Coffee Shop Journal

I’m getting excited about going to Catalyst ‘o8 this year! The speaker line-up is incredible. I don’t want to miss the opportunity to hear Billy Graham speak! Yes - Billy Graham. The speakers really are too numerous, and too amazing, to list. But I am excited about Stephen Furtick being there. He is one of the best new preachers I have come across in many years. God’s hand and anointing are on him. I love to get to Atlanta any chance I can get…so many of my very best friends live there. And Atlanta food…oh yeah.

Anyone else out there headed to Catalyst with me? The early registration deadline is today, June 26. They put this Geico add spoof out to encourage us to register. Very funny. And yes…those are their real voices!

Catalyst / Geico Spoof from Catalyst on Vimeo.

This is a good one, too. It is on the new media and how it can be used in the church.

Because this is part of our group history…

This is an interview with Mark Batterson, the author of In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day, pastor of National Community Church, and let us not forget Ebenezer’s Coffee shop! These behind the scenes interviews were going on all day. That is Carlos Whittaker — Ragamuffin Soul himself! — on the left, and Tony Morgan on the right. Also there is Dave Gibbons, who I got to hear at Q. Fun little interview here.

Talk about places we’d all like to be! Rick Warren called a “Stealth Summit” calling together top pastors to talk about ministry. In addition, he had top bloggers come to cover the event. Go to Ragamuffin Soul to see the list of speakers and bloggers, or go to the ustream live broadcast by clicking this link. They literally sit down some of the nation’s top pastors and start asking them questions over the net and in person. Awesome.

Last week John Maxwell spoke in our weekend services with, for him, an unusual topic. He staged the platform with three chairs, and then proceeded to ask us what chair we sit in. The chairs represent our spiritual life.

• Chair # 1 represents the level of commitment. Our lives are characterized by obedience, reading the word, prayer, reaching others.
• Chair #2 represents compromise. We obey when it is convenient and fits our plans.
• Chair #3 represents confusion. We no longer think first about God, if at all.

Here is the main point. Over time, there is a natural tendency to slide from chair 1 all the way to chair 3. You can see this in many areas of life:

Nations start out under Godly principles and move to an increasingly secular outlook.

Educational institutions begin as seminaries and end up as…Harvard, Yale etc.

Denominations begin in revival and become increasingly bureaucratical.

Sadly, this movement from chair to chair can also be found in the lifecycle of a church, the generational patterns of a family, and an individual life. Generation #1 knows God. Generation #2 knows about God and his works. Generation #3 knows nothing about God or his works. John gave some biblical examples (David - Solomon - Rehoboam, Abraham - Isaac - Jacob) and then gave us some key lessons learned from the chair.

1. The Bible and history teach us that there is a tendency to slide downward with each succeeding generation.
2. To know which chair you sit in is to know where you are spiritually.
3. To know which chair you sit in is to know where your children will be spiritually.
4. You can change chairs.

I need to apologize to…well, someone. I was reading one of the blogs on my Google Reader last night. The topic was based on Shane Hipps, who spoke at Q on the Downside of the Digital Age. This blog post had me thinking about a lot of things this morning, and I would love to link back to you. But I can’t remember which one of you all wrote it! So if I reference something that sounds like your post from yesterday, would you let me know?

[The lost has been found! Larry let me know it was his post I was reading! Go check it out…he says it better than I can.] 

So anyway…here’s the gist. The digital age, as we know, has a good side and a bad side. 24 hour connectedness is great and it can harm us. Hearing about global tragedies, said my mystery post, informs us but it also places too great a burden on our shoulders. The human being wasn’t meant to bear the weight of all the world’s tragedies. An unintended side effect of this, therefore, could be a dulling to the needs in your own circle of influence, since the needs I would tend to run across in Palm Beach Gardens would be of a much smaller magnitude than the needs in Myanmar or China.

On the other hand, this morning I read posts from an English language teacher in China as he discussed daily life there, read the birthday post from this guy as he reaches out to people in Europe. I always read Duncan, and imagine his life in Scotland as he lead a church and works in a job industry currently experiencing layoffs. I’m also looking forward to hearing about his upcoming trip to India. I’ve mentioned many times that LT has opened my eyes to the world of Chinese immigrants and their challenges in a new country, first and second generation.

Here in the United States we can get very insulated not only from the world, but also from each other. Through blogging, though, I’ve been exposed to far more ministries than I would be likely to visit in a year. DJ Chuang, from Leadership Network, travels all around the country tying people together. Following his blog or twitters you can “listen in” on many of those conferences. Scott Hodge has taken the conference blog to amazing heights and runs an incredibly creative church. I’ve met Pamela, who is planting a church with her husband in Tennessee and who I believe is a friend I just haven’t hugged yet. Jenni has shown me what leadership looks like in her world. And then, of course, there is Carlos Whittaker and his wife, Heather, who have inspired so many of us and opened their lives up to show us authentic Gospel. And oh…there are the bloggers in my own church like Kerry, Chad and Dave, who keep me learning what’s happening in my own back yard. My life is so much richer because of all these people.

