Jesus is not just worth going with your life, He is worth giving your life! Listen to David Sitton talk about the PRIVILEGE of going after unreached peoples across the world. He is looking for the “right kind of missionary” – are you one of them? I pray that Restore will send others and our own to unreached peoples. We already have one prospect! Check out To Every Tribe for more information. And take 3 minutes to watch the video below.
“Father – I’m so grateful to present this opportunity to the church leaders you have brought here today. Please don’t let me screw it up… Amen.”
That was my prayer before heading up to the front.
As some of you may know, we hosted church leaders from all over metro Detroit (and some even outside of it!) to share with them what God is leading Restore Church to do with the building we obtained last fall. We are so grateful for a permanent meeting facility. However, maximizing this tool from God so that we can serve our community better is the next step.
On February 26th Mike and Clete shared a short history of Restore Church, coupled with a few videos/pics of what God is doing in central Detroit. We also heard some testimonies from members of Restore Church – how God brought them to Restore and what he is doing in their lives.
The lunch culminated by presenting our “first steps” to renovate the P.O. and to ask the church leaders who were able to come to invest in Restore Church. And by “invest” we mean more than just money and work teams. See, if this was just about a building, we would have just “begged and borrowed” until we could get the funds together. Instead, we want to see gospel relationships result from this building renovation. This building has become an opportunity for Restore Church to build some deep, meaningful “gospel centered” relationships with churches all across (and beyond) metro Detroit. To put it a little more simple… “We don’t just want money – we want your life to touch ours. We want you to pour into us and we want to pour into you. We want you to press the gospel into our lives and we want to press the gospel into your lives.”
That is what this building we be. It will be a place that brought together gospel relationship. Churches in the ‘burbs will now have close, ministry connection to a church in the city. Churches outside the city will now have a connection inside the city – an insight that they may not otherwise have. Restore Church will have relationships with churches that they can partner with to serve both communities. We have resources they don’t – they have resources that we don’t. What a beautiful way that we can serve each other.
This is the kind of mentality that led Mosaic Church from Ann Arbor MI to send a ministry team out this week. They are going to pour into us and serve by working on the building. We are going to pour into them by including them in our Discipleship Groups and teaching sessions from Mike and Clete. They will also get to spend some concentrated time together with members from Restore to share testimonies and what God is doing in our neighborhood/city.
And we are going to serve each other. That is what the church does.
When I closed things on the 26th, I challenged everyone to pray about how God would have them be involved in the renovation of the P.O. Is it financially? Is it through a work team? Is it through concentrated prayer for the cause of this church in this city? Let me issue that challenge to you – Do you think God might be moving you to be a part of Restore Church in some way? We have a lot of work to do, but we are so excited about the relationships that will be built because of it!
In the pictures section, you will see a post card we encouraged the attendees to take back to their churches. Please take some time to look at it, and please take some time to pray for Restore Church!
If you care about reaching your city, your time will not be wasted in watching this message by Michael Crawford of Freedom Church in Baltimore. If I had a bishop, it would be Mike! I love this brother’s gospel fueled passion for making disciples in the urban core. Something really special went down this weekend! Restore Church looks forward to learning from and walking with Freedom Church as we seek to make disciple making disciples and plant church planting churches. In this message Mike shares 5 recommendations for Restore Church. And perhaps yours.
Please pray for our upcoming series in Mark, our first week long mission team coming in to help prep for building renovation and the far bigger goal of building relationships, and for a massive Easter Egg Hunt we are planning.
Acts 29! While I love my church planting network, I’m actually referring to this age in which Jesus continues to build His church. In the concluding message to our series through the book of Acts we see 3 reasons why The Unstoppable Advance Continues. The Gospel is for all peoples! Busting out of the cocoon of the Old Covenant to the New Covenant was messy business for the early church. And busting out of our cocoons is messy for us too if we want to reach all peoples. Messy. But beautiful! The Gospel advances through suffering. The Gospel is not bound by suffering, it bursts forward through it. Oh, that we would understand this! The Gospel is God’s Story. When we repent & put our full trust in Jesus, our story is corrected & completed by God’s story. He takes our trashy, nasty, cheap paperback novel of a life and makes it part of a brilliantly written story that will show out & show off His glory forever. As if that is not enough, God puts you on his writing team in this Acts 29 age! Not that He needs you to get it done – He could make the rocks cry out in praise to Him – but to show His power & shower you with joy! Where are you in The Story? Check out the video below to find out (as well as to learn how not to pronounce cocoon;)
Three & a half years ago Acts 20:24 rocked my ministerial life. Yesterday I had the joy of preaching on this text & Paul’s goodbye speech to the Ephesian elders. Church leadership, living out the faith, & more is covered in this passage. You can check out the message below.
