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Twitter Prayer Chain!
Churches used to have telephone prayer chains, where people called one another to pass along prayer requests to others in the community. But that’s so 1990! Today we’ve got the Internet and Twitter, so here’s how we’re going to do this.
Follow the instructions below and whenever a new prayer request goes up on the CC prayer list, you’ll get a text message on your phone (TECHNOLOGY!).
- Go to http://twitter.com and sign up for a new account (unless you already have one).
- Once you are signed in, click on “Settings” on the top bar.
- Click on “Mobile”
- Enter your cell phone number and click “Start” to verify your phone.
- Once your phone is verified, go to
http://twitter.com/ccprayer - Click the “Request” button to get access to prayer tweets (they are only visible to those who request access).
- Later on, head back to http://twitter.com/ccprayer to see if your request has been granted
- Once we grant access, you should see that you are following @ccprayer, with a list of the prayer tweets below.
- Click the little mobile phone icon next to “Following” to have all prayer tweets sent immediately to your mobile phone. It should look like this:
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Leaning into Conflict for the Sake of the Gospel
A few thoughts from Acts 6:1-7 before a discussion on church gatherings and conflict in churches (not recorded).
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Easter 6: Our Advocate(s)
A sermon by Wesley Gaines on the sixth Sunday of Easter (May 9, 2010), from John 14:23-29.
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Resurrection Reading
In the church calendar, Easter isn’t just one day, it’s a whole season. It’s 50 days of learning to walk in newness of life, of finding ways to “practice resurrection,” as Wendell Berry said.And if Lent is a time to give things up, then perhaps Easter ought to be a time to take up new things. Start piano lessons, ask someone out on a date, start volunteering, start reading a new book.
Specifically, a book that helps you dive more deeply into the meaning and implications of Christ’s resurrection. We don’t grow deeply in our relationship with Jesus without the help of those further along in the journey. Here are three suggestions of books that would be great to read in this season of resurrection:
Viral Hope: Good News from the Urbs to the Burbs is a collection of short essays from 50 different authors articulating the gospel in their own local context.Read about the various ways the good news of Jesus is making its way into many different places of the world. One post per day of Easter, all the way to Pentecost! You can read more about the book on Ben’s blog.
Surprised By Hope is a phenomenally lucid examination of Jesus’ resurrection, the meaning of heaven, and the mission of the church.This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the resurrection of Jesus gives shape and meaning to our everyday activities and propels us into missional living.
The Challenge of Easter is a very short book on the credibility and reliability of the resurrection of Jesus as matter of history. This book will help you ground your faith in knowledge. One chapter per week of Easter.Winn Collier, an Ecclesia church planter, and some friends are blogging through this book during the Easter season as well. You can find the intro to the series here.
Happy reading! Christ is risen!
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Holy Week: Day Four
Today’s reading is a little longer, and introduces us to Jesus’ teachings about the end of the age – a subject we don’t often hear about during the Easter season, but one that is obviously tied to his resurrection. So, read Matthew Chapter 24 and 25 and reflect on the questions below.
Questions for Reflection
- How would you sum up Chapter 24? What is the main thing Jesus seems to be trying to say?
- How would you sum up the teaching of the three parables in Chapter 25?
- Why do you think Jesus might be discussing this during the week leading up to his crucifixion and resurrection?
- How do you think this subject of the end of the age might be relevant for us today?
(Exercises written by Jason Coker of Ikon Community)
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Holy Week: Day Three
Today read Matthew Chapter 23 and contribute your thoughts to the comments below.
Questions for Reflection
- What single saying in this long list of “woes” strikes you most or which one best sums up the whole list? Why?
- If Jesus were to come today and give a modern version of the “woes” for Christians, what kinds of hypocritical behaviors do you think he would be condemning?
(Exercises written by Jason Coker of Ikon Community)
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Holy Week: Day Two
Today read Matthew Chapter 22 and Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and contribute your thoughts to the comments below.
Questions for Reflection
- In this passage Jesus quotes part of the Jewish Shema from Deut 6, the most important prayer practice in Judaism (you can read more about the importance of the Shema here). How do you think reciting Deut 6:4-9 three times daily might affect your thoughts and life positively?
- How can we know if a religious practice, like reciting the Shema three times daily, is effective for good spiritual formation or if it is merely an empty religious ritual? How are Jesus’ words in Matt 21-22 helpful in making this distinction?
(Exercises written by Jason Coker of Ikon Community)
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Holy Week: Day One
Today read Matthew Chapter 21 and Zechariah 9:9-17 and contribute your thoughts to the comments below.
Questions for Reflection
- Based on the prophecy in Zechariah 9, what would your expectations have been of Jesus if you were a Jew in that crowd?
- If Jesus is the promised messiah, why do you think he did and said these things in Matt 21? Are his actions and teachings consistent with Zechariah 9?
- What do you think Jesus is trying to get across in Matt 21?
(Exercises written by Jason Coker of Ikon Community)
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Gathering in the Name of Jesus
I highly recommend Dallas Willard’s new book Knowing Christ Today. He speaks in the book about the spiritual discipline of fellowship with other believers, and I wanted to share a beautiful passage about the purpose of disciples gathering together. This passage deserves deep and intense reflection.When we gather “in the name” of Jesus, we gather to love one another and to be loved, to serve one another and be served. That is why we “go to church.” The one sure mark of being his disciple was said by Jesus to be that we love one another in the way he loves us (John 13:34-35)… So when we “go to church,” we go to love those who are there and to be loved with his agape love. But that love is not confined to when we are “in church.” It is for everywhere in life. Church is for catching it and practicing it.
