“When you’ve had all the experiences – met all the famous people, made some money, toured the world and got all the acclaim – you still think ‘is that it?’” –George Harrison

Most Christian leaders I know got into this whole ministry game because of a passionate love for God and a deep love for people. At some point, however, every pastor, worship leader, speaker, musician and leader faces a crisis.

At some point in our hearts we are tempted to make ministry more about us and less about God. We start to believe our own press (whether good or bad). We start to feed off of and need the attention and respect we get from others. We crave bigger platforms and more influence. We start to give in to the idol of acclaim.

At this point, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish whether the leadership decisions we make are fueled by zeal for God’s glory or for our own. This is dangerous ground for any leader, but especially for those of us whose job it is to constantly point back to the beauty, fame, and glory of Christ.

Signs of acclaim’s influence
What are some signs that you’ve been lead astray by a desire for your own acclaim?

• Jealousy Do you become easily envious of leaders who have more influence, a larger platform, or a bigger following than you?

• Despair When someone’s talent, level of attention, fame or power eclipses your own, does it practically affect your level of joy – even driving you to despair?

• Self Absorption Do you find yourself busily preening your public image, Googling your name, obsessing over how many times your sermons or songs have been downloaded, the number of hits on your site, or the number times you get retweeted?

• Need for Credit Is it hard for you when others get credit for something you deserve? Do you find yourself constantly needing to set the record straight, making sure people know that was your idea, how hard you worked, or that you were in fact the genius behind the big success?

It’s very possible you have already given your heart to the idol of acclaim and you are sin-sick with pride.

Certainly the answer is that you and I need to again repent of our idols and embrace the gospel at a deep level. But how? How can we detach our hearts from the idol of acclaim, before we are destroyed or enslaved by it?

We Have a Home
Christ City recently signed a lease with Minglewood Hall.  We are excited about this partnership with the premiere concert venue in our area. Minglewood has a similar heart for being a force for creative renewal in the center of Memphis, and is a well known gathering place for a lot of the people we feel called to reach. The management there has been very encouraging to us. The space is a fit for us in so many ways and has enough room for us to grow over the next year.

1st Preview Service
Sunday June 13th, we hosted our first summer preview service. Many of you were actively praying for this first public worship gathering and for that we are grateful. We got a sense that something unusual was happening when at 10:25 we had to start setting out more chairs. Our final count was 90 adults and 22 children – many more than we had hoped, prayed, or planned for. More importantly, there was a distinct sense of the Spirit’s presence as believers and unbelievers alike came together to sing and listen to words proclaiming the power found only in the sacrificial death of Jesus.

New Staff & Residents
We are in the process of bringing our first staff and pastoral residents on board. The first to join us are Caleb & Casey Sigler.  Caleb leads the church in worship and arts and Casey is working for us part-time in an administrative capacity. Their ministry and friendship along with the rest of our stellar team have been a giant blessing to us. Keep your eyes on http://www.christcitymemphis.org as we add more staff and residents this summer.

How to Pray For Us
This summer, there are several opportunities to pray for us:

• June 26th – 30th: I Art Memphis – multiple interactive art “mini-camps” that we are hosting in Midtown-area parks for families & kids. This is an effort to get know and serve our neighbors while simultaneously getting the word out about our new church.

• July 11th: Our 2nd preview service. I’m preaching on the idea that our final hope for the renewal of all things is what gives us energy and power to work for the renewal of our city here and now.

• August 15th: Our 3rd and final preview service before launch. The theme, that a response to God’s initiating love demands that we fight for loving community in the middle of diversity, will be used to launch our City Groups, home-based communities designed to help people live on mission together.

Also continue to pray for wisdom and discernment as we make crucial decisions and plans for the future, protection from the enemy for our families, that God would be gracious in granting a harvest of new converts, and that the leaders and families of our church would have a single-focused zeal to know and pursue Christ.

Financial Support
If you have or are currently financially supporting Christ City Church, your gifts are not in vain. We are so unbelievably grateful for your sacrifice – and you need to know that you are helping plant the gospel deep in center city Memphis. Thank you!

As we prepare for launch, we will to need more resources for new administrative staff, weekly facility rental, promotion and purchases for worship, Christ City Kids, and signage.

Will you consider Christ City Church for your budget? If you’re already a financial partner – will you consider recommending us to a friend or another church looking for a new work to get behind? If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Thank you again for your help, prayers, support, and encouragement. We could not do what we’re doing without the aid and support we feel from Christians literally around the world.

-Jonathan for the Christ City Team

Have You Seen?

• Our new address:
  673 N. Auburndale St.
  Memphis, TN 38107

• Our website and vision video.

