It is finally here. We are taking Skull Church on the road for the first time. There will be performances by Family Force 5, Blindside, the Skull Church band and explicit gospel messages. We are praying for God to move powerfully in Zoo town!

Take a moment and visit our promo page (link) where you can invite people to attend, send pre-loaded tweets, and download wallpapers for your screen. Both nights of this outreach will be webcast live so you can even invite people who don’t live anywhere near Montana to join in on the fun. And please pray for God to move in power!

It’s not everyday that you get to shake hands with someone who shook hands with Adolf Hitler. Last night at the Harvest Crusade I had the opportunity to do just that when I met Louie Zamperini. He was interviewed by Greg Laurie in front of the capacity+ crowd that had gathered at Angel’s stadium and I had the chance to speak to him backstage.

Shaking the hand of Hitler is not the only unusual item on his resume either. Not by a long shot. He also competed in the Olympics, was a fighter pilot in WWII, crashed a plane called the Green Hornet into the ocean, spent 47 days floating at sea in a raft where he punched a great white shark in the nose, survived imprisonment and torture as a POW, and then was saved at a Billy Graham crusade.

If you are thinking that this guys life needs to be a movie, that is exactly what is going to happen. His life story was documented in the book “Unbroken” by the author who wrote the book “Seabiscuit” and is going to be made into a movie. It was a huge honor to meet this eloquent and funny man who has lived enough for four lifetimes but isn’t done yet, he continues to share his story. And God is using him in major ways, including the more than 40,000 people who were blessed by him last night!

A brand new series begins this weekend at freshlife. This one’s going to leave a mark.
The UPRISING
Things will never be the same.
Long live the revolution.

Joshua 24:15 Choose today whom you will serve. Would you prefer the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates? Or will it be the gods of the Amorites in whose land you now live? But as for me and my family, we will serve the LORD.

Last week we saw MANY people take the plunge, following the command of Christ, and getting baptized! It is always invigorating to watch this picture unfold as a forgiven sinner declares that they have been buried with Christ and raised to walk in newness of life.

Additionally, we saw many respond to the gospel this weekend in response to the teaching from John 11. This powerful text contains the statement, “I am the resurrection and the life” that Jesus made standing near the grave of Lazarus. Now I’ll grant you, saying something like that is easy, but in the following moments Jesus told Lazarus to get up…and He did. I think that should earn Him our undivided attention!

One detail I love in the story is that Jesus raised the dead, but He had the people roll away the stone. He could have done it Himself–without even trying! But He chose to involve others. The picture that emerges is that while salvation is a work that only God can do, He longs for us to participate, “rolling away the stones” so to speak, as we intentionally bring dead people before the Word of Christ. If we as a church truly embrace that, this wednesday night, at the Skull Church event for April, there is no telling what God might do!

Also, this week I had the opportunity and the pleasure to travel to Chicago to attend an event put on by my good friend Pastor James MacDonald. It was called The Elephant Room, and it was fantastic. You can read a blog he wrote describing what went down, HERE and he will be posting the whole 7 hour event in increments on his site in the weeks to come so look for it. Let me say having been there, it was seriously rad. The only way I can really describe it is that it was like you were getting to hear the sort of conversations that go on backstage at a conference, off the microphone. Only these raw, un-groomed conversations were the conference.

The trip was also refreshing personally. It is always a great blessing to spend time with men of God. James MacDonald, Greg Laurie and Mark Driscoll are guys that I look up to and have learned much from. Greg is a father in the faith, and James and Mark have both spoken into my life and taught me much. It was also a blast hanging out with Jonathan Laurie and Landon MacDonald–PK’s that love Jesus and rock hard. Another one of the highlights of the trip for me was meeting Pastor Steven Furtick for the first time. He is someone whose ministry, passion and vision I appreciate very much and it was great to get to tell him how God has used him in my life.

with Landon and Jonathan (from left)

On April 22nd, at 12pm MST we are going to be having a very special Good Friday event on Fresh Life Radio. We have never done a service entirely on the radio and I am super stoked about it. There will be worship and a message all live and in person from the studio of Fresh Life Radio in the historic Strand theatre in Kalispell.

The message will be the second to last installment of the Rise & Rise Again series (the series finale will be on Easter Sunday) and we will see the death of Christ on the cross was such a powerful event that it triggered the rising of several people from the dead on the spot. You can tune in at 91.3FM in the Flathead Valley, or catch it streaming at freshliferadio.com everywhere else. If you have an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad you can stream the station through the safari app; it will even run in the background like Pandora–only fresher.