Early last week, Clete & I had the privilege of spending 3 days in New Orleans with John Gerhardt of Castle Rock Church in New Orleans & other EFCA church planters talking & walking what it means to plant gospel centered churches in inner cities. Incredible time! The wrecking ball for racism is the gospel, not as a one day project, but as a life long commitment. Unfortunately, all but one video interview is inaudible due to the wind. A big shout out to Brett Gleason, church planting director of the Great Lakes district EFCA, for putting this trip together!
For the next two days Clete & I have the privilege of joining 150 pastors from various denominations gathering in Austin, TX to strategize planting gospel centered churches across our great nation. We are grateful for the opportunity to participate in this discussion!
Behind the plexiglass at the counter of the coney island I frequent is a lot I can’t see. Likewise, behind the stuff that you see with your physical eyes in everyday life is a spiritual realm in which a battle is raging. Some people ignore it & others are obsessed with it. Urban missionaries will face this spiritual opposition as they attack demonic strongholds. The way to fight is with the very thing that translated us out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of His love, the gospel of Jesus Christ. 1 John 3:8 tells us Jesus destroys the works of the Devil, or to put it plainly, Jesus kick satan’s butt. In Acts 19 we see this displayed, experienced, & opposed.
Please be in prayer for our upcoming Dgroup commissioning service (11/25), our next facility workday (12/1), neighborhood canvassing (12/8), & a neighborhood welcome service (12/9).
With all our talk about having a church facility that does not look “effeminized”, the paint in the upper room at The PO looks like something from a women’s restroom (yellowish, & not even the Michigan kind). Kind of funny! #firstworldproblems No worries, at Tuesday night’s work party we’ll get a tanner second coat on the walls. Come on out at 6:30PM if you’d like to eat some cheap pizza, drink lots of Faygo, & get your hair frosted with paint. A big shout out to Bethesda Baptist of Allen Park for working like beasts on Saturday! Sunday evening we were also able to get a lot done in the Bontrager kitchen in preparation for a team coming back from Brookside Church in Bowling Green to hang cabinets & lay tile this Saturday. Thanks also to Riverview Church for hosting last Friday a great mini-conference for church planters on the mission & marks of a healthy church.
Oh yeah, it was great to meet Sunday in person a friend of the church we helped pray through a successful lung transplant – you are a trophy of God’s grace & power Heather! Finally, thanks to Leah for inviting us to a very informative session at Alternatives for Girls on the blight of sex trafficking. Much to process & act on from that evening. Please continue to pray for connections & conversions in our community, the design layout of The PO, the upcoming launch of a third Dgroup, and an early December Christmas open house for our neighborhood.
Sunday we continued our look from the book of Acts at what it means to be an urban missionary. In the face of fear & difficulties we can keep moving forward because of the 3 hope drenched truths of Acts 18:10!
This past weekend 14 of us loaded into a 15 passenger van and headed down to Philadelphia for the Thriving Conference. We had a pretty smooth drive down except for an improperly executed New Jersey jug-handle turn (great job Clete!) that got us pulled over. The officer kindly reminded Clete, “you’re not in Michigan anymore!”.
We had a great time of fellowship with our Restore family, exploring Philadelphia, checking out the Liberty Bell (not sure it was worth the half hour line…) and hunting for a great Philly cheese steak sandwich! If you are heading to Philly in the future, do yourself a favor and avoid Jim’s Steaks!
Our two days at the Thriving Conference were great! The Thriving organization exists to equip and empower missionally minded church leaders and planters in the toughest inner cities to go from surviving to Thriving. We had some incredible speakers who poured into and encouraged all of us. Instead of just talking about strategies and methods, the speakers looked at the urban church through the lens of the person and work of Jesus. By doing this, it stirred afresh a love for Jesus and HIS mission. It was encouraging to see so many others who were fighting the same fight and pressing through the same struggles of urban church planting. We were able to meet so many people from all over the country and encourage each other, talk about struggles, discuss methods and share about the joys of ministry in our cities.
