67…this is the number of boxes that the Coram Deo family put together for Operation Christmas Child! Thanks to everyone who helped put a box together. The love of God is being sent around the world via the shoebox that you filled for a child living in poverty. More than 3,000 boxes are being sent out from Omaha alone this year, and we got to be a part of that. Please don’t forget to pray for your box and the child who will receive it. In the communities where there is a local church, there will be an opportunity provided for the children who receive a box to complete a several-week class to learn about the gospel. Pray that these shoeboxes of gifts will shine brightly with the love of Christ and will open the hearts of the communities in which they are distributed. Thanks again for participating…your special gift could mean a world of difference for someone.
Coram Deo celebrates its fourth birthday this week (we launched the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 2005). As part of our celebration we asked a few of the people who have been around since the beginning to share their reflections. Here’s what they had to say…
Jeff Vanderstelt, pastor of Soma Communities