Acts 20:24 – But my life is worth nothing unless I use it for doing the work assigned me by the Lord Jesus  the work of telling others the Good News about God’s wonderful kindness and love.

I have been dwelling on this passage lately. What an awesome verse this is. Truely awesome.

No doubt one of my favorite topics is serving. Trying to make a difference. Living your life on purpose. You name it, but the mroe I read Acts 20:24 it kind of say it all doesn’t it?

If your looking to be a disciple of Jesus Christ – there is is answer of how you are supposed to live your life.

Dwell on it and let me know what God puts on your heart.

While I have been on vacation I have been reading Breaking the Missional Code by Ed Stetzer and David Putman. The book is an incredible challenge to get back to missionary like thinking in the local church. Not to focus on church growth, or health, or many of the other movements that have helped shape the church over the past 20-25 years, but to really spend time examining the context of where God has called us to to see if those methods really will work in our context or if something else needs to be done?

Hmm. The authors talk a great deal about even us as pastors doing away with our personal preferences in order to better reach the community. The analogy they give is one of a missionary going to say Swaziland, Africa to reach the people who are there. They have to learn about the people, the language, the culture, the context before they can begin to really minister effectively to the people.

The book does slightly knock the church growth movements saying that they might be peaking.. Who knows?

So far I have gotten to p. 89, but was stopped rather dead in my tracks by p. 87 when it got to the topic of Spiritual Warfare. My heart received some conviction that we have left it out of our experience lately and really need to get back to our roots.

In our early days we asked people to adopt areas of the county and communities to pray and interecede for. We did some prayer walking, we did nights of prayer and worship. Somewhere along the line we got so busy just keeping up with the growth we have been experiencing and lost a little ompf along the way.. hmm..

I’m going to see how we might strategically integrate some of that back into the life of the campus.