from April 18, 2010 prayer email

Grace Community Church is a small non-denominational church in NW Austin, located a couple of miles from where we live. GCC has a significant, decades long commitment to a traditional involvement (prayer and financial partnership) in missions. Today I had the opportunity to preach in their Sunday morning worship service on “two defining questions”.



Question one: “who is God?” My response: “our God is a missionary (sending) God”.

Question two: “who am I?” My response: “I am sent in the same way as Christ”, based on John 20:21.

My primary challenge to the congregation was to live missionally where they live, work, and play, recognizing that God has called most of us to reach the lost in our natural spheres of influence.

We briefly considered a top 10 list for missional living:
1. proximity
2. priority of the least reached
3. presence
4. partnership
5. practice missionary methodology
6. prayer
7. practical service
8. practice hospitality
9. probing questions
10. proclamation

How about you, do you see yourself as sent in the same way as Christ? Are you demonstrating and proclaiming the gospel well where you live, work, and play?

from April 4, 2010 prayer email

Although Christmas has a much higher profile in American culture, Good Friday / Easter is the Christian holiday that best represents the essential core of the Christian message. “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures …” (I Corinthians 15:3-4).

Good Friday is all about forgiveness and restoration of a broken relationship with a deeply offended God through Christ’s death in our place. Easter is all about new life, spiritual power, and future hope through the resurrection of Jesus from the grave.



It has been more than 37 years since Christ radically changed my life as a freshman in college. I am so grateful. Who knows what my life would look like today apart from His presence and transforming touch.

Each of us who has placed our faith in Jesus has experienced the reality of Good Friday and Easter in our lives. All of our sins (past, present, and future) have been nailed to the cross. We are forgiven, declared not guilty. We are no longer enemies of God, but beloved sons and daughters. We have been made new creatures in Jesus Christ. We have living permanently within us the powerful Holy Spirit, who enables us to live a life that pleases God and that advances His Kingdom. And we have a future hope beyond our wildest imaginations awaiting us when we move from this life to the next.

With all of this why are we continually tempted to go back to a system of living built around self reliance and performance measures. “Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?” (Galatians 3:3). Let us this Easter be reminded once again of the need to live a dependent and supernatural life. A life dependent solely on the once-for-all substitutionary work of Jesus Christ and made supernatural by the moment-by-moment empowerment of the Spirit of God.

from March 21, 2010 prayer email

Every March, Dallas Theological Seminary cancels classes for a week to host their world evangelization conference. As a member of the DTS class of 1984, it is always a joy to be back on campus and participate in this significant annual event.



I had the privilege of representing ACMC as one of the more than 40 mission agency exhibitors who were part of the conference held March 8-12. This event provided opportunities for lots of good interactions with other sending agency reps, future pastors, and future missionaries. I also led one of two dozen brown bag lunch discussions during the week. My topic was “mobilizing your church for effective engagement in missions in the 21st century.”

The conference speaker for the week was Dr. Michael Frost. Author of The Shaping of Things to Come and Exiles. Frost spoke passionately each day on missional living and the missional church. Great stuff.



My biggest take away – identify a definable group of people that God has clearly called me to seek to reach for Christ and identify a partner to work closely with me in that effort. How about you? Who has God clearly called you to reach? If you don’t know, isn’t it about time to start asking God for that clear calling?

from March 7, 2010 prayer email

Grace Baptist Church is a nearly 70 year old independent Baptist church of 800 in a college town of 50 thousand, with Kansas State University at its core.

On Saturday evening I consulted with three members of GBC’s missions leadership team as they grapple with issues related to sharpening the focus of their global outreach efforts. The MLT recognizes the need to transition from having only a financial involvement with their 30 missionary partners to a paradigm where they will engage more deeply in a few strategically selected works.

I preached three times on Sunday morning in corporate worship services. This was the fourth of four Sunday mornings devoted to their month-long missions focus. Previous speakers had addressed issues related to the role of music, orality, and Bible translation in the missionary task. My message was titled: “God’s Word: powerful and transforming” out of Matthew 13. I spoke on the responsibility of every believer to embrace in a missional lifestyle, proclaiming Christ in their personal spheres of influence and among the least reached globally. I used the parable of the sower to illustrate that we will encounter four very different responses as we engage in sharing the gospel.



Sunday evening was GBC’s closing missions banquet. I had the opportunity to speak on “the task remaining”. We rejoiced in the tremendous progress made with the gospel through the past 20 centuries, with unprecedented progress globally in recent decades. And I challenged folks to confront the 7 greatest hurdles remaining to bring closure to the Great Commission mandate.

