B

Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.

::Isaiah 55:1-2

Every movement has a central message. The bohemian movement of the 19th century jumped across the Atlantic ocean and smashed into the United States of America, touting it’s mantra and values, “Truth. Beauty. Freedom. Love.” At the heart of the movement was a message: There must be an inward demand to love and be deeply loved that drives the decisions and lifestyle of every man or woman who is seeking out a meaningful life.

Cultural trends, like the bohemian movement, are simply historical pendulum swings that are associated with some sort of social movement aligned with one central message that contains the transformative ideas that drive their way deeply into the hearts and minds of the tenants.

The Gospel is the central message of the the whole Bible, and the central message of the greatest movement of all time. Christianity’s movement leader – Jesus – sparked the most widespread religious, social, political, economical, historical, cultural movement of all time. His message was clear:

::I’ve come for the sick, those who realize they need a doctor - Matthew 9:12

::I haven’t come to be served, but to serve and give my life as a ransom – Mark 10:45

::I have come to seek and save that which is lost - Luke 19:10

::I have come to give life, depth and beauty, not steal joy – John 10:10

His message communicated his purpose, and his purpose is what the entire Bible points ahead to and back to. The Gospel is Jesus, and Jesus is the Gospel.

The heart of Christianity is joy in knowing Jesus, not dreadful deprivation. Jesus redeems all brokenness, bears the weight of all pain caused by sin, and breathes life into the human soul through a disgusting death on a criminal’s cross. He did this so we can imbibe his gospel deeply and become inebriated with Him. Taste, smell, sight, touch, sound – they are all from and for Jesus. Jesus is the end of everything good, not the enemy.

The Gospel and the way of Jesus is not dreadful deprivation of everything good, but the joyful imbibing of Jesus, the source of everything good (c.f. James 1:17). So inhale; breathe; drink deeply of the joys of life. And do it all as a means to an end – knowing Jesus.

Ray Fuentes is a good friend and great thinker who has influenced my life significantly, and I thank God for him. He’s a friend in life, and a partner in the Gospel. His story of his experience is very compelling and a vivid depiction of what life is like in that part of the world.

I spent seven weeks in India.

If we had time, I’d tell you about the overwhelming Hinduism slicing huge chunks of spirituality out from the dashboards of taxis and the entrances of stores or restaurants. In each of those places, there were fixed small shrines, accepting daily offerings of prayer, flowers, superstition, and money.

I could tell you about the juxtaposition of poverty and affluence. In one single glance, I could see: a man lying on the sidewalk (next to a dog doing the same), a family huddled in a 8′ X 8′ metalplasticwood hut adjacent to the Porsche store (with the little kid using the street as a toilet, his little brother wiping him, and their mother watching TV via a satellite dish tied to a tree), a man in tattered clothes cooking rice and vegetables on a makeshift grill in front of the glimmering new McDonald’s.

Photo taken by designldg

I’d love to tell you about the heavy monsoon rain in the late afternoon as I stood alone in a crowd under the awning of a restaurant peering towards the Indian Ocean. Its waves breaking violently on the side of the pier. The city streets would flood like rivers overrunning the curbside, careening towards the thirsty drains. A faucet, cleaning and rejuvenating the city after nine months of drought and water shortage. Kids were dancing when the first real monsoon rains hit. What a beautiful sight.

I can’t even capture the beauty I saw while riding, nauseatingly, in the back of a bus full of my amazing friends on the way to spend my 21st birthday in the hill regions. Mountains sleeping under a blanket of fog and humidity. This bus careening right along the hill’s edge. I felt like I was supposed to lean towards the mountain so I could balance the bus, but I was dragged to look over the edge at the villages and towns below me.

But today, walking back in my memory, I am reminiscing about when I learned what the Gospel meant in the most deeply theological way…

We were walking through the brothel. Sushmita was smiling a beautiful smile. Short, little, wiry, and fiery lady. She was kind of like a fun little kid, which was beautiful to think about, seeing as though her childhood was raped away by the darkest of men and women.

