Mid-Week Memo

Hi Five Oakers,

I have NINE things to share with you:

#1- Great service last weekend. Loved Justin's arrangements of "It is Well With My Soul" and "Happy Day." It really underscored the message of the songs.

#2- I taught on the Lord's Prayer last weekend. We looked at five surprises that can lead to breakthroughs in our prayer lives.

#3- Here are some of the comments from the Communication Cards (and some of my answers):

• Excellent service from start to finish.
• Sometimes I have to stop in awe and amazement that I have the privilege, week after week, of being part of the worship I am involved in.  I am the beneficiary of such great music and phenomenal teaching.  Lord, please don’t let me take this for granted...
• I am just thankful to be here today!  I had some life circumstances which prevented me from being here the last 3 weeks.  Praise Jesus! 
• Loved the hymn!  
• The bass amp was quite loud today.  Loud enough to vibrate the left projector at times and blur the words. [Maybe we need to bolt that projector down better. :-)]
• Henry, you might already know but almost every AA meeting I’ve been to in 8 years ends with the Lord’s Prayer.  It’s always cool. 
• Liked the hymn.  Bass too loud today. [Or maybe we need to lower the bass amp. :-)]
• The moving images give our daughter and my wife headaches.
• Speaking of recitations: Apostle’s Creed, Doxology, too.  This coming from my Baptist background!  Special prayers on Veteran’s/Memorial Days, too. 
• Nice stage design!  I love the new look.
• Thanks for the teaching today – I always wondered why some said a longer version of the Lord’s Prayer.  Loved the “communal” part! 
• Henry – thank you for helping to make prayer seem easier. 
• That gluten-free bread is far from tasty. 
• Can we get the titles of the songs we sing every Sunday? [You can find them right here every week.]
• Thank you, Henry for a new understanding of the Lord’s Prayer! 
• During response, why does the worship leader have the attendees stand and join in the singing at the beginning of the second song?  Attendance at the stations mostly comes to a halt.  This seems to defeat the purpose of praying, reflecting and reading scripture.  Reflecting during just one song is too short for this response time. [I would love to extend the reflective response time by one song. Until then here's the issue as I see it: Most people are done with the stations by that time and singing while sitting down (especially as the tone and tempo is becoming more celebratory) doesn't work well. The tone of the service is shifting and standing is natural at that point. We are looking at how we might get more time for reflection without cutting celebration.]
• Forgiveness is the part I have to work on. 
• Pastor Henry – Would you please put a small summary of the part about Surprise 5 on your blog?  I was frantically taking notes and trying to understand and am confused.  Thanks. [I'll add an addendum at the bottom of this post.]

#4- Soon we'll be sending a survey to your email box about a possible time change for the Saturday night service. The idea is to move the start time to 5:30pm so that people's afternoons aren't interrupted quite as much when the days are longer (while still preserving an evening after the service). Then we''ll move it back to 4:30pm some time in the early fall. But we want to hear from those of you who attend Saturday regularly so that we can make a good decision.

#5- I've been trying to figure out why I've been crashing several times a day. Total fatigue until I sit, close my eyes and recover for a few minutes. Thought it might be that I didn't have enough strenuous exercise in my life. Started doing a spinning class. No help (but loving he class). Made sure I was eating right and getting enough sleep. Not the issue. Then Jim Hill suggested I might be getting too much caffiene. True, I've been drinking a lot more coffee since Christmas (got a bunch of great coffee stuff). Cut back. Fatigue gone!!!

#6- A special thanks from Lois and I to one of our small groups. You know who you are, even if we don't. God bless you for your kindness! We are blessed.

#7- The Treehouse kids put together a bunch of supplies for the Nicaragua family missions trip. Way to go kids!

#8- Got an email from one of our members regarding A Praying Life: "What a great book.  Thanks." My mom is loving it. I'm also hearing from many others. We sold over 50 copies! I hope at least 25 get read. :-)

#9- This is one of the great weekends of the year for our church family--our Feed My Starving Children Event. Think of the all the hungry and hurting children that will enjoy meals this coming year. Thank you all for your generosity anbd your commitment to this work at this event! We got this email from Gold's Gym employee and Five Oaks member Ashley Perry this week:

Hi Deb!  I reserved 40 slots for the Sunday 11:30-1:30 time-slot for the Gold's Gym Team (FMSC).  God has been so awesome and has filled each and every slot. Incredibly, I have 4 more Gold's peeps who would love to join our team.  Are there any slots available during our time frame?  I promised them I would check even though you guys have been very clearly telling us it is FULL!! :)

Don't forget to scroll down to read the addendum if you're interested.

God bless you all,

Pastor Henry

Addendum: Here's the main ideas I was trying to get across in the last point of the message.

• Don't let the brevity of the prayer fool you. It's quite complex. It's incomprehensible the first time you really stop and look at it.
• This prayer begins with requests for God to make things right (to fix this mess) and then it ends with requests to help us live in the mess in the meantime.
• The last three requests don't make sense unless you see that they look to the day when God rules on earth as he does in heaven (i.e., at the return of Christ and the time of the new creation). In this life we will have to work for food, we might go hungry, most of us don't need God to put bread on the table, we are forgiven in spite of the fact that we don't forgive everyone (we are not forgiven as we have forgiven), and we are led into temptation just as Jesus was (Matthew 4:1). But we pray for God to rule and the day to come when we will not have to work for food or no one will ever go hungry again, when we will forgive everyone, and when there will be no temptation.
• Thank God he doesn't answer the prayer to be forgiven as we forgive EVERYONE. But we pray it because we are being transformed into the kind of people who live in grace so deeply that we can and do forgive EVERYONE who is indebted to us.
• Why pray not to be led into temptation when we find temptation everywhere? For the same reason we pray for healing in spite of the fact that God doesn't always provide it and we all eventually die. Sometimes God heals miraculously and sometimes he spares us the ordeal of temptation by miraculously protecting us from it. 
• I didn't say this, but in seminary talk, this is an eschatological prayer.