One session in particular really resonated with all of us. Crawford Loritts spoke on reconciling the leader’s character. Crawford had been reading a lot of books on Christian leadership and found that a lot of them were just wordly widsdom repackaged with Bible verses attached. This prompted him to take an in-depth look into Scripture at every man or woman that God used to carry out an assignment. He learned that these men and women had no certain personality profile, no common pedigree and no common set of experiences or education. What he did find was that every great man or woman of God that he gave an assignment had these four things in common:
1. They were marked by BROKENNESS
-This was not a lack of self confidence, but a God needines. A holy handicap that kept them dependent on God.
-God never uses anything that comes to Him “together”. He never uses anything that He has to share his glory with. God does not use what we bring to the table, He uses what we surrender to Him.
2. They were marked by UNCOMMON COMMUNION
-These men and women of God were marked my uncommon communion with God.
-Crawford spoke on how when Moses was leading the Israelites, he would go outside the camp and pitch his tent of meeting and he would commune with God.
-The most important thing you can do for the people you’re leading is to commune with God. It is more important than planning, strategy, you name it.
3. They were marked by SERVANTHOOD as an IDENTITY and NOT as a STRATEGY
-Servanthood is not utilitarian. We do not serve to get something in return. Many leadership books talk about serving as a way to affect the bottom line.
-If you give to get something in return, it is no longer called giving- it is called INVESTING.
-Servanthood is not a strategy, it is an IDENTITY.
-Jesus, the Lord of history, washed the feet of those that he created and died for.
-Don’t ever ask anyone to do anything you haven’t done or aren’t willing to do yourself.
-The platform to lead is only given to servants. Greatness finds servants, not those looking for an ego boost. Nobody should serve your wife like you do. Nobody should serve your children like you do. Nobody should serve your church like you do.
4. They were marked by RADICAL IMMEDIATE OBEDIENCE
-You don’t have to be successful, but you do have to be obedient. Our struggle is that we are tying the last to the first. We think that if we’re not successful then we are not being obedient. If you’re not successful- Don’t quit! Did God tell you to leave? Did God tell you to quit? Did God tell you that you can change the assignment because it’s hard? Your job is to be obedient to God. This doesn’t always mean we will be successful.
We left this conference extremely encouraged by what GOD IS DOING, not just in Detroit but in cities all over the country. We left excited about what God’s vision is for the city of Detroit. It is His vision that we align ourselves with. It is His mission that we are joining. It is by His power that we do anything. We are just instruments in His hands.
Theological liberals distort the gospel by subtraction and theological legalists distort the gospel by addition. The early church was threatened by the former and, as a result, took decisive action in what is known as the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. In addition to learning the true essence of grace from this historic event we are also reminded that grace both frees us to strategically surrender our freedoms and turns us away from that which it saves us from, sin. You can check out the message below. (We’ll improve our camera angle next time;) We had the joy of celebrating this grace through our first baptisms at The Post Office. It was beautiful to hear three heart-thumping stories of grace! I’ve got the first testimony/baptism posted and will try to get the other two up later.
13 of us also had the privilege of attending the 2nd Annual Thriving in the City Conference in Philadelphia at Epiphany Fellowship last Friday & Saturday. Wow! Blogpost to come by one of our Restore peeps.
Friday night the Bo-Ed Dgroup will host a cider & donut bonfire for our neighborhood. All are invited. 7PM 1258 Longfellow 48202.
After a trifecta of crime last week (the house we are buying was broken into, I “interrupted” a second invasion, the window of our Suburban was shattered – getting it fixed as I write) I really needed Sunday’s worship service. And man was it sweet to gather with my Restore fam & praise our King! In the message I answered from Exodus 33 the question of what one thing we need when God calls us to do something far bigger than ourselves. You can check it out below. Next Sunday we will be doing our first baptisms at our new facility.
We were also massively encouraged by a team from Brookside Church in Bowling Green who installed completely new plumbing & wiring in the Bontrager kitchen. After we insulate & drywall the kitchen the men are returning to lay cabinets & hang tiles. Thanks Brookside, you are a HUGE blessing!
Restore Church also had the privilege of help set up & tear down the stage for the Unashamed Tour 2012 Concert on Saturday. I got a little nervous when I discovered the truss I bolted together would be mounted with 100s of pounds of gear & hung over peoples’ heads. Fortunately nothing happened, whew! A big shout out to Matt Golden for organizing the Restore team & to all the guys who volunteered their time!
About a dozen of us will be attending the 2nd Annual Thriving in the City Summit at Epiphany Fellowship in Philadelphia later this week. Please pray it will be a profitable time and that our families will be safe in our absence.