It is of absolute importance that you get this right if you are to know Christ. We know Christ in others. Reflect on what goes on within you upon first sighting another disciple. It may be a member of your family or someone at your job, or it may be as you approach your meeting place (your “church”). Is your first thought that they should be blessed by God in every way? That they should be “better” than you are (“In humility regard others as better than yourselves” Phil 2:3)? Are you prepared to serve them spiritually by lifting them to God in prayer for his utmost gifts to them and by assisting them in their needs? Do you earnestly long that their light should shine in such a way that others would see their goods works and glorify God because of them? (Matt. 5:16). It is out of such a heart and overall disposition that we spontaneously and without thinking “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15). Or do we meet others more in the spirit of the Pharisee who prayed alongside the tax man?
The most important thing about our fellowship with other disciples is that Jesus, the trinitarian presence, should be in our midst. For that, we must meet “in his name” (Matt. 18:19); that is, we meet for his purposes, with his resources, and in his presence. This will no doubt require some serious readjustments, given how “church” is generally practiced today. But it can be done if you and I are willing to walk with Jesus in doing it and not get caught up in superiority and in condemnatory comparisons as we look upon those around us–especially upon those who do not agree with us or even attack us.
If we come together in this way, Jesus’s idea of evangelism and “mission” will fall into place: “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:23). As Frank Laubach says: “The simple program of Christ for winning the whole world is to make each person he touches magnetic enough with love to draw others.” If we grow our fellowship in this direction, it will naturally affect those around us, whether in the fellowship or not. This kind of love and the “Presence” go with us wherever we go. They cannot be hidden. A “missional church,” in a wording often used today, is actually one that cannot be stopped from increasing, because it grows by contiguity–skin on skin.
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The Whole Worship Service is the Exposition
Geoff Holsclaw, one of the co-pastors at Life on the Vine in the Chicago suburbs (an Ecclesia Network church), recently wrote a great blog post about where exposition of Scripture happens for their community. He says it happens during the whole service, not just the sermon. His outline of what their service looked like last week was a helpful glimpse into how another missional church worships together in order to be formed as the Body of Christ for mission.
Here’s the post. What strikes you in his description of their service?
It is often claimed that the missional church might be loosing the high standard of expository preaching. And often we don’t exactly help to clarify this when we rail against individualized, overly rationalistic, disembodied information dumps which masquerade as the worst of expository preaching (love ya Dave). And when we claim that interpretation is a communal activity not reducible to a grammatical-historical method, many think we, the missional church, have given up on the Word of God. Well…we haven’t. In fact, we do the real expository preaching!
In our worship gathering the question is not if exposition happens, but where exactly it happens. Someone new to our gathering, steeped in the traditions of expository preaching, commented to one of our co-pastors that while biblical exposition didn’t happen in the sermon (as classically understood), it instead happens throughout the entire service. I think this is absolutely correct. Let me explain by walking us through last week’s worship gathering.
Our preaching text was Romans 8.1-8, 12-13, celebrating that for those in Christ there is therefore now no condemnation. The rest of the lectionary was Isaiah 43.16-21, Psalm 126, and John 7.53 – 8.11 [the woman caught in adultery].
The Life on the Vine Liturgy (03/21/10):
* Before the service, at 9am, we have a teaching class which lays out the basic framework of the morning text to be preached.
* In the service, after the time of silence and invocation we sang the call to worship, Wake Up, (which we recently wrote based in the text of Roman 13), calling us to attend to the work of Christ.
* Then comes the Scripture readings, read from the four walls of the sanctuary symbolizing that we are being surrounded by the words of God, ending with a reading from the Gospel of John and how Christ did not condemn the woman caught in adultery. .
* Between the readings and the sermon is what we call the Liturgion (a litany and motion icon), which in this case was a guided meditation on the painting, “Christ and the Adulterous” by Jan Brueghel, focused on Christ’s non-condemning spirit. The questions asked were: why is Jesus the lowest in the painting? Who is at the center of the painting? What is the significance of that? Why is the crowd fading into darkness? Notice that man who dropped the stone…notice that he is the second lowest. What does his posture resemble? Notice the shape of the woman’s hands. What does all this tell us about Jesus?(click painting for larger image)
* Only after all this comes the sermon (which for us is only one aspect of the dual apex of the service), which we conceive as a focused time of displaying the gospel of Christ and drawing everyone into the Kingdom of God. In the sermon there of course will be information conveyed and reference made to grammar and genre. But the true reference of exposition is always Christ himself and his saving work towards which all our preaching must speak. This week’s sermon focused on living in the hope that while we are guilty, in Christ we are not condemned.
* After the sermon is a time of response through congregational prayer and two worship songs (Grace Flows Down, Wondrous Cross).
* Then comes the second apex of our service, the Eucharist, or Communion, or the Lord’s Table, which is itself a fully participatory exposition of the non-condemning hospitality of Christ, and a fully participatory congregational response in faith and hope.
* During this time of coming to the Table we celebrate the non-condemning love of Christ in three songs: You are My King, Kyrie Eleison (a song we wrote on Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension), and Let us Love and Sing and Wonder.
* Finally, in the Benediction, we are sent out as the non-condemned people of God, the Body of Christ, offered for the life of the world.Of course, reading this pails compared to experiencing it. But for us, at Life on the Vine, exposition happens throughout the entire service, not just in the sermon. And it is done is a fully biblical, artistic, and immersive situation. Instead of a 30 minute exposition of the grammar, structure, and meaning of Romans 8, we have a 75 minutes exposition engaging the heart, soul, mind, and spirit, rather than just the mind.
So let it not be said that this missional church doesn’t care about biblical exposition, but rather that we care so much that we make and entire service out of it!
So, then, where does biblical exposition happen for you in your context? Is it similar or different?
