A New Baby, A New Church: Meet Chloe Simpson

Hey guys. I wanted to update the Crew with pics of the newest Crewling. Chloe Beth Simpson. OOOOH. AAAAAAAH.



Kevin and Amber became proud parents of this little beauty Friday morning. Let's pray that big brother Aiden doesn't punt her! Just joking. Aiden is loving her up.



I also thought of something that I hadn't thought of before sitting down to write this blog. When a new person comes to Crew through becoming a Christian, becoming a member, or being born that changes our church. Crew very literally becomes a new church. The Simpsons illustrate that. Their family has just changed dramatically. They have stresses, joys, needs, gifts, and perspectives that they didn't have before. Therefore, so does Crew. We help the Simpsons carry their load and stress as the body of Christ. We celebrate with them as their friends. We meet their needs as best we can because their needs are our needs. We equip and come alongside them as they use their gifts and home to impact Huntington. We are their community and they are ours.

So, I guess in a way this is an announcment that a new church has been born.

What Are Your Strengths?

Hey remember that intentional thing I've been doing? A few of you have been following it anyway. Well, I read this article on knowing our strengths:

http://www.businessevolved.com/articles/124/1/Discovering-Your-Strengths

Crew is going to have a gifts discovery night early in January where everyone can get an idea of their spiritual gifts, passion, natural abilities, personality type and unique experiences. But until then I'd love to hear what you're top two talents are. Mine are humor and likability (I think people typically like me). If you struggle with knowing what yours are, then ask someone close to you what they think.

The Hardest of All the Disciplines For Me

In the intentional living thing I'm doing (I mentioned it on my last blog) I thought through what was the hardest discipline for me to maintain. I'm great at Bible study and even can fast fairly easily, but prayer kicks my tail. I don't enjoy it. I don't feel as if it's effective. It's not a priority for me many times.

You read of these great men through the years who pray all night or are known for their great prayer lives. Read some of these quotes: I have reserved 3 of the best hours of every day for prayer (Martin Luther). The sun never rose on China without finding Hudson Taylor on his knees (Hudson Taylor's Son, can't remember his name!). I read that and get depressed.

I'm not sure that's the model though. In fact all of the prayers of the Bible are short. Even the longest recorded prayer in Nehemiah takes about 5 minutes to read. Jesus teaches that prayer isn't heard because it's long or flowery.

Paul gives us the command to pray without ceasing. I'm a big fan of this. And it has for years been my primary prayer time. It's constant. It's something I actually do and it keeps me tethered to Christ all day long. All through the day, I mutter little 4 or 5 sentence prayers. The first thing I do as I'm walking to the bathroom after waking up. On the way to drop Danny off at school. As I answer emails I pray briefly for each person I email. I sometime write prayers in the emails. You know all through the day.

But these rarely are intentional. When I pray it's as I'm coming across things or dealing with things. So unless a certain request or need is on my agenda or schedule that day it doesn't get prayed about. So I'm thinking maybe once a week I'll have a prayer session. Maybe a half an hour or hour on Monday morning where I write out the major prayer requests in my life, family, my small group, church, city, etc and talk to God about them. To be honest I don't have a good attitude that this will actually become a reality. I don't want to cease praying. I also don't want to faint while lifting.



What about you? What's your hardest discipline to maintain? Why?

Do You Want To Be Like Jesus? We'll See

At least twice a year I have worked through a book with different groups of men and women. It's called Disciplining Yourself For the Purpose of Godliness by Don Whitney. It's a dry title and frankly a dry book. But I have yet to find a better one for simply defining what spiritual disciplines are, why they're important, and then practically illustrating what the disciplines look like. If I want to be like Jesus than I must train for it. I don't just wake up and discover that I'm like Jesus. Yes, God does the work in our life, but uses biblical, time tested, and let's face it hard methods to do his work. Things like bible study, prayer, fasting, bible memory, journaling, silence and solitude, evangelism, service, etc. Just like an athlete must eat right and train and put it in the hard and many times unwanted work to accomplish his dream. Just like a medical student must go through school, tests, clinicals, residency, etc to become a doctor. So must a Christian discipline him/herself if they want to be like Jesus.

Paul wrote this: Exercise daily in God, no spiritual flabbiness, please! Workouts in the gymnasium are useful, but a disciplined life in God is far more so, making you fit both today and forever. You can count on this. Take it to heart. This is why we've thrown ourselves into this venture so totally. We're banking on the living God, Savior of all men and women, especially believers. (The Message 1 Timothy 4:7-10)

Now, I'm going to do this discipline book and one other in winter spring of 08. Anybody want in?

A Journey To Being More Intentional and Inviting You Along For The Ride

Several top notch thinkers in the EFCA have put together a 4 week online class that I've been given the opportunity to participate in. It's focus is intentional living. Making sure that spiritual leaders don't drift aimlessly from project to project, staying busy, but accomplishing jack squat. Another danger is being driven by what has been called "the tyranny of the urgent". Living your day from one crisis to the next. Instead, a healthier, more efficient, and more effective method is proposed: intentional living. This is certainly applicable to the pastor, but not exclusively. This lives and breathes everywhere. I challenge you to think through this with me. Here's your first assignment and post it in the response fields and engage one another with it too:

1. What 3 words pop into your mind when you hear the phrase intentional living?

2. What are your three greatest strengths beside B.O. and telling me how I suck?

3. What historical or contemporary person do you know that models intentional living and why? (NO BIBLE CHARACTERS!)

Bring it!

John Piper is Bad and So Are You

If you've listened to me preach more than 10 times than you've either heard me quote John Piper, preach a sermon John Piper has preached or preached something that I first learned from John Piper. Just a great thinker and pastor. In a lot of ways he is the pastor of many young preachers in America. His book Desiring God is a must read and is one of three books that profoundly changed my life. You can check out his stuff over at www.desiringgod.com. Anyway...a friend of mine, Sam Smith, posted this youtube video of Piper teaching the sinfulness of man over at his website (http://adagiocounty.blogspot.com). I thought it was funny: