If you desire what is right, then you can have all you want. Matthew 6:33

Take this little quiz (don’t cheat)… Name the five wealthiest people in the world.Name the last five Heisman trophy winners.Name the last five winners of the Miss America pageant.Name ten people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize.Name the last half dozen Academy Award winners for best actor and actress.Name the last decade’s worth of World Series winners.How did you do? The point is, none of us remember the headliners of yesterday.

As we cast this vision we get many questions and many of them I can’t really answer. I have come to the conclusion that is OK. I don’t have to be able to answer every question. Why? That’s a great question. I think it’s OK because at some point in this process we have to yield to faith and trust. We have to believe that God is serious when he makes promises in his scriptures.

As I enter into this new stage of life I am realizing that I am about to embark on something unique. For the first time in my life I am the one who has to slow down and listen to God to determine what the ‘end’ is and how he intends to get us there. I think that he is saying that the ‘end’ is ‘now’. As our family steps out into this adventure of launching a movement we will begin with the end in mind.

I was in a great conversation with some friends the other day talking about The Antioch Movement. One of them asked me, “So you’re the lead church planter?” I responded, “Lead movement launcher.” The next question was money, “Why not a church?” So if you’re planting a church the end goal is to have, well, a church. A building or something, the focus becomes the Sunday gathering. We are going to try and build a movement that is reproducible and sustainable.

This Sunday we shared with our community at Grace Chapel that God is calling us to follow Him to Ypsilanti, MI. It’s been a two year process of God pushing, pulling, and prodding. We have had to look, listen, live, and learn. Ever since we joined the staff of CRU I have been dreaming about a movement in a college town that mobilized the whole community. Now, God has opened the way for us to engage in this dream.

“Hey Dad, why do some kids at school have ashes on their foreheads?” the kids asked. “It’s a Catholic symbol for Ash Wednesday, the day before Lent.” I responded. “What’s Lent?” That’s a great question. I went on to explain what Lent is and the response quite honestly shocked me. “We need to give something up!” Libby, our eight year old daughter gave up chocolate. Little did we know this decision was about to transform a life.

The quote below intrigues me. I think that this kind of “serial disruption” is required by churches. We must keep on “re-planting” ourselves. If we don’t then we become stale and lose our saltiness. The church needs to keep looking to the future and not allowing any sacred cows to keep us from being on mission. emergentfutures: “The lesson here is that a company that disrupts does not necessarily survive. Long term survival depends on the ability for serial disruption.

Hi, my name is Ethan and I learned in school that Jackie Robinson lived his life by nine values and used them to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball. This is a story about a time that I used those same values to overcome a barrier in my life. At my school football got banned because some kids weren’t playing safely. I was very mad. It seemed unjust. I went back to my house that night to talk about it with my family.

One day in the spring of 2002 I returned home from a long day on campus. I was in the midst of my first year as campus director at Illinois State University with CRU. I was tired. In my mailbox was a little package and inside was a book entitled, Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller. I hadn’t ordered this book, it just arrived. The next day I sat outside a coffee shop and read.

simplyorthodox: A servant of the Lord is he who in body stands before men, but in mind knocks at Heaven with prayer.-St. John of the Ladder