Photo Taken by Koshyk

Sushmita had been taken into sex slavery while young and was freed eleven years ago, holding on to her life, the scar of abused memories, and HIV. When I met her, it was close to her one year wedding anniversary.

With Sushmita, my friend Lindsay, and my new Scottish friend, Andrew, I continued walking from floor to floor. It was near 4:00PM. The 200+ women in the building were just waking up, eating breakfast, and getting ready to start the night of work.

We spent a while in one room. I was sitting on the chair across from the bed. Nagina, the woman who lived, worked, and raised her premature two-week old daughter in this tiny cell of a room, was sitting across from me. Lindsay and Sushmita were with Nagina and her baby on her on the bed. Andrew was sitting next to me, both of us muttering a long prayer under our breath.

After a long conversation, crying, prayer, and laughter, Sushmita had again taken Nagina to the point of embracing her with the Gospel. That Jesus is the only one who offers freedom from the darkness of self and the world. That He is the only real one, and these idols were just stones and pictures and evil spirits.

It was frighteningly beautiful when, on the third floor of a brothel, in the middle of one of the largest red-light districts in the world, Sushmita, a former sex slave (now a redeemed lover  and worker of Jesus) started singing out loud, in a soft, yet strong voice, inviting Nagina to be trapped in the depths of the Gospel.

And that is when I learned what the Gospel was. Sushmita was singing to my heart just as much as she was singing to Lindsay, Andrew, Nagina, and Nagina ‘s baby girl laying on the bed.

When is the last time you sang the Gospel with your mouth, strength, soul, heart, life, and mind? Have you ever fearlessly sung it hard enough, gently enough, to slice into the hearts of those that need to hear it? Ever?

Do the people you meet know that they can be free, because your heart overflowed with what the Grace-filled King did for you?

Sushmita sang with words I did not understand, through the lens of experiences that I will never know, but I felt crushed, energized, and uplifted by every word.

I am deeply convicted.

Pray for our brothers and sisters in the Gospel all over the world.

Peace.
Ray Fuentes :: @rjfuentes

(These names have been changed for safety reasons.)

Gospel Community Church's First Sunday Gathering in their new location under their new name

In my last semester of Seminary I was invited to work part time with a new church plant in Lynchburg, VA. Since I had never worked on a church staff before I thought it would be a great opportunity to get some experience. I was planning on serving there throughout seminary, then moving on to something different after I graduated.

I’m not qualified, I’ve never been a pastor, I don’t know anything about church planting, and this town already has too many churches.

I quickly found out that God had different plans for my life. Proverbs 16:9 says, “In his heart a man plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps.” About one month after I began working with this church, God changed my plans when the leadership asked me to take over as the lead pastor. Through a series of different circumstances I was left with a huge decision to make, do I trust God and keep this church going or do I throw in the towel? There were a lot of excuses going through my head – I’m not qualified, I’ve never been a pastor, I don’t know anything about church planting, and this town already has too many churches. As I was wrestling with God, He simply would not let me go.

We can make our plans, but the LORD determines our steps.

Proverbs 16:9

God continued to pursue me and give me a peace about what we needed to do as a church. We began to do service projects for our community. We grew closer together as a church and experienced the joy of loving and serving others. In January of 2010 we realized that we needed to clarify our vision, restructure, and strengthen our identity. Through much prayer and guidance we changed our name to Gospel Community Church, moved to a new location to a hurting, downtown area, and basically re-planted our church plant.

Our purpose is not to get bigger, but to get healthier.

Our mission is simple: to be and make disciples of Christ (Matt. 28:19-20). Our vision at GCC is to gather, teach, and empower people to love God, to grow in Christ through community, and to reach out with the love of Christ. We are laboring to build a culture of discipleship and sacrificial service. Through our Saturday Serve ministry we are able to show the love of Christ and strategically share the gospel with our community on a weekly basis.

Andrew and and other GCCers living out the Church's value of sacrificial service.

