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.

Lessons From Ecuador

So here are four lessons i learnt from my recent trip to Ecuador. I went along with four other adults and nine teenagers for 8 days, two of them in Quito, five of them in Misualli, the 'gateway to the jungle,' and one more in Bella Vista, a deep jungle tribal village that doesn't even appear on Google maps. It was, by almost any measure, an extraordinary week.

The Gospel really is the hope for all nations

OK, so i didn't 'learn' this in Ecuador, but i tasted it. I guess it's easy living in the United States to feel like the power of the Gospel is somehow limited by borders or ethnicity Or to feel like we've limited it. Most people in our churches are 'just like us,' one way or another. It's easy to drift into the mindset that the Gospel is only powerful in in the Bible belt. But that's a lie, as you know. The Gospel is powerful to change lives everywhere. Monks Risborogh, Greenville, Quito, everywhere. It was so good to be reminded of this, and reminded of it so powerfully. And it has to be the Gospel. What is the hope for kids in those remote places? Just the Gospel. Sure, running water and electricity would be nice, but only for a life time. The Gospel offers life beyond life, life after death. His Word speaks and creates life wherever we are. It was wonderful to see the Jesus of the nations, to hear His praises' sung in Quichua and to see His Word at work deep in the jungle.

Faith is radical

The word radical has lots of traction in Christian culture at the moment. We all want to be radical in our faith, which is no bad thing, as long as we understand what it really looks like to be radical. I guess one of the first things we think of to define radical is the family from the States who pack up everything and move to another country to teach people about Jesus. And we met some of those people last week. People who had given up nearly everything to be play their part in the great commission. And it was inspiring. Like i told our teens at one point, either they were in love with Jesus or they were out of their minds. Maybe sometimes there's not much difference. But, the same radical seed that blooms in the hearts of those overseas blooms here also. Getting on a plane does nothing to your relationship with the Lord, by itself at least. Reading the Bible is radical, Heaven breaking out on Earth as we open the Word. Being faithful to church is radical. In a me, me, me society, why would i give my time, and treasure and talents so freely, so abundantly. We've either lost our minds, or we love Jesus. And increasingly, as anti Biblical morals are legislated and celebrated, simply living like the Bible is true will become more and more radical.

I almost had a religious experience

To be a Christian is to be an iconoclast. No sacred space, except everywhere, and no sacred time, except all the time, but at the Saint house, the renovated HQ for Operation Auca, now turned into a museum, i nearly had a religious experience. To stand at the very radio, in the very room, where Nate, Jim, Roger, Pete and Ed failed to radio in at 4.35 on January 8th 1956, to see the airstrip from which Nate Saint would fly into the jungle from, to stand in the kitchen where the five wives were told of their husbands' fate, to know that real, living, recent Christian history happened in these very walls, was almost too much. What a legacy and calling those men and their wives left behind.

Never grab a monkey by it's tail

And that's all i'll say about that.