is a youth-led movement. Busting a cap on our youth groups was a little Snoop but it has been awesome. We aren’t having students sit at the little kids table anymore. They aren’t the church of tomorrow, they are the church of right freaking now. No matter who you are, if you come to fresh life you gather in worship experiences, get plugged in through community groups and are unleashed to serve and take part in the action. Best…Decision…Ever.

9. My cheerleaders
Every week, before I preach, my daughters pray for me. Their prayers rock my world. They pray that God would fill me with His Holy Spirit, that I wouldn’t be afraid, and that people will come to know Christ. My three year old once prayed that I wouldn’t fall of the stage! Then they give me a high-five and tell me, “preach the Word Dad!” They are amazing.

10. Watching Jesus build His church
Nine out of ten church-plants fail within the first five years. The average three year old church is 45 people. What we are seeing at fresh life is a lot of things–but it is certainly not normal. I am thrilled, humbled, and blown away to be apart of a move of God’s Holy Spirit. Jesus is doing what He said He would do, building His church (Matthew 16:18) and no one can stop Him. What thrills me even more is the fact that with all my heart I believe that the best is yet to come!

Happy New Year!

This weekend at fresh life we announced a new campus that we will be launching in Whitefish, Montana at the beginning of 2011. We are stoked on this venture in faith that the Lord has us taking and are praying that many people meet Jesus through it!

Please join with us praying:
For many people, who live in the North end of the valley and attend fresh life, to view this as their home church and be apart of the mission and community of this campus.

For many to find life and liberty in Christ as we seek to make Jesus famous!

I had an interaction with a church planter recently that startled me. He told me that his church isn’t going to do any overseas evangelism until every last person in his city knows Christ. I was troubled by this. I walked away stunned and wondering how many other pastors, even if they wouldn’t be so blunt about it, share his perspective.

Let me say for the record that I am a thousand percent for churches being missional. I don’t think you can pattern your ministry after Jesus or Paul without contextualizing the gospel to the culture you are trying to reach. And we do need to be passionate about reaching our cities. Do I believe that we have a mission field right under our noses 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Yes! But that certainly doesn’t free us from the mandate to “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” (Mark 16:15)

Today, church planting is ultra hip. And I am grateful that God is raising up an army of young pastors to plant slick, relevant churches that will reach this culture. I embrace the latte’s and the foyer’s that feel like you are in an Urban Outfitters and all the tech,(provided we remember that we don’t make the Bible relevant–the Bible makes the Bible relevant!) but in our efforts to effectively reach our cities we must not neglect the rest of the world.

In my life, the desire to plant a church and reach a new city was born out of a missionary heart that God had awakened. When I was 16 I had been around the world a few times and I viewed missionaries like Bruce Olson, William Carey, and Hudson Taylor as rockstars. As a result, it is a part of my DNA and I couldn’t lead a church that would ignore the lost in the world if I wanted to. You just can’t undo what leading someone to Christ in a squatter village in the slums of the Philippines does to you, on the inside. And it would be incompatible with following Christ, who died for and will be worshipped in heaven by every tongue, tribe and nation.

Being on mission in my city hasn’t replaced or eclipsed the desire to bring the gospel to the ends of the earth, it has intensified it.

We certainly haven’t perfected this at fresh life but we are being intentional about integrating global missions into our daily lives and ministry as a church. Here is a video clip from this weekend that will give you an idea of what this looks like for us.

I have recently been thinking about the correlation between input and output. Meaning that what you choose to put into something will have an impact on what comes out of it. This is true on a number of levels. Paul said (Galatians 6:8) that if we sow to the flesh, of the flesh we will reap corruption–garbage in, garbage out. The Psalm 1 dude, on the other hand, chose to pour God’s Word and righteous company into his life and because of that he grew fruit. We are determining who we are going to be tomorrow by what we are doing today.

I have also realized that this principle also applies to other areas too, like the allocation of energy. Meaning that the areas where attention, passion and time are invested make a statement about where you are wanting to see growth. You can say you want to be a better tennis player, but if that’s really true you will be spending hours every day practicing your serve. This is so simple that I shouldn’t need to be learning this, but I am. There have been times where I have been disappointed by a lack of improvement in an area but if I step back I can usually see that it was directly related to a meager allocation of passion. There is no growth without sacrifice.

Maybe I saw Field of Dreams too many times as a kid or something but something I have had to overcome is the “If you build it, they will come” mentality in ministry. Just put it out there, and let it go… That approach works great if you are playing with a top, but for something to keep spinning there must be the continual introduction of force. This mentality can be spiritualized though, all you have to do is bust out a “we are just letting go and letting God.” (whatever that means) And all of a sudden you are able to be lazy in Jesus name. But from what I see in Scripture God doesn’t want us to let go of the things we are trusting Him to do-He wants us to work out what He works in. (Philippians 2:12-13)

Here’s one way this has been working out in my life lately. We just launched another trimester of fresh life groups (our intentional approach to meeting the need for community within the church) and we were blown away by the tremendous response. We are going into this fall with over twice as many groups as we had one year ago today and 19 times as many as we had two years ago! In that time nothing has changed in how important we view community as being, but A WHOLE LOT has changed in what we are willing to do to facilitate it.

A line of people waiting for the Lab to open so they can enroll in a fresh life group.

We have always believed God wants our church to meet in large and small groups, but now it’s not just a line item in our bulletin, it is being shouted from the rooftops–almost to the point of obnoxiousness. We have also put our money where our mouth is, so to speak. Before, if you came to fresh life you might have heard about our small groups, now it would be impossible to go and not know all about them. This is not a coincidence, we took a number of steps to accomplish this: we dedicated digital and print resources, allocated staff through a full time groups pastor, carved out pulpit time to the subject, and even terminated competing ministries to make this happen. In short we have backed up our conviction that these groups are important with action. The increased input of energy had a direct and immediate impact on the output.

Here is a video we created to promote fresh life groups.

I have found that, because resources are finite, doing things with your whole heart will lead to doing fewer things. There is only so much money, manpower, and time to go around. Shaun White is a professional snowboarder and skateboarder–a man of the board. He does those two things incredibly well. He doesn’t also professionally fight bulls or pole vault on an olympic level. He spends all summer on the vert ramp and all winter on the snow. His time and his energy are focused like a laser on what he has deemed important. You gotta pick where you are going to spend your passion or you will end up doing a lot of things poorly.

Here’s a test: If you were to write down the things that you believe are important in your life, church or ministry– your core values, the ministries that matter: and I was brought in as a consultant, would I be able to name those things without seeing your list? If I were to superficially assess what you were broadcasting to be important through the allocation of time, energy, resources and passion: would our lists match? Make it so!

Don’t just say it’s important…prove it.