• New Church will Bring Grace, Renewal and Love to Memphis - an interview with Jonathan in Memphis Connect.

• Roll Over, Elvis. Meet Indie Memphis. – an article from The New York Times on our neighborhood.

• Friend us at our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter.

At least that’s the argument.

This line of thinking assumes that there would be no other reason for a pastor to approach this topic with great care.

For many reasons, homosexuality has become the issue not only for contemporary culture, but also for the contemporary church – defining boundary lines and immediately sticking one in either the camp of “liberal” or “conservative” often depending entirely where they fall on this single issue.  And sadly, it seems that the loudest Christians who receive the most publicity on this topic are the angriest; many doing everything short of waging war against the homosexual community.

So, should pastors never address the topic of homosexuality? Of course they should. In 1 Timothy 1, Paul contextualizes the Ten Commandments for Timothy’s current context. The only reason for him to bring up same-sex sexual acts under the overall heading of adultery or sexual immorality would be that it was a specific sin prevalent in 1st Century Ephesus. Paul was being a good pastor in using scripture to address the issues of the day. However, how did he do it? We can use the passage to mine some principles on how to talk about such an explosive topic.

1. Paul specifically mentions homosexual practice and not homosexual persons. It’s men who practice homosexuality (arsenokoitai).

As much as Paul says, however, he never says that being gay is a sin.  Homosexual activity is clearly named as sinful, but not necessarily those that would identify themselves as gay or who wrestle with same-sex attractions.  This is a small but important distinction.

This simplifies things. It means that when a staff member confesses to same-sex attractions, your first response is certainly not to fire him. It also means that homosexuals in our churches are called to the same grace-enabled disciplined abstinence that we would ask of any single person in our church attempting to walk in the light.

2. Paul talks about homosexuality in the larger realm of Christian sexual ethics. Homosexual practice in the New Testament isn’t a sin worthy of some sort of special censure. Any church that has people in it, is going to be a church filled with people who sin sexually in a variety of ways, whether its use of pornography, extra-marital affairs, or sex outside the bonds of marriage.

The church needs to be able to call people to repent and then to equip them, in loving community, to walk out of sexual sin of any and every type.

3. After naming “men who practice homosexuality,” Paul is quick to confess his own sin. Specifically.

He says, “the law is laid down for sinners. Sinners like me.” And then he names himself as the worst, chief, or foremost of sinners.  Along with naming the sins of his culture, he names his own sin. This is unheard of in today’s evangelical climate.

What if every time a Christian wrote an article on the “wickedness of sodomy” they also had to say, “but, you know, I looked lustfully at a woman last night, spoke sharply to my children, and I’ve practiced a lifestyle of safely secluding myself from the needy in my area. I’m no better.”?

This would bring a level of humility to the subject that could really help defuse tensions.

4. In his “sin list” Paul does not discriminate. He weaves back and forth between classic “liberal” and classic “conservative” sins: immediately after “men who practice homosexuality,” Paul aims his guns at human trafficking.

This is one reason that use of the words “sodomy” and “sodomite” are particularly unhelpful when talking about homosexuality.  Ezekiel 16 clearly indicates that the sin of Sodom was “pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease” along with a failure to “aid the poor and needy.” To use the word “sodomy” for one group of people but not the other is intellectually dishonest. A word steeped in fear is used only to shame and marginalize those we don’t agree with.

In the recent past, I believe conservative evangelicals have put too much emphasis on homosexuality. I think this has been done partly out of a love for truth, but partly out of fear and partly because the “gay agenda” makes for an easy target. Because of this, we are in danger of losing our “prophetic right” to speak to this topic. Any honest words are lost among the white noise of angry, hate-filled, homophobic jargon.

Evangelicals Christians have marginalized, attacked, and shunned homosexuals.  The gay community knows that evangelicals think that they’re wrong. They haven’t heard, with nearly the same force, that we love them. Because maybe we don’t.

What do I want gays and lesbians both those inside my church and those outside of it to know more? That I disagree with their sexual lifestyle? Or that God’s true message is different than they’ve heard… that in the gospel, we find a surprising message of a God in hot pursuit of sinners and rebels of all types?

And this question is so important, because if I lead with the first message, it will most likely eliminate any chance I have to communicate the second. As Jochem Douma says, “The direction of our moral argument(s) should be from love to law, not from the law to love.”

This is why any pastor reaching into his community would want to approach this topic with great care.

See, one message comes in sound bites and is easily printed on a bumper sticker. The other message takes incarnation. It takes life.  A grace-saturated life that disarms and breaks through defenses, loving despite differences and labels.