Our purpose is not to get bigger, but to get healthier. As a church we want to become more like Christ and help others become like Him also. God has built a great leadership team at GCC that is helping us to stay focused on our mission and vision. I’m not a typical church planter. I’ve never taken any church planting classes, I haven’t raised any money, and I really haven’t read many church planting books. As I study God’s word I grow more confident in God’s plan and mission for His church.

Andrew Moroz :: @AndrewMoroz

Gospel Community Church :: @GospelCommunity

www.gospelcc.org

Sorry it’s sideways.

-B

So, have at it! I haven’t spent any time editing it for the purposes of this blog, so it’s a little long and a little academic, which isn’t normal for Gospel Leadership.

My Leadership Style

Brenton Lehman

In my current organization, leadership is a very common buzzword, and has been for the 13 years of its existence. However, in my interactions and conversations with the staff of the organization, I have found that their ideas of leadership vary, as well as what their understanding of their role in leading their portion of the organization. In other words, they talk a good bit about leadership, but what does that look like up and down the line of responsibility? What does effective leadership actually look like for each member of the staff?

There is a significant lack of clarity throughout the leaders in the organization as to what leadership is supposed to look like in their context. This has taught me several very essential themes regarding leadership, which will be discussed in my description of my leadership style and implementation thereof. Of the various styles described in our text, I value and am growing in the philosophical framework of servant leadership and the practical style of transformational leadership, with a strong determination to reach level 5 style of leadership, due to it’s combination of effective managerial competencies, iron-clad will and commitment to the mission, vision values, as well as the preeminence given to humility, which a strong value of mine.

First, I’ll describe how the value of servant-leadership is played out in my leadership style. I value team leadership and flatter organizational structures, as opposed to centralized leadership. Leadership revolves around pulling the best out of people in order to move forward toward a common desired outcome. For those under my leadership, the common desired out come is the vision. The mission drives the process of how we’re going to get there. The manner in which we are going to pursue the mission and vision is determined by our values.

My job is twofold: to leverage those under my leadership in order to synergize their creativity, intellect, and competencies to achieve the mission and vision. Secondly, my role is to equip other leaders to do the work that is necessary in order to achieve organizational goals. I have certain gifts and abilities in which I operate. My gifts revolve around a narrow aspect of the skills and gifts needed ne accomplish the mission and vision. My job is to assemble a team around me who fills in the gaps I cannot fill on my own and to tie our efforts together and create a stronger solution, idea, or strategy. My job as the leader is to synthesize the gifts and talents of my team and to equip them to do their job at the highest level they are capable of.

My values as a leader are humility, empowerment through healthy delegation, encouragement, and effective modeling from the top down. As our book keenly points out, “embedding servant-leadership into an organization’s culture requires actions as well as words” (Kinicki and Kreitner, 2009, p. 366). Though words carry significant weight, if not backed by compelling actions, those words fall dead on the floor. If a leader does not model the type of behavior he seeks to see in those he leads, regardless of style, he will most certainly never see the desired behaviors. This is precisely why I value leading by example. I model for my team how to lead their teams and how to perform their tasks. As I work to equip my team, they learn from me how to equip their teams. As I encourage them, they learn how to encourage their teams. As I make mistakes or come short in my leadership, they can avoid those pitfalls and lead their teams better than I lead them! Eventually, I work myself out of a job as my leaders begin to do what I do as well if not better that me. Then, I’ve reproduced myself anywhere from two to twelve times, and the organization expands in its capacity to go further faster.

Practically, this works itself out in the following scenario. At the beginning of the 2009 fiscal year, I was given the marketing and customer expansion department of our organization. I decided to put together three community involvement projects in order to drive our organization’s identity into the minds of people in our city. In order to pull these three events off, I decided to lead exclusively through a team of 5 key leaders, each responsible for building teams that would accomplish certain elements before, during, during and after the three events. Each event had different teams and different team leaders that reported to me. So, at one brief time of overlap, I was leading 15 direct reports, who were leading teams of people.

