Expanding Our Borders

Isaiah 54:2-3, 2 “Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. 3 For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left, and your offspring will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities.

A consistent theme in the prophetic call to God’s people is to make preparation for expansion. It is a promise of blessing in order that we might bless others. However, to receive this promise, we must in faith make preparations (changes) in order to make room for the blessing God wants to pour out.

I have spent the last couple of days in Northeast Missouri…about 25 miles south of the Iowa border. It is very rural and with lots of farms. Any farmer knows that you have to build a silo before you can harvest. Moreover, the size of your silo (or the number of your silos) depends upon how big you expect your harvest to be.

Jubilee has always lived with the expectation of a big harvest, and has sought to be the kind of church that has prepared for growth before it’s happened. This has meant we have:

1. Rented or bought facilities bigger than maybe we needed at the time
2. Developed and trained more leaders than we needed
3. Remained very flexible with our systems and methods of going about our mission.

Our hope and plan is to continue to “enlarge the place of our tent”, to lengthen our cords and strengthen our stakes.

This Sunday, December 6, the roughly 75 people that currently make up Life Church in Union, will officially come under the leadership of the Jubilee elders, making them a part of Jubilee Church. This is an exciting time…the family is growing!

When You're Here, You're Family

I heard recently (through the grapevine) about some confusion surrounding our "Family Meetings". Some had thought the meetings were just for families. Let me clear that up: they are not just for families - they're for everyone who calls Jubilee home.

Let me just quickly explain why we use the word family anyway. We believe and hopefully practice that the church isn't just a place where people gather together once a week on a Sunday, but do life together. That we don't just affiliate, but fellowship. That we don't act like a club, but a family. A family with brothers and sister, aunts and uncles, cousins, spiritual mothers and fathers, grandmas and grandpas. We aspire to be a family.

So when we give events names like "Family Meeting" or "Family Weekend", it's not just for biological families, but for the entire spiritual family. Because when you're here, you're family.

15 Minutes That You Don't Want To Miss

Some of the most exciting minutes of the week for me happen between 9:45 am and 10:00 am on Sunday morning. These are precious minutes for me because I get to meet people I have never met before - some of whom have never been to Jubilee and maybe church period.

What happens in these 15 minutes is such a big part of what it means to be the church. Showing hospitality. Showing philoxienia or "love of strangers". This can't happen once the meeting gets started and it rarely happens after the meeting because we are picking up our children and a lot of times newer people are ready to get home so we miss our opportunity.

Between 9:45 am and 10:00 am on Sunday morning are 15 minutes that you don't want to miss.

Experience Can Ruin Your Perspective

The other day I asked my 2 year old daughter, "Do you know what daddy does for work?" She thought intently for a moment and then with a 'eureka-type' expression blurted, "You go to the church building!"(she loves the church building because of the toys in the nursery) "That's right" I said. "And what does daddy do there?" She replied, "You play!"

I was devastated. All my daughter thinks I do all day is play. But then it occured to me that in her world, that's what the church building is all about - playing. There's no corporate worship, there is no preaching of the gospel, there is no fellowship, there is no counseling, no administration, no serving, no prayer - there's only playing. Why else would you go to the church building? And then it occured to me that her experience had completely shaped her perspective. And her perspective shaped her view of me and the Church.

I wonder what your perspective is of the Church? How has your experience shaped that perspective? Is Church a once a week gathering or a vibrant 24/7 community? Is it irrelevant to daily life or is it the hope of the world?

I have found that our experience can ruin our perspective and can be very dangerous to how we live in the present and hope for the future. You see, experience is often contradictory to the Word of God. For example, we can receive prayer for our sickness and not get healed and have that experience shape our view on whether or not God heals. Or we can look at the Church and see where it has let people down and has let you down and that experience can ruin your perspective of the Church. The Bible says that the Church is the precious bride of Christ. The Bible says that the Church is God's one and only plan to administer and proclaim the message of salvation. God has high hopes for the Church. How can we disregard the Church knowing God feels that way? Well, we've had some bad experiences. But my prayer is that we don't allow our experience to fog our view of truth. May we learn through the power of the Holy Spirit to allow God's word to shape our perspective more than our experiences.