Downside of the digital age? I’m going to read the book soon and find out what it is. But right now my heart is full of the prayers for these people around the globe. They have inspired me to make a difference in MY community. Because the one thing they all have in common is the high calling to love the world they are in, wherever that might be. And if you happen to think of me, pray for me like I am praying for you!

It was a busy day on the blog as I was blogging from the John Maxwell Leadership Gold conference. I enjoyed the day spent thinking through leadership concepts, a  passion of mine. Leadership has always seemed a strange topic to study. If you have to study it, do you really have it? Is it innate, like the ability to jabber on and on with perfect strangers for example? Or is it learned, like ping pong and touristy Spanish? In any case, I did pick up some helpful insights which I hope to actually use in the days to come.

One of the more interesting aspects of the day, for me, was seeing so many members of the community at large flood into Christ Fellowship. I enjoyed the idea of using the building to offer something of real value to the community, no strings attached. As I said in my first post of the day, however, I seriously underestimated the potential size of the crowd. With very little advertising it looked like we had around 1,000 people attending today.

So here is what I need to process over the next few days. Please bear with the “is this blog a diary?” approach for a minute or two. After all, maybe you can help me! Here are the questions I need to answer.

1.  How do I properly identify the 20% most important tasks on my priority lists?
2. Do you take 20% in every area of your life? So should I be looking at the 20% most important blog tasks, household management tasks, community service tasks,  kid tasks? Or just the top 20% overall?
3. How do I determine the thing that only I can accomplish?
4. What is my sweet spot? What am I passionate about? What do I excel at?
5. Who are the people that I need to travel through life with?

OK…I’m exhausted. I think tomorrow I’ll hit the coffee shop with a good book and let the world pass me by. Life will be back to normal.

Sunday afternoons on my back porch are the best time of the week!

We just returned from Christ Fellowship’s City Place campus. Jillian (our youngest daughter) is headed to Costa Rica with the City Place mission’s team next week, so we went to see the commissioning service. I love City Place campus: where else do you find a Starbucks, Macy’s, Cheesecake Factory and Anthropologie outside your church door? The worship is great, the setting is more intimate and the serendipitous element to the crowd keeps things from getting bland.

John Poitevent spoke today about Phillip walking on the desert road on God’s orders. Phillip, said John, was in the middle of a city-wide revival when God interrupted him and sent him out the desert road, where he met the eunuch riding in a carriage. The eunuch was an interruption. Phillip noticed what the eunuch was reading, and asked him a question about his understanding of the scripture. The eunuch invited Phillip to sit beside him and explain the scriptures. You now the story, and it ends with Phillip getting whisked away to his next interruption.

Well John had  couple of really great points that jumped out at me today.

• Phillip noticed what the other guy was reading. In other words, he connected with what the guy was doing. We talked about that last week: don’t be buried in your own stuff at the coffee shop. Notice what’s going on around you, because God might have something for you.
• Phillip asked a question about the passage the eunuch was reading. He didn’t jump in and begin preaching. He didn’t say, “I know the guy who wrote that book.” He took the time to understand where the eunuch was coming from by asking questions.
• The eunuch responded by asking Phillip to join him in his carriage. Or, as John put it this morning, “Come on up here and do life with me.” We only get invited to “do life” when we’ve connected first.
• Phillip never even got where he was headed. First he was interrupted by the main point of his day, and then he was whisked off elsewhere. By having a heart that was constantly tuned to God’s voice, Phillip made sure he didn’t miss the main event.

As most of you know, I’m still processing all that I heard at Q last week. If you missed them, you can find my Q posts further down in April. Q is an amazing conference in that it brings together people from all backgrounds, cultures and persuasions. As my husband David said several times, during the course of Q he wanted to stand up and cheer for the person on stage and at other times he wanted to stand up and throw something. That has become the definition of a worthwhile conversation to us. Why in the world would you want to pay good money to go to a conference where everyone thinks exactly the same way you do? Not a problem at Q: you name it, you can find it.

That kind of openness to dialogue, however, can lead to an opposite reaction than intended. We have the desire, ability and even responsibility to discuss what we are hearing and evaluate it. The conversations started this way are valuable. But we can’t cross the line into the territory where we are cutting down another follower of Christ simply because we don’t agree with him, or maligning the motives of a teacher or pastor simply because he seems wrong to us. We need to develop the conversation based on a mutual understanding that we all want to know God truer and deeper because of our association with each other.

I read a blog by one of my favorite preachers that captures this thought best for me. Take a few minutes to click over to Stephen Furtick’s blog. He is the lead pastor of Elevation church. Read this post, and then resolve with me that we will be humbled by the others around us who are striving to put their faith into action.