A Godly Generational Vision

I have uploaded the teaching from Sunday: A Godly Generational Vision. This message was primarily inspired from our visit to the North Carolinians for Home Education Conference we attended last week. I was especially encouraged by Kevin Swanson of Generations with Vision. I had been memorizing and meditating on Deuteronomy 6 preceding the conference. This passage two basic principles related to a generational vision:

• The vision is for God’s people to live in loving, faithful obedience to him (vv. 4-5).
• Parents are responsible for teaching their children to live in loving, faithful obedience to God (vv. 7-9, 20-25).

As usual, you can listen to this message in the Teaching Audio player in the right sidebar. From the Player you can also download it or subscribe to messages from Highland Christian Fellowship as a podcast.

Does Family Integrated Church Work?

Our church, Highland Christian Fellowship, is "family integrated." This means that when we meet as a body on Sundays and Wednesdays, we meet as families, with all ages present. There are unique challenges and benefits to this approach. During homegroup on Wednesday night at our house, we had a discussion on male/female relationships, especially in the context of how young unmarried people relate to one another. My friend, Clarke Kennedy, wrote me this email reflecting on the discussion:

I thought the discussion last night was FABULOUS!   What a joy and a privilege to see our church working in the way it is.  I don't think I've ever seen anything like what happened last night.  A family-integrated church, with children of all ages, all the way up to young adults and then the older adults, all in a discussion of purity and holiness and appropriate ways of relating to the opposite gender, while being fairly explicit about what is acceptable and not acceptable, and yet doing it in a way that the young children could still be there an not be exposed to ideas beyond their capacity to process.  I think one way this can be done is just by using biblical language, which is usually quite clear, but in a way that is not needlessly offensive, and that even children can hear, and yet grow into their understanding of it over time.

One of the weaknesses I had feared in a family oriented church was that the young people, such as the teenagers who face these kinds of issues in very aggressive and direct ways would not be able to hear truth about these issues because of the presence of the younger ones.  What happened last night proved that this is not a problem, and in fact I thought it had tremendous power to have the older adults and the married adults speak from their own experiences into the lives of the younger unmarrieds, so as to say "Look, I've made mistakes..I wish I had known...here's a better way."  Wow! This church design is more powerful than I realized, and I guess I've just never seen a church like ours before, so I've never seen it work, and didn't know if or how it would work in these areas.

I just think of the strength that this will give these young people, when they think of these kinds of meetings, with older role models, spiritual family members, counseling them, and loving them, and speaking truth to them, right there with their parents in the room!  It must give a tremendous sense of strength and courage and fortitude to these younger adults when they are facing the pressures of their own flesh and the lies of the world to stand strong, thinking of all that they have heard and seen and felt from their close-knit spiritual family.  THIS IS POWERFUL!  AMEN!  GOD IS DOING AN AMAZING WORK AMONG US!

Defeat the Devil . . . Be a Mom

On Mother's Day I taught on the interesting relationship between being a mother and the spiritual war against Satan and the testimony of the church (Titus 2:4-5; 1 Tim 2:8-15; 5:9-16). There were two basic principles we discussed. The first, which is particularly despicable to our culture, is this: In general, God intends for women to be mothers. This is the assumption of Scripture, especially the passages in view. Excepted, of course, are those that God calls to be single and those who are not able to have children. The second principle is this: When women live out their role as mothers, they are less vulnerable to the attacks of Satan. There is also in this message a lengthy discussion on modesty from 1 Tim 2:9-10. You can listen to it in the audio player on the right side bar.

HCF Picnic

We had a great time last night picnicking at our house with our church. We ate, talked, and played basketball and Wiffle ball. Here are some pictures. You can see a few more in this album. Ellie Casner and Hannah are buds (left)

In order below:

Here are the Wiffle ball teams together.

Christina, Anna, and Meredith

Kassie and Bethany

Kathryn and LeeAnne are buds.

The Power of Discipline and Love

I just uploaded my teaching from Sunday at Highland Christian Fellowship. It is a continuation of the series from 1 Corinthians 16 on Doing the Work of the Lord. In it I share some of my most life changing moments in learning to be disciplined and learning to love. I also explain the vision and purpose of our fellowship. Listen to it in the Teaching Audio player on the right sidebar or here.

