picnic in the park '12

Picnic in the Park is a wonderful seasonal opportunity to gather and grow a community of hope in Christ right in the middle of Lincoln Park, Downtown Waterloo.   Friends from Harvest Vineyard, Orchard Hill Church, and the surrounding neighborhoods gather to eat, worship, pray, visit, and play!  If you'd like to come take part, PIP is every first and third Sunday of the month, June through October, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.  If you'd like to volunteer to serve, please sign up at www.orchardhillchurch.org.

neighboring

We have a new neighbor named Lance.  He's fresh out of college, a new hire at John Deere, he's from Michigan, and I have a feeling he's going to challenge me in neighboring.  Lance just moved in to the apartment we have on our acreage on Saturday.  He'd been to our area during an internship with Deere, and now he's going to call the Cedar Valley home with his new job.  Lance had dinner with us last night, and this morning, he came with us to church.  On the drive home out to the country, I was sharing various bits of information with him about living out where we live.  As we passed two houses about .5 miles away from our house on our gravel road, I simply said, "We don't really know these two sets of neighbors."  Lance's response?  "Well, I was on my way out to your place a few weeks back when I was checking out the apartment.  I saw the couple that lives here, Kermit and Carol, outside, and I stopped, introduced myself, and ended up riding in the tractor with Kermit for a couple of hours while he was planting in the fields."

Yep, we've lived here 10 years and have never stopped .5 miles away to sit down with Kermit or Carol for two hours.   Lance, God's going to stretch me with you, I can already tell.

remodel

Kudos and credits to my incredibly amazing superfantastic awesome daughter, Sara, for giving a new look and some pizazz to the blog.  I've taken a month off from posting but am ready to begin again...and this time with a new look.  :)

p.s. Sara is sitting next to me dictating the descriptive adjectives for herself, though I won't disagree with any of them. ;)
p.s.s.  Miss Sara has now begun her own blog at www.saraventures.blogspot.com.  Reflections of life and faith from a thirteen year old's perspective.  You'll also notice that Sara has quite the "hair" gift.  I tell her that it paid off that I wasn't a good "hair mom".  It forced her to take matters into her own hands.

CCD in Haiti

I talk a lot about Christian Community Development.  If you watch the 3 minute video above, you'll see a tremendous model of it happening in Haiti!

three questions

Dave Gibbons leaves his listeners with 3 questions (in an interview by Wendy Seidman  in a 2009 supplemental Global Leadership Summit conversation):

"Think about your hand.  What is in your hand?  You have everything you need right now to accomplish God's thing in your city.  Don't compare yourself to the big church or to the small church or to that leader.  What's in your hand?  Really ask God to help you see. What's in your hand may be very uniquely not your strength but maybe again your weakness.  And that leads me to the second question.

When you think about your hand think about the nail print hand of Jesus in the middle.  Think of pain.  So, what is your pain?  Your pain will often guide you better than again your strength.  God allows the pain to dictate who you maybe are feeling compelled to serve.  But also, your pain gives you resonance.  It gives your voice authority cause this world doesn't relate to your accomplishments, to your degrees, to your gifts, but they immediately relate to your pain.  So, your pain is your platform.  It's your voice of authority.  It's your credibility to the world.  Cause remember most of the world lives in suffering.  It's a norm.  They don't live the happy life.

And the last thing is when you think about the hand think about the outskirts of your hand.  Think about the fringe.  Who are the fringe?  Mostly the American movements focus on the masses.  Cause we're thinking we gotta grow our churches..it's a numbers game again.  But I realize Jesus' style, he cared about the masses but he really focused upon the few. And you see intentionality about the fringe, the outsider, the mutants, the misfits, the  freaks of a culture.  The ones who weren't seen- many times they were children and even the women.  So, who are the fringe in your local community? That will guide you in terms of who you actually need to serve and minister.  That doesn't mean we forget about the people like us. But in terms of what we're known for, what's beautiful again, is that we love our neighbor, our neighbor is someone not like us, who's uncomfortable many times to be around, who's maybe even offended us, but as we love these people that's when people realize that's supernatural and that's when they take a closer look at who Jesus is."

Night at the Five Sullivan Brothers Museum

I never reported on the fabulous job the Youth Art Team students did in preparing and presenting "Night at the Five Sullivan Brothers Museum" on March 24.  The students did a fantastic job writing and practicing lines, making the setting and props, and offering what they had to Jesus so that He might multiply their gifts!  The play was presented at Harvest and Orchard Hill and had wonderfully supportive audiences!

Two highlights of many:
 
Albert Sullivan was the only brother who was married with a child when he went off to war.  His granddaughter, Kelly, came to the performance and can be seen in the video with the Youth Art Team.

Also, the students raised close to $500 through admission for the African American Museum in Waterloo.

Read more at www.youthartteam.blogspot.com if interested!

the acceptable year of the Lord

Last week I visited the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Site in Atlanta, GA, and found myself in the back of Ebenezer Baptist Church listening twice through an audio of his sermon "Guidelines for a Constructive Church" .  He started his sermon by mentioning how the Supreme Court, in 1955, stated guidelines that every school district should integrate "with all deliberate speed".  The year he gave his sermon was 1966, and he mentioned that only 5.2 percent of the African-American student population had been integrated in the South over those 11 years. He shared that at the rate integration was happening, it would take another 96 years to integrate the public schools in the South.  As he spoke these words, I watched four different school tours come into the sanctuary.  All were African-American; there was one white female in the whole of these four classes...and we're 46 years past King's sermon.  Hmmm.

After talking about the Supreme Court's guidelines, King also went on to share that Christ's Church has some guidelines, too.  "The guidelines are clearly set forth for us in some words uttered by our Lord and Master as he went in the temple one day, and went back to Isaiah and quoted from him.  And he said, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.' These are the guidelines."

He then went on to give several examples of "the acceptable year of the Lord".  A few:

"The acceptable year of the Lord is that year when men will keep their theology abreast with their technology."

"The acceptable year of the Lord is that year when men will keep their morality abreast with their mentality."

"The acceptable year of the Lord is that year when men will will do unto others as they will have others do unto themselves."

(read sermon for more)
How would you finish the sentence, "The acceptable year of the Lord is the year that..."?