Last October, many of you rated Paul Miller’s book A Praying Life as one of your current favorite books. I’m just now getting around to reading it. And it’s messing with me. In a good way.

What’s brilliant about this book is that it’s gospel-centered… no… gospel saturated. Miller pulls together weakness (or helplessness) as the common thread between believing the gospel and prayer.

“The gospel, God’s free gift of grace in Jesus, only works when we realize we don’t have it all together. The same is true for prayer. The very thing we are allergic to – our helplessness – is what makes prayer work. It works because we are helpless. We can’t do life on our own. Prayer mirrors the gospel.”

This truth is exploding in my heart. My primary issue is not that I don’t pray enough. My primary issue is that I don’t realize how truly helpless I am. Helpless to do what? Everything. Be a good husband. Love my kids well. Plant a church. Be a faithful pastor. Grow as a disciple.

“We tell ourselves, ‘Strong Christians pray a lot. If I were a stronger Christian, I’d pray more.’ Strong Christians do pray more, but they pray more because they realize how weak they are. They don’t try to hide it from themselves. Weakness is the channel that allows them to access grace.”

“Weakness is the channel that allows them to access grace.”

And that, in a nutshell, is it. I have been trying to hide from myself how weak I truly am. I am not meant or designed to be the best, most insightful, wisest, kindest, most creative… dad/husband/pastor/speaker. I cannot do the task set out before me. If I really know and believe this, I will cry out to my Father for his divine resources. Constantly.

I am weak. Are you?
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You can buy A Praying Life here.

Below are a handful of quotes by N.T. Wright on the meaning, power, and importance of the resurrection (both Jesus’s and ours). All of these are taken from his excellent book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.

“If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls leave behind their mortal bodies, then death still rules.”

“To preach the Resurrection is to announce the fact that the world is a different place, and that we have to live in that “different-ness.” The Resurrection is not just God doing a wacky miracle at one time… this was the turning point in world history.”

“Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven.”

“With Easter, God’s new creation is launched upon a surprised world, pointing ahead to the renewal, the redemption, the rebirth of the entire creation.”

“Instead of talking vaguely of heaven and then trying to fit the language of resurrection into that, we should talk with biblical precision about the resurrection and reorganize our language about heaven around that.”

“Every act of love, every deed done in Christ and by the Spirit, every work of true creativity – doing justice, making peace, healing families, resisting temptation, seeking and winning true freedom – is an earthly event in a long history of things that implement Jesus’s own resurrection and anticipate the final new creation and act as signposts of hope, pointing back to the first and on to the second.”

He is alive – and He is making all things new. Praise Him!

“True or false (or dare?): Romans 10:9 says, ‘If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is savior and believe in your heart that he died for your sins, you’ll be saved.’”

And of course Romans 10:9 doesn’t say that. It says, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

Why does it bother me that Paul emphasizes Jesus’ lordship and not his power to save (or are these more connected than I’ve allowed for)?

Why – if he’s trying to give in nugget form what it takes to “be saved” – does he emphasize the resurrection with no mention of the cross?

What role does the lordship and resurrection of Jesus play in the message & ministry of the “gospel-centered” church?

You get bonus points if your answer hits 1 Peter 1:3 “he has caused us to be born again… through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

Something about Verge was different – and I want to get it down before I forget. Because I easily forget.

1. Worship Gatherings Should Not Be Abandoned
This first thing is actually a running thought I had throughout the conference.

One of my fears is that young zealots will walk away from Verge and say, “I get it now. We’re going to totally scrap our public worship gathering,” or “Who needs preaching? It takes the already limited time I have away from community and mission.”

Maybe some failed to notice, but during Verge we were convicted, inspired, moved, and challenged… all through preaching and powerful corporate worship experiences.

I know that as a whole, we’re moving away from event and program-driven Christianity (good!) – but an “event” is an okay event in my book if at that event the gospel is proclaimed, God’s Spirit is present, and the sacraments are observed.

2. Francis Chan is Awesome But Not For the Reasons You Think
Yeah, Francis Chan blew us away.

Here’s what stuck out to me, though, more than any one thing he said: we saw this mega-church pastor get on his knees in front of us all and beg God, in tears, to show him how to do church.

You got this sense from him the entire weekend that the bigness of his church didn’t matter. His books didn’t matter. His reputation as a pastor didn’t matter.  He acknowledged that he distrusted even his own motives for why he does what he does and that he wanted to be courageous enough to ask the question: does any of the stuff we think is so important in the evangelical world really matter in the end?

3. The Holy Spirit is Real
The best part of the weekend was a worship session on Saturday afternoon that never seemed to stop. It was time for the singing to be done and for all of us to move on to the next deal on the schedule – except that God had something else on His schedule.

Matt Carter got up and acknowledged that something was going on. Breakouts were going to start soon and that if people needed to go they could, but he opened the door for others to stick around if they felt so led. And we did. People just stood there. Or knelt. Or bowed.

And then one by one, people spontaneously started calling out to God. In a group of thousands, people started calling on the name of Jesus.

It’s hard to describe what happened, and I really don’t want to dishonor that moment by trying to make it seem more dramatic than it was. I’ll just say that for me it was an intense moment of sensing God’s hugeness and my own smallness and yet feeling accepted in that instead of alienated. It’s the first time I’ve seen something like that happen in a group that large since my charismatic revival days.

4. Mission & Community Are Hard
I was trying to explain to a friend unfamiliar with evangelical church jargon what a “Missional Community Conference” was about. I failed. It should’ve been simple because the conference was about mission and community (obviously).

Here’s why this conference sticks out: Verge was not just about mission and community, it was about being committed to those things until it gets painful.

Being committed to doing mission with a small band of people who know you well should and will be uncomfortable. It will cost me something. It will hurt.

But it’s worth it.

That’s what I’m leaving with. It showed up in the teaching, sure, but I got a fresh reminder in person.

During the weekend, I got to spend some time with Josh Wilson, a close friend and co-worker from The Journey that I hadn’t seen in months.  Right now, since leaving one church and getting ready to plant another, my experience of community is somewhat sporadic at best.

Seeing Josh reminded me first of the depth of friendship I miss out on when I am away from community. Secondly, it reminded me that community is painful because it means letting people get close enough to call you on your garbage. I don’t like getting called on my garbage.

There’s a trend right now among evangelical pastors that plays on our natural fears and desire to manipulate. It says that if you’re a pastor, you can only let people get so close. If people get too close, then you loose some of your power. Clear lines of authority get cloudy. You loose organizational effectiveness in pursuit of relationship. It’s that much harder to hold someone accountable to job performance and becomes close to impossible to fire them, if God forbid, one day you’re forced to.

Who cares.

Letting people in close enough to see through your every motivation is stinking painful. But the alternative – living life alone, surrounded only by admirers and no real friends – is infinitely worse.

George Patterson

The great secret: it’s easier to do evangelism, plant churches, and to make disciples if we do it the way the apostles did.

The way the apostles fulfilled the Great Commission:

1. They presented the risen, living Christ – instead of just telling facts about him.
2. They mobilized everyone to witness – not just paid full-time teachers & evangelists.
3. Who did the apostles go to? Stop trying to shove the camel through the eye of a needle.  The camels are the rich and powerful – most of America. The movement is sustained when the gospel is preached to the poor.  Go to the people who are receptive – who desperately want change – often the poor and disenfranchised.
4. One approach that has been consistent & universal. It doesn’t require a lot of money or a degree. It requires people who love Jesus turned loose to talk about him.
5. They did evangelism not just to individuals. They didn’t just pull new Christians out of their familial or social environment. When an individual was receptive – they went to that person’s family.

Neil Cole

Busyness – does not yield compassion. “Get out of my way – I’ve got things to do.”

Matthew 9:36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

Jesus felt compassion – in the Greek – in his “bowels.” A compassion that comes from your guts is deep – born out of turmoil.

Jesus saw people as “harassed and helpless.” We could translate that as “pin-downed and molested.” If was saw someone like that – we would feel the deep down compassion of Jesus.

When it comes to making disciples – you cannot call it multiplication unless it makes it to four generations (Paul to Timothy, Timothy to faithful men, faithful men to others. 2 Timothy 2:2)

For Neil the pattern of making disciples is built into Life Transformation Groups. The groups:
1. Read large passages of scripture together multiple times over and over with the same chunk of scripture.
2. Confess their sins to each other – honestly.
3. Write out a list of their non-Christian friends and pray for them every week.

Look for those who are desperate – those that have a desperate need for Jesus.

Ed Stetzer

1 Peter 4:9-11

We have to let other people in our churches use their gifts.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to use when our people are living on mission, close to Jesus. That should be the norm.

From the passage:
1. All have gifts.
The way we do church, often disempowers people from using their gifts. We force them to sit and observe the professionals. If we disciple people with knowledge and no action – we are building puffed-up gnostics. Any system that disempowers or demotivates the people of God is unhelpful and perhaps sinful.

The recession has – in a good way – forced the church to rely more on volunteers instead of paid staff.