Mid-Week Memo

Hey Five Oakers,

I have a few things I want to share with you today:

#1- I was in Louisville over the weekend so I missed our worship gathering. I did, however, listen to Tim's message and he did an excellent job kicking off the "A Praying Life" series on Luke 11. Highlights...

• You'd think that with all Jesus' power, all he came to do and his 24/7 broadband connection with God that he would be more efficient with the use of his time.
• You have to put effort into making time for God just like making arrangements for a date with your spouse.
• Start small and keep going. Consistency is crucial.
• Jesus REALLY needed to pray. We REALLY need to pray.
• Some day we will die and we will know reality: we exist now only because God sustains us.
• When we get how dependent we are on God, we will pray.

#2- Thanks for comments on your Communication Cards this weekend. Here are a few:

• "Oh my!  You raised the questions I have about prayer.  Good to know I’m not alone.  Loved your analogies Tim." [No, you are alone. He included that stuff to make YOU feel better. (That comment was written by a personal friend, so don't worry, I can poke her.)]
• "Beautiful harmony by the worship team!  Tim, thanks for the encouragement in my prayer life!"
• "Really appreciated blessing/benediction/challenge at end of service." [You can expect more of this in the future.] 
• "As I speak to individuals in the community I am amazed how many people know about Five Oaks.  They are also considering coming.  That’s great - Praise the Lord!" [People are primed to be invited. We all need to pray about who we can invite for this weekend.]
• "The gluten free communion is terrible!  Please have some regular bread." [We'll consider it, but I'll just say that it gets very confusing and difficult to explain where the glutten free bread is when it's only in one place. There are several other factors in going all gluten free, but we hear you.]
• "Any chance we could have a communion station with cups?  For some like me that might have some germ-phobic tendencies we avoid the dipping because we know fingers have been in the juice." [Don't worry. It will build your resistance to germs. Okay, I'm only kidding. Again, we'll consider it, but just know that it's very hard to provide options (a lot more work for volunteers) and to communicate the options to everyone. But maybe there is a way we haven't yet thought of.]

#3- Justin Schaap and Dan Lukas came with me to Louisville so we could poke around Sojourn Church. Our time there was super impacting. We came away with some concrete ideas on how to bring more Scripture into our services, how to deepen our congregation's understanding of what we are doing whenever we gather for worship and how to deepen our engagement in worship. We are changing the whole way we plan our worship, but the differences may not be evident until mid to late March. I truly believe you will love it, and it will deepen your engagement with God in worship and your response to God and his Word.

#4- Why Sojourn Church? It's the church my son attends, but I've known about it for years through some other Five Oakers that moved there and attended. It's one of the most interesting churches I've ever attended. I hate to even try to convey why, because it's one of those things that has to be experienced. But our primary reason for going is that they have a very clear and thought-out order and form to their worship that in instructive to us and to how we do our Response services. This church also knows how to create great music. They are highly talented. You can check out their music here or on iTunes. You can check out a recap of one of the services from this last weekend here (we attended two of their locations, but not this one). We were very grateful for the time we had over supper with two of their worship leaders, Brooks Ritter and Chad Watson (and one of their musicians). Simply a GREAT trip!

#5- Lots of hipsters in Louisville and at Sojourn so took a few moments to see what it feels like.

It feels good. Also found some time to play Catan.

#6- Who gets a negative message on a fortune cookie? I did yesterday at our staff luncheon. The only one who did in the entire room. Take a look. (Sorry about it being sideways but I can't fix it.)

#7- Don't forget about the Jaime Jorge concert on Friday. Lois and I are making a date night out of it. Dinner then the concert. Interestingly, I heard a Cuban violinist in Miami recently. One of the highlights of our trip to clean out my uncle's house. He and a guitarist were playing beautiful music in front of a hotel on South Beach.

#8- We continue in our prayer series on the weekend as we look at the Lord's Prayer in Luke 11:1-4. Think about how odd this is:

• Jesus regularly spent entire nights in prayer, but when the disciples asked him to teach them to pray, he gave them a four-sentence prayer they could recite.
• When they ask to be taught, he doesn’t give a lecture on prayer. He goes on to tell them some stories about prayer, but his first action is to give them a prayer.
• The prayer can be recited. Jesus says, "When you pray, say, 'Father...'" Interesting that most commentators I read for this message can't see that. These are super-smart scholars, but I'm afraid their bias against recited prayers is too strong to see what the text actually says.
• It also teaches us about the content of prayer. Jesus doesn't say, "Only pray this prayer."
• Strangely, the content of the prayer is a series of requests. There are no direct statements of praise or thanksgiving or even confession. 

I hope you come to learn more. This message builds on last week's. Jesus was totally dependent on the Father. And the prayer he gave us to pray is a prayer communicating our dependence on the same Father: We need his purpose in our lives, his provision and his protection. (Yeah, three P's...it just happened...must be directly from God!).

Can't wait for the weekend! Love you all.

Pastor Henry