Five Things From Skokie

I just got back from taking a team of teens and adults to Skokie, in Chicagoland. We were there for five days helping out a new church plant, Living Hope. Here are some lessons i learnt, and things i'm thinking about.

1) Church Planting Is ___________
Hard, wonderful difficult, encouraging, discouraging, and a thousand things more all at once. But vitally necessary. Skokie was a different world from North Carolina, a world that needs more men and women that love Jesus, and more churches filled with those men and women.

2) I Love The South-East, But
I commented to Rachel over the week that people who complain about living in Greenville have probably never lived anywhere else. North Carolina has everything, beaches, mountains, cities, stunning weather. Greenville has all the advantages of a college town with few of the disadvantages. And churches, lots of churches. It was refreshing to be out of the Bible belt for a while and help a pioneer work.

3) Planting Trees
Fifty years ago you could knock fruit off the trees into your church basket. Today you have to plant the tree, and that's if you can find a field. We rejoice at the Biblical, moral, freedom protecting, common sense decision of the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby case, but we weep that it took an act of the Supreme Court to get it.

4) Only The Word Creates
The Bible is the rock on which the church stands or falls. Preach it, unleash it, unlock it, let it out and let it roar, and people will grow, and life will be created, and people will be saved. It will be slow, but it will be eternal. No one can convince me that turning the lights down and the music up is at all helpful. It may draw a crowd, but draw a crowd to what?

5) America is Mostly Farms
America isn't Manhattan Island and 90210. We drove the 912 miles to Skokie on Wednesday, and drove every one of those miles back yesterday. Farms brother, just farms. There's a long, dead straight stretch of highway in Indiana where every slight bend in the road feels like an event. From the farms in the Hoosier state, to the broken down old towns in Ohio, to the mountains of West Virginia we saw a great deal of America. Why do i mention this? For two reasons. The people that live in Chillcothe, Ohio and Renssaeler, Indiana need churches. Sure, we must aim for cities, because that's where the people are, but there are people in unfashionable places too. And secondly, because the priorities and passions of the coal miner in Milton, West Virginia are almost irreconcilable with those of the coffee shop owner in Boystown, San Fransico. If the Lord tarries, the next one hundred years of American life will see not just a schism between the two, but a chasm.