Community Anyone?

We are lonely people. We feel it all the time. We feel it when we come home at night and the phone doesn't ring. We feel it when sadness kicks in and no one seems to care. We feel it when we are still at the office at 9 pm. We feel it when we go to bed alone. It's not that we don't try to relate to others, but that doesn't seem to satisfy us. We get disappointed when people don't meet all our needs (even though they were never meant to - that's God's job). The problem is we really don't understand what community is and what it takes to have it. It's a buzz word these days, but the reality of community seems to elude us. We need to get a grip on what community really is.

Community flows out of who God is.

The Father, Son and Spirit live in perfect relationship while on mission together (mission is important to experiencing authentic community). So if you want to tap into community the way it was meant to be experienced, get close to God. Repent (right now) of the sin that stands in the way of you relating to God. If you are experiencing loneliness, I'll bet anything your walk with God is less than stellar.

Here's some more about community that I borrowed from a friend:

Community is experiencing Christ through one another.

Community is knowing and being known, serving and being served, celebrating and being celebrated. Community is hanging out with Christian friends and laughing about stupid things. Community is gradually opening up our true selves to people and letting them see who we really are. Community is telling each other the truth in love.

Community is not just being "nice."

True community involves being in a bad mood and still being pleasant to others. Community means asking for help. To be in community means to be in need. To feel other peoples' pain, that's community. To think more about what others need, that's community. Community involves crying and looking foolish in front of others. To be in community means to be uncomfortable at times. Community involves risking our image. Community is not just eating together. Community is not seeing people at church. Community is not saying, "Fine" when asked how you are doing. To be in community involves using your phone a lot.

To experience community is to arrange one's life in such a way that fellow members of the church are seen not as a burden to deal with, but friends with which to do life.

Community is seeing church as a family to belong to, not a service to go to. Community involves simplifying one's lifestyle in order to welcome others.

Community means sacrificing time and money for those who need either. To listen more than you talk is community. To work out all conflicts and never hold grudges is community. Community is the way of Jesus who related to and lived with twelve very imperfect men when he could have accomplished his mission and lived his life without them. Jesus showed us how to do community by who he was and how he lived.

Let's be a church that just doesn't have the word community listed in our brochures and website. Let's be a church that experiences authentic community and models it to the world around us.

Bryan

Get Outside Yourself

We learn in Scripture that we are created for a greater purpose than satisfying fleeting pleasures (read Ecclesiastes). Moreover, we learn that our life is more than just about our life and our lifetime (Jeremiah 1:5; Psalm 48:13, 71:18, 78:4). We have been created to effect those around us in our generation and generations to come. If you have been a Christian for a while, you get that.

Well the same is true for churches. Jubilee doesn't exist just for Jubilee. It exists for people outside of Jubilee. And not just people in St. Louis, but the nation and even the world. That is why it is critically important and a privilege to be a part of the Newfrontiers family of churches (go to www.newfrontiers.xtn.org for more info). It's an opportunity for us to tap into something bigger than ourselves. To be a part of a worldwide, grace-filled mission-minded group that is reaching all different kinds of people. Starting churches in places where there is not a current expression of the body of Christ, feeding the poor in Africa and raising up a new generation of leaders that will live on well beyond our lifetime.

This is why next week, we'll load up our cars and drive to Central Missouri State University to live in dorms for a couple of days, eat cafeteria food and pay money for it. So that we can band together with other wild-eyed, grace-filled, mission-minded people who want to make a difference beyond themselves and beyond what any one local church could do (regardless of size). It costs us something to go outside ourselves, but the payoff is huge and the direction Scripture pushes us toward.