I first developed a skeleton strategy and concept for each of the events with one or two other leaders that I wanted in the room. Then, I began to recruit and enlist leaders through whom I could lead. Next, I began to equip and develop these leaders to lead how they would need to. I gave them as much information as they needed and infused as much of myself in them as I could and let it permeate in them in order to reproduce myself in them. Then, I began to back out of the development of the events, as I empowered my leaders to put the muscles and tissues on the skeleton. My role began to be communicator, problem solver, empowerer, and encourager.

My job was to enable my team to do the best they could, while letting them run with the ball, so to speak. I would continue to encourage and refresh my leaders as a I remained informed and future-focused. Then, as the events actually took place, I was present, fulfilling my personal role, while remaining accessible to them if they needed anything. My role was very public in two of the three and basically non-existent in one of the three. All three events were executed with very little problems, and all three achieved the desired results. Finally, I praised and thanked my team personally and publically as often as possible in order to encourage them. I did not have to encourage them to do the same with their teams, as they all understood the value of expressing gratitude, and did so on their own.

For Further Reference:

DePree, M. (1989). Leadership is an Art. New York: Dell Trade.

Kinicki, A. and Kreitner, R. (2009) Organizational Behavior: Key Concepts, Skills & Best Practices (4^th ed.), US: McGraw Hill

Catalyst East 10 was a great experience. If you have not gone, you’ve got to try and attend any one of the three conferences offered by the catalyst team. They have a One Day experience with Andy Stanley and Craig Groeschel that’s coming to Central Virginia in on October 21st. These conferences are held all over the country, so look for one close to you! Their major events are held twice a year, one on the east coast and one on the west. Find one, and go! It’s worth it.

While I was at Catalyst, I was able reconnected with several good friends. One of the key leaders and pastors at Cross Church in NW Arkansas, Shawn Smith, graciously took me to lunch and talked me through some of the changes occurring as a result of the name change. For more info on that, see previous Monday Run Down post. Shawn was very insightful, and I truly appreciated his willingness to talk for a bit.

The third session of Westridge’s School of Church Planting was this past Saturday, and it was so good. Mac Lake and Jim Akins have turned the six-year-old program around, and we as current and prospective church planters were deeply challenged and riveted. Alongside Jim and Mac, Kevin Dunlap and Tony Morgan joined in by leading us in discovering administrative and organizational leadership principles essential for effective church leadership.

Aimee and I saw the film Wall Street yesterday. It was phenomenal. The camera caught such dramatic and breathtaking views of the city of New York. I want to move there and be a stock broker now. Then rule the world as a result of all the money I make. Seriously though, the movie was top notch and very evocative. There were so many Gospel themes throughout, including the theme of redemption. See it if you can!

We attended attended Refuge Church in Marrietta, GA for their inaugural service yesterday morning. Brian Brown, the lead Pastor, endured many difficult struggles all the way up until the final moments before the service. As a result, morale was low and discouragement was plaguing Brian’s heart afterward as we chatted with him. Churches exist to deepen the roots of Christ followers in Gospel community and to reach those far from God with the Gospel. If we aren’t doing that as a church, then what are we doing? What’s the point? Refuge has a long way to go before it is fulfilling these two purposes, and it’s our prayer that the Holy Spirit moves them there soon, or puts them to death slowly so the damage will be minimal.

Friends and family are two of God’s greatest graces and shadows of Himself, and Aimee and I are excited to see some of ours this weekend. P.A.R.T.Y.

-B

2. Aimee’s back after 5 days away. That shouldn’t seem like such a long time, but it felt like eternity. I’m just better with her around. She motivates me to be the man I pray God would make me. He is accomplishing this through her in so many ways. I love marriage, and I highly recommend it. It’s beautiful and from God.

3. I had the opportunity to eat lunch with Andrew and Courtney Pray, new friends from an older time, today. Andrew is Westridge Church’s new Worship Leader/Pastor. He’s doing a great job in his short time here already, and life is slowing down for them here now. God has made some great shifts in their lives in the last 7 years, and this last one has lead them to N.W Atlanta. Aimee and I are looking forward to connecting with them over the next few months.

