One More Thing

Hi Five Oakers, The weekend is coming and I want to share a few things with you.

The Weekend

He's thirty years old. He's been languishing in prison for years. It's been 13 years since his brothers sold him into slavery. Two years since he was forgotten by someone with the connections to help him. And in one day he gets called up from the prison to the presence of Pharaoh in the palace. And the first words out of Pharaoh's mouth test whether Joseph will trust God in affluence as much as he trusted him in affliction.

It's hard to trust God when things are going badly. Sometimes it's equally hard to trust him when things are going really well. Some people who trust him in their affliction forget him in their affluence. Are you trusting God in your affluence? That's a question you'll take time to explore this weekend.

FYI

Rachel Lu on "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle: Will the Culture War Be Won in the Crib?"

The trends aren’t dramatic, but they are noteworthy nonetheless. Americans are gradually becoming more pro-life. ...Perhaps most remarkable of all, young adults in their twenties and early thirties show surprising sympathy for the pro-life position. This is somewhat unexpected, given that their views are not in general conservative. ...Their ideas about sexual morality are markedly non-traditional. Despite all of that, their attitudes towards abortion are if anything less permissive than those of preceding generations. How do we explain this strange decoupling of views?

One More Thing

One of the emotional high points of the Global Leadership Summit was feature they did on the special needs ministry at Willow. A lot of our own folks don't know about our special needs ministry, The Retreat. One of the mom's with a child in The Retreat recently posted this on Facebook.

"My 5yr old is in The Retreat class. As a part of her bedtime routine, she asks us "What day is it tomorrow?" Every other day of the week, she just accepts our answer and moves to the next part of her routine. But on Saturday nights, when she finds out that tomorrow is Sunday, her face lights up and she jumps up and down saying, "I get to go to church!" ... THANK YOU for that bright moment in our lives every week!"

A big thank you to all of you who serve in that ministry!

One More Thing

Hi Five Oakers, The weekend's coming and there are a few things I want to share with you.

The Weekend

Everybody is greater than somebody. Really!

When we band together as a church to proclaim the gospel and demonstrate it's transforming power and love to each other and to a lost world, we are unstoppable. Jesus said the church, the church, built on the confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, is a prevailing church (Matthew 16:13-18). The gates of hell won't prevail against it.

That's why, when we gather as the church and each person does their part in being the church to each other, the result is incredible. We're going to look at that result this weekend in Acts 6. It might surprise you. You make a difference in a prevailing church.

Next weekend we resume our series, "The Gospel According to Joseph."

FYI

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra on "Introducing the Bible! Now with Less! Delete the chapter and verse numbers. Kill all the notes. Make it one column. Make a million bucks.

If you watch Adam Lewis Greene's Kickstarter campaign page for more than a couple of seconds, you can see the number of pledges pop higher. With two days left, Greene's goal of raising $37,000 to print a Bible "designed and crafted for reading, separated into four elegant volumes, and free of all numbers and notes" has been met several times over. In fact, it just surpassed $1 million.

Yancey Yarrington on Indoctrinate Your Kids? Yes!

Even parents holding a negative view of indoctrination indoctrinate. Suppose a father and mother who pride themselves as intellectual progressives that disdain indoctrination in any form confidently proclaim they’ve withheld themselves from pushing their personal belief systems upon their kids. They chose to instruct their children to discover what’s true for themselves. However, they fail to see this also is indoctrination. They are attempting to deposit into their children the “ideology” or “principle” that truth is relative.

One More Thing

The Leadership Summit is half over as I write this. What a great first day. Here are a few highlights captured by my son Aaron who is working sound for the event here at Five Oaks:

// Bill Hybels: "People join organizations; they leave managers."

// Carly Fiorina: "Leaders never accomplish anything worthwhile when acting on their own."

// Jeffrey Immelt: "A [rising leader] questions authority, drives change."

// Susan Cain: "Restore quiet to your culture."

// Bryan Loritts: "I can't claim to have God's heart and do nothing for the least of these."

// Patrick Lencioni: "I'm tired of hearing about servant leadership; I don't think there's any other kind."