Meeting and Praying for Refugees

We had a fascinating and diverse group of people into our home for our mid-week prayer meeting. Several ethnic groups were represented: Chinese, Malaysian, African, Serbian, and Iraqi. The reason for this diversity is that Chui Hea Hill (of Malaysian descent) has a wonderful ministry to refugees. She and her husband work with World Relief, U.S. Center for World Missions, and International Justice Mission. She brought with her refugees she is currently assisting: a woman who worked in Iraq as a jounalist and was kidnapped, a young Muslim Iraqi boy who's father was killed by a car bomb, two African boys whose father was a king in Zimbabwe and is running for his life because of his stand against an evil government. We heard their stories and prayed for each of their situations (we also played basketball, ate snacks, and had good fellowship). We were challenged by how much suffering goes on in the world that we are not aware of and encouraged to be available for God to use us to demonstrate his love and truth to other.

Interviewed by a Homeschooler

Emma Curtis, one of the students in our local home school association (High Country Christian Home Schoolers), e-mail interviewed me for their online publication. Here are the questions and my answers:

1) How long have you been homeschooling?  Six years

2) Do you have any tips for new homeschoolers that plan to have large families?

We recommend selecting a curriculum that allows you to teach some subjects to several grade levels at once. We use My Father’s World. We are able to teach Bible, History, Vocabulary, Art, and Science to our three oldest together (5^th, 4^th, and 2^nd grades). This is not only efficient for the parents, but it gives us more of a group learning experience with more dialogue and learning from the other students. Although they are studying the same basic subject, they are allowed to work at their own levels.

I would assume that a large family full of undisciplined, selfish consumers would be quite miserable. The only way it is possible to have a large family and a peaceful home is for each family member to see himself or herself as a productive part of a team. It is important to establish a culture of service, strong relationships, kindness, and shared purpose.

3) What are the Christian principles that your family embraces most?

The purpose of our family is to love God, love people, and make disciples. This is not unique, of course. We believe that is God’s purpose for all believers, families and churches. As I mentioned in the last question, having such a purpose is one of the keys to having a productive, peaceful home. All other principles, guidelines, or questions fall somewhere under these goals.

4) What are some of the greatest triumphs and trials our family experienced while planting a new church in Boone?

The greatest trial of our experience in starting Highland Christian Fellowship was working through significant theological and practical difference with other believers. This can be hard at two levels. First is when such difference are dealt with wrongly, without humility, patience, and love. Second is when such differences cannot be resolved, even when dealt with rightly. We have learned that it is important to discern between primary and secondary issues of faith. There are comparatively few primary issues of faith that must be met for Christian fellowship. In general, I’m afraid the Church often makes too much of secondary issues.

The greatest triumph of our experience has been the tremendous spiritual growth of everyone involved. Many of us have seen the last few years as providing the most significant spiritual growth in our lives. Now that we are established, our hope is that the greatest triumph will be that God uses us powerfully to see the lives of others transformed by the love and truth of Christ.

Jesus' Communication Strategy

Here is an excerpt from Dad's book Making Friends for Christ: An Inductive Strategy for Personal Evangelism. You can hear Dr. Wayne McDill present the contents of the book in the seminar our church is hosting this Friday evening and Saturday morning. Check out the details here.

"Since Jesus is our model for communication strategy, it is important to us to see how His mission is presented in the Bible. In Jesus of Nazareth God communicated with man as never before. He translated His message into a language mankind could understand, the language of human experience. Jesus was, in an ultimate sense, the Word of God to man. God had spoken once and for all time in an unmistakable way. His message was contained not only in the things said by this Visitor from another world, the message was also in who He was and what He did, His attitudes, and how He related to those around Him. His communication strategy then becomes ours.

. . . An evangelism that ignores the experience of the individual person is not consistent with the gospel of Christ. People can sense our motives. They know when we are attempting to manipulate them for our own purposes. They know when we are out for their good only, and when we aim only to fatten our church rolls and our offerings at their expense. They know when we really care, and when we see them only as objects on which to unload an evangelistic “pitch.” They know when we are actually listening, and when we only wait impatiently for a chance to continue our canned presentation."