When we do for people what God has called them to do, everybody gets hurt and the mission of God gets hindered. The more gifted you are as a pastor, often the more difficult it is for you to release others to do what God has called them to do.

You cannot disciple with books. You disciple people life on life. Disciples don’t just know. Disciples do.

2. God intends all to use.
Obedience-shaped discipleship results in mission-shaped disciples.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve made it acceptable to sit in church week after week and do nothing and still call yourself a follower of Jesus. Contributing a percentage of your income and getting your face in a pictorial directory is not good enough.

3.He empowers us.
As pastors we often have a co-dependent relationship with our followers. In order to stop the cycle, the enabler has to stop enabling. Pastor – stop forcing people to be dependent on you for their spiritual life.

Like Susan Boyle – the underappreciated and undervalued shine when they get to use their gifts.

4. To bring God glory.
When people use their gifts in the church – God gets glory.

We should care less about the label on our church, and more about the lifestyle produced.
When we use our gifts, the body is united, and that brings God glory.

Disciples see what Jesus is doing and join him in that. Is your church equipping people to join Jesus on his mission?

Exodus 33:13
If God’s presence doesn’t go with us – then we won’t go. Is there anything else we want in life besides the presence of the Lord?

My motives in ministry have not been pure. “I want to be funny and engaging – or I want a big church – I want to do that.” All these things enter your mind and you loose sight of what you had at the beginning – where you just wanted to be with God.

Verge: to be on the edge. We really seem to be on the Verge of seeing something happen – more than the traditional “We’re going to change the world” excitement of every other conference.

It seems that the Holy Spirit is speaking the same thing to a diverse group of people. There is no pressure to start a movement – a movement has started – the Holy Spirit is starting it. This is Biblically driven – it’s theologically driven. It’s not just the hip thing.

Be courageous – Biblically. Erase what you’ve seen everywhere else – and just go to the Bible. Don’t just go around to other patterns – to tweak what other people are doing. Have the courage to read the Bible and do what it says.

Anyone can create a new religion and take verses from all over the place and force them together and make them work. We have to ask ourselves – looking at our churches – would I ever have come up with this just from scripture? Usually the answer is no.

If I just read the scriptures – I wouldn’t care so much about the gathering. If I read the scriptures, I would see that we are on a mission. That we are to make disciples. Then, what would happen, is that the gathering would just naturally happen – because I would be on mission and I would stick out and I would need other people to help me to do that – to hold me to that.

We would look at the Great Commission – which we’ve all memorized – and we would actually do it.

Go, make disciples – this is what Jesus says to do.

We change everything in church. We look at the Great Commission and don’t take it literally.

Unlike the game “Simon Says,” with the church, if Jesus says it – we just memorize it – we don’t do it.
If I ask my daughter to clean her room, I don’t want her to come back to me and say, “Dad – I memorized your words. I can say them in Greek. We did a study on what it means to clean my room.” No – I would just want her to clean it.

In Acts chapter 2 – the early church just gave all their stuff away. It’s insane, it’s radical – but it makes sense. They had just seen a man rise from the grave. What wouldn’t make sense is – after seeing a man rise from the grave – they just got together in a room every Sunday and sang some songs and listened to someone teach. You would look at that and say, “you didn’t see someone rise from the grave. You’d be doing more than that if you saw someone rise from the grave.”

Scripture says that it’s through our unity – through the way we love each other – that people will see that Jesus came from God, not through our apologetics.

What would it look like for the church to live this out – to have a real sense of inter-dependence in the church… to be able to ditch life insurance because we know that we are going to cover one another?

The disciples did not get together and plan out the day of Pentecost. It wasn’t a plan. It was the Holy Spirit, working through a bunch of diverse individuals to create a unified result.

We cannot create or plan a “movement.” This seems like something that the Holy Spirit is doing. We don’t have the power to make the wave. “God, I think you’re starting a wave here. But if you’re not – let’s just go home.”

There’s a story of a village that had an old tractor. Over the years the villagers had forgotten that the tractor could run and they had forgotten how to use the tractor. So, three months of the year, the town would gather the strongest in the village to move the tractor around on the field through mere strength. They were able to plant some crops – but it was only enough to feed the town.

Much like that tractor, in the church we hire the brightest and most talented to try to grow the church. What we really need is to read the owner’s manual. When we do, we will discover that the church, like the tractor, has an untapped power and life of it’s own. Power enough to plow more fields than we can possibly imagine, to grow more crops, to feed more people than we could imagine.

Let us not care about our salaries, our reputations or any of the other things we build our churches on. Let us strive for the simplicity and purity of the word. Let us be a people act like we really believe that a man rose from the grave.
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See all updated sessions from Verge here »