During this missions month, the congregation has been repeatedly challenged to pledge $180 thousand to 2010 missions engagement through their faith promise process.

from February 21, 2010 prayer email

Post removed for security reasons.

from February 7, 2010 prayer email

I participated in the Verge missional communities conference here in Austin this week. Many of the big names (including Burke, Carter, Chan, Cole, Ferguson, Garrison, Gibbons, Halter, Hirsch, Patterson, Stetzer, Vanderstelt, Watson) associated with the missional church movement were involved. Some fantastic vision casting, motivational speaking, worship, and networking. Austin Stone Community Church planned and promoted the conference and my home church hosted the event. It was packed out with over 2000 involved for three days on location and more than that participating from a distance online.

I was initially concerned that the “cool” factor was going to dominate the conference. A high value with the many 20 somethings that attended the event (but something that I no longer value and tend to view with skepticism). I was grateful that there was a lot of substance mixed in with the cool.

I came away with much to process and think through regarding my personal engagement with the lost, who I should partner with in that engagement, how these things could play out in my own home church, and how these things could play out in the churches I serve through ACMC.

All of the large group and breakout sessions are available online. Check a few out.

Several things that impacted me personally:
• going back to the Scriptures (especially the example of Christ) with fresh eyes for my understanding of the mission and forms for the church (instead of relying on books, tradition, or the example of “model” churches)
• emphasizing obedience in my teaching and discipleship -- doing (not simply knowing)
• obeying what the Scriptures teach, even when it takes me way out of my comfort zone and into territory where I have never gone
• coming to terms with how few of the people in our U.S. churches are living Biblically and how infrequently good models are provided for them of how to live Biblically
• coming to terms with how unbiblical much of what is called evangelism and church is in the U.S.
• working at keeping things simple and focused
• the priority of hospitality, constant relational engagement, and clear proclamation of the gospel with the lost
• the importance of focusing on the receptive and their personal spheres of influence
• the importance of seeking to reach those different than me, especially the poor
• the overuse of staff in most churches, the unbiblical distinctions made between clergy and laity, and how unchallenged and unempowered most laymen are
• the importance of reproduction (rapidly if possible) in most of what I do

Little of this is new, but it is a lot to get reminded of and challenged with in a small window of time. Where to start?

from January 24, 2010 prayer email

I had the privilege of spending last weekend with the missions leadership team (see photos below) at Fellowship Bible Church in Tulsa (a family focused, evangelical, non-denominational, 30 year old church of 1100). We met for 48 hours in a 19th century barn (that had been converted into a home) in a beautiful rural setting NW of Tulsa.



The missions leadership team had been struggling for some time with a “tyranny of the urgent” mentality. And many team members were discouraged and nearing burn out.

We spent all of Friday evening in a guided time of worship and prayer (a great way to start any retreat or extended meeting time).

All day (and night) Saturday were devoted to grappling with three major issues:
1. ALIGNMENT: How to best align local and global outreach with the vision of the church’s leadership, rather than having the missions leadership team function as a silo.
2. STRUCTURE: How to best structure the team to shift focus from urgent to important issues, how to decentralize responsibility and authority to avoid burnout, and how to empower those given delegated responsibilities.
3. STRATEGY: How to bring focus and intentionality to several dozen mostly unrelated engagements around the globe, shifting focus from the current 35 field workers to a few strategic local and global works.

God provided clarity and consensus as we interacted together. We were able to use our Sunday morning time to identify initial steps to take with the first two major issues. Sunday afternoon was devoted to dealing with a long laundry list of urgent issues that some on the team anticipated would take the entire weekend. But when viewed through a new grid, were handled in less than two hours, allowing us to wrap up our weekend together an hour early.



We anticipate on-going interaction early this year as we work through details of clarifying and aligning better with the vision of FBC’s leaders (senior pastor and elders) and put together a new decentralized structure for the missions leadership team. Once that is in place, we anticipate launching a major effort that will result in identifying a few field focus areas for the church. This will be followed by an effort that will grapple with a spectrum of church mobilization issues as they relate to these new field focuses.

The issues that FBC’s missions leadership team was struggling with are certainly not unique to them. Many MLT’s function as silos, somewhat divorced from the vision and dreams of the church’s leadership. Many MLTs are consumed by countless urgent and administrative issues, with little time to deal with the truly important issues. And they have a structure that insures that this pattern will continue indefinitely into the future. The number one issue I encounter in my work with churches is the issue of focus and strategy. Very few churches are focused in their mission efforts, and as a result see far less happen on the field than what could be.

Please contact me if I can be of service to your church as you seek to identify and grapple with the big issues that may be limiting the Kingdom impact of your church, locally or among the least reached globally. I would be delighted to talk with you.