Next Saturday, October 9th, I will be emceeing and speaking at a LoveLife conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico with Mark Driscoll. The event is being put on by The HUB and it will cover the Song of Solomon. It is designed for anyone 16 years of age or older–whether single or married–and will be full of super practical, Biblical insight on love, sex, dating, romance and marriage.

I highly recommend this event to you, whatever stage of the romantic spectrum you find yourself in, if you live in the Southwest. I love the Song of Solomon and have found that a proper understanding and application of the principles that are in it will unlock God’s best in anyone’s love life. Unfortunately, it is often ignored. J Vernon McGee called it “the most neglected book in the Bible.” If we let it remain silent, it’s to our own hurt. You can purchase tickets here. I hope to see you there!

Last week was one for the books at fresh life. By that I mean the record book of how many technical things can possibly go wrong in a week. I think it was written by a dude named Murphy. I hate that guy. It would be hard to try and come up with more things that could have gone wrong.

Here is a snapshot:
While preaching at skull church my mic went out briefly and came back on with some terrible feedback that continued for what seemed like forever. What I didn’t know was that whatever had happened also took out the live radio broadcast. The webcast also crashed at some point in the night as well. And our system that sends txt msg questions, that come to my skulpit, to the screen went down. This weekend, I was supposed to preach the 11 o’clock at the Strand but, due to a series of events, they moved me to the Liberty at the last minute. I was supposed to be piped live into the Strand but they had to resort to a video backup because, for the second time ever, our fiber optic feed freaked out. When the video backup was fired it first came up with only audio before (fortunately) coming on correctly and playing all the way through. Man, just reading that list stresses me out.

Stuff like this makes the hair on the back of my team’s neck stand up. Excellence is something that we value highly. I can’t see how we really have a choice about that. Our mission is to see those who are stranded in sin find life and liberty in Christ. Eternity literally hangs in the balance. Like it or not, that injects importance into everything. We simply don’t have the luxury of dismissing even the smallest detail as being trivial. The stakes are too high. Hell plays for keeps and forever is a long time. Even small things deserve our very best effort.

Coming out of a week like we have had there is definitely the temptation to be upset, to be bummed, to beat ourselves up and only focus on every single thing that went wrong. But we won’t. You can’t live that way. If you do, eventually you will end up in the fetal position under your desk mumbling, “Laces out, Laces out, the Laces were supposed to be facing out...” And that’s not good for anyone. You have to accept that if you are are committed to thinking outside the box and pushing the envelope; there are going to be bad days. Things happen. Computers crash. People make mistakes. That’s life. Deal with it; don’t dwell on it.

Instead you have to learn to focus on all the good that happened in spite of the problems. The people who gave their lives to Christ listening to a message with feedback coming out of the speakers. The fact that people were blessed who were ministered to by the Bible study and felt God as they took communion even though according to our runsheets everything took way too long to come out of the meet and greet. The hundreds and hundreds of people who signed up for small groups even though at two of the services the amazing small group promo video never even played. And above all, the fact that the Word of God cannot be chained! (2 Timothy 2:9)

I think it’s also important to be thankful for the hundreds of services a year that have gone by without major meltdown. All the webcasts that didn’t go whack, all the times the fibre hasn’t failed and the projectors didn’t show the blue screen of death. Thank God for the other thousand times that your mouse didn’t turn into a beach-ball.

I’m not saying that you are supposed to just be ok with things that go wrong. You shouldn’t be. We aren’t. I can assure you there will be meetings where the glitches will be analyzed and assessed. We will ask: Why did this happen? Has it ever happened before? What could have prevented it? Was it human error or just a freak–the devil is in the details– kind of a thing? Do we need to upgrade a system? buy new equipment? Retrain someone? Conduct an exorcism? And we will do our best in the future to learn from our mistakes and move forward. We will pursue perfection and seek after seamlessness. As I said, I believe that the urgency of the gospel requires nothing less than our very best efforts.

But at the end of the day if anything eternal is going to be accomplished it’s not because of us, it’s because of Him. It’s all about Jesus and what He did for us at the place of the skull. In our weaknesses His strength is made perfect. If you keep that in mind, you can keep your eyes set on heaven even in the midst of a technological week from hell.