4. The idea of David Putman’s phrase “downward mobility” has begun to deeply shape my framework for discipleship. This idea is from his book, Breaking the Discipleship Code. It’s a great resource, and one I’m currently digesting. The idea of downward mobility is the process in which a believer slowly moves away from fame, fortune, and personal glory and into the Christ-Life. The way of Jesus is much more concerned with God and others than self-promotion. As an aspiring local church leader, this challenges a lot of what I see modeled in the leaders around me.

I’m feeling pressed to look more at Jesus and follow His lead than look at the leaders around me and mimic them. So many of my leaders are moving into the spotlight and bigger houses and nicer cars than downward and away from those things in order to give more away. There’s nothing wrong with having things, in fact Putman is doing alright for himself at this point. But how are we who have much leveraging what we have for the ministry of reconciliation? What did Jesus have? What did He need? What do I need?

I’m sure this runs much more deep than this, but I’m challenged nonetheless. What is discipleship, bottom line? What does the way of Jesus look like, in 21st century America? Globally? More thoughts on this in the future.

5. Good Friends and loving Family are two of the greatest shadows of God’s affection for us. They point out God’s goodness and grace like nothing else. We’re excited to see ours in about 10 days. Be prepared, Hotlanta. We’re ready to party. Are you?

-B

There is so much more to individual sin issues than the issues themselves. The sins we do are manifestations of the wickedness in the human heart. The old man is never completely gone until we physically die. The new man is fighting for what is whole and beautiful and true, but the old man is a scoundrel, and in survival mode. He doesn’t realize he’s already dead, so he fights and bites and stabs to try and regain his ground. And sometimes he wins. But here’s the good news:

The Bible teaches that God through Jesus has already won, and He has given us practical insights into how to beat sin. James 1:13-15 gives insight into the process of sin, and where to cut it off. I’d like to suggest a translation of that passage, with a few of James’ other ideas thrown in there for fullness’ sake:

No one should ever claim or think that God is tempting them. God is above evil, and is not tempted by the things in this broken world that call out for our affections. Rather, each one of us is tempted to sin by our own wicked hearts. We can’t even blame this on the devil or his demons here. Blame yourself!

We are tempted to sin when we are first lured away from God’s rhythmic perfection and joy, and enticed by something that we desire. That desire was once good and can be good again, but now that desire is so deeply broken. Then the desire turns evil and gives birth to sin. All of us are susceptible to this, so cling to the cross!

When sin sinks it’s teeth in, it grows by sucking all the life, depth, and beauty out of you. When it’s finished, you die. Sin kills, no matter how much pleasure we may know from sin, in the end, it ends up killing us. That’s all it does. Sin kills.

But the Gospel creates new life.

Run from sin! Get the hell away from it! At all costs, flee! Then run to Christ. And pray. Pray like it’s your only hope, because it is! Remember, Christ has already won. There will be battles won and lost on the way, but Christ has won the war. He is your personal victor.

Let me complete this thought by saying this: flee from sin, run to God and dive into squall of His Grace in prayer, and remember Christ’s suffering on the cross. He bore your sin, and dominated it. You are free. Now go, and live.

James::Teacher & Elder, Jerusalem Church.

A.D. 45

So, there’s the win. I know that feeling of desire and when I’m being lured. Do you? Have you figured out what entices you? What lures you? The lust we have for this world can be redeemed and aimed toward God.

The capacity to lust was given by God. He gave it to us so that we would so deeply desire Him and find our satisfaction in him. Find out that place of desire, and then get out! Go to God in prayer, and weep there. Stay there. Call a friend or another loved one and ask them to pray with you. Lean on the community God has called you to.

When you lose, go straight to God. He’s waiting for you. He’ll be waiting for you, no matter how many times you’ve lost. Then go straight to a brother or sister in Christ. Confess it. It will hurt and be awkward, but it will save your life.

Let’s go. Let’s do it. Together.

-B