- Weird day today for a number of reasons.
- Everything started as normal and we even got set-up quicker than normal despite a brand new stage set being put up for the first time.
- Great job by Bill who puts these together on a very limited budget.
- Part of the weirdness today was that I wasn’t preaching.
- I have my normal Sunday routine and quite a few times I found my self just wandering around going, “mmmm ok what should I do now?”
- Because I wasn’t preaching and because of a last minute cancellation, I… instead… served…in…the……………………….nursery!
- Pretty ironic since just two weeks ago in my message I stated that you wouldn’t want me serving in there.
- In any case, there is a great crew working in there so I never felt overwhelmed and I only got thrown up on 3 times.
- Chad started the new Thrive series today which is all about the Church.
- Pretty cool to start it on Pentecost Sunday which is also our denominations “Plant a Church Sunday”.
- They take one Sunday to concentrate on raising funds to help new church plants...their generosity helped us immensely 8 months ago.
- We decided though from day 1 of Exponential to give back not just 1 day per year but all year long.
- To date in just 7 months we’ve been able to give nearly $11000!
- One of our core values at Exponential is that “It takes all types of churches to reach all types of people”. So giving back to church planting is just one way to put our money where our mouth is at.
- Now to be honest being a new church and struggling financially it’s tempting to not give but I personally feel that it wouldn’t be right to ask for people to support us financially and trust God that He’ll meet their needs and then not do the same thing ourselves.
- Ok back to Chad’s message…I hear it went well and I’d love to be able to listen to it…but the next weird thing that happened was every channel on our multi-track recorder stopped about 18 minutes into today’s Experience which means we’ve lost it forever.
- I called Chad this afternoon to see if he wanted to re-record it but he felt he could do better just doing a brief re-cap next week before week 2’s message.
- For those of you used to listening or were especially excited to hear Chad’s message, I greatly apologize that we don’t have it and we’ll work hard to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
- It was great that we could give everyone a copy of Guerrilla Lovers today.
- It was written by my good friend Vince Antonucci who is super funny, super creative, as passionate about reaching the lost as I am and as passionate about “being the Church” as Chad is.
- I hope everyone enjoys it…if you didn’t get a copy (I understand we ran out), we’ll get more copies and have them ready for you next week.
- Last weird thing that happened was Chad left everyone out early and our tear down crews must have been super hungry because we left the theater a full 1/2 hour earlier than normal.
- Heck we even beat the main-line denominations to the buffet line…and that’s saying something! 🙂
- Got a busy week this week as we prepare for vacation coming up…hope to get it all done but yet still have time to enjoy these beautiful days God has been giving us.
Guerrilla Lovers
A few years back I got to know a pastor down in Virginia Beach by the name of Vince Antonucci who is not only a really fun guy to hang with but as passionate if not more passionate for evangelism as I am. Vince has a really funny testimony that he shares of his journey from atheist to follower of Jesus. More recently Vince moved from Virginia Beach to Las Vegas where he is getting ready to start Verve a church right on the Strip for the people of Vegas. Lisa and I are going to be out there in a few weeks and we’re excited to get to see him again and experience all that God is doing in and through him.
I shared all that because today is another exciting day in Vince’s life. His second book, Guerrilla Lovers is being released. If you want to not just say you love Jesus but also show the love of Jesus to others, this is the book for you! If you’re still struggling with the whole what’s it mean to become and then be a follower of Christ then check out his first book, “I Became a Christian and All I Got Was this Lousy T-Shirt.
For pastors and church leaders, Vince is also providing all kinds of cool guerrilla loving resources for individuals and churches at www.guerrillalovers.com