For quite some time I had this nagging suspicion that there was something wrong with our approach to student ministries at fresh life. I tried to shrug it off. After all, our youth pastors were doing a great job. They were doing the same things I had done during my years in youth ministry, the same things that just about every other thriving church around the country was doing (I know that because we checked).

As time went on I couldn’t shake the thought that something was missing, that our approach was based on an institution, not on what God wanted us to do. After several months of meeting, praying and brainstorming with the pastoral staff we came to the conclusion that the real problem with our youth groups were the youth groups themselves. I mean having them–at all. So we decided to pull the plug. Here’s the story…

I wanted to make sure and chronicle the thinking behind this decision for other pastors and church planters out there. Perhaps some will be inspired by what we are doing and rethink preconceived notions about how youth ministry has to be done; and I’m sure that others will disagree. Regardless, I hope that, at the very least, this can serve to provoke discussion and fresh thinking about how we can most effectively reach the next generation and empower them to make Jesus famous.

We have recently made some changes at fresh life. We are simplifying and scaling back in order to expand our ability to fulfill the vision that God has given us. As a church, change like this is nothing new, it’s part of our culture and it’s practically a core value–I partially blame that on us being a little A.D.D.

These particular tweaks, however, have implications that impact us on virtually every front and as a result, there was more than a little hesitation before pulling the trigger. We had bathed this decision in prayer and were confident that, even if it wasn’t the easiest, it was right thing to do. I still felt as I always do right before shaking things up, scared.

Fortunately, once it was done and we were committed, I felt like I almost always do right after shaking things up, stoked. It’s funny, when you do something you’ve been needing to do, especially if you have been dreading it, there is often a surge of, I should have done that a long time ago! that follows. I think they call that 20/20 hindsight vision.

As we were processing all of this in our weekly, all-staff, prayer meeting we had a laugh at our track record of: gravitating towards complicated solutions to what are ultimately simple problems, having a moment of epiphany, subsequent streamlining, and repeat. I told our team, “I just wish I knew what I know now when we first planted this church.”

That same day I joined some friends on what has become one of my favorite bike rides, the world famous Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park. It is pretty much 13 miles up hill and then 13 miles downhill. You ascend at all of 9 miles an hour and then descend at 39. Once we reached the top we took our helmets off and enjoyed the view that we had fought so hard to reach.

As I stood there, catching my breath and drinking in the beauty, I thought of the comment I had made at the meeting and realized I am glad I didn’t know everything that I know now when planting fresh life. That would have been like being airlifted to the top of this mountain. Would that be easier? Absolutely. But without the sweat and burning lungs and legs I would never appreciate the view the same way.

I’m not saying you should make life harder than it needs to be so there are things to fix later. Let me tell you, the next time you are at the bottom of a ministry mountain choosing a vehicle and there is a helicopter and a bicycle–get on the chopper! But there will probably come a day when you will take the long way and suffer for it. When that day comes: throw your weight over your handlebars, give it all you’ve got and remember, The view is sweeter when you fight for it.

The view from the top!

Fresh Life Church is around 1,400 hours into our goal of giving the Flathead Valley 3,000 hours of community service this summer in an initiative that is attached to our study of the book of Nehemiah. We have teams, decked out in red Rock this City shirts, all over the place doing things like: picking up trash, cleaning mountain bike trails, giving blood, and making meals for homeless people. It has been awesome seeing the church rally to the vision and rise up to make Jesus famous by serving in these very practical ways.

When I met with the mayor of Kalispell, before this project began, and asked how she would have us spend the 3,000 hours one of the immediate things she asked for us to focus on was graffiti removal. As a result that has been an area that we have thrown a lot of energy at. We have prayed that people would see our “good works and give glory to our Father in Heaven” (Matthew 5:16) But this past week one of our teams, that was serving in this way, attracted the wrong kind of attention. One of the local newspapers runs a section, called the Law Roundup, where they report all police activity from the day before. (One of the quirky things about living in a small town) It is usually pretty humorous to read. Here is what was written about the RTC team:

Police investigated a complaint that youths were spray-painting the bridge at Underpass Hill. It turned out that the young people were performing a good deed by removing the graffiti Tuesday evening.

You can learn more about Rock this City, watch videos where you can meet some of the RTC stars and even participate and log your hours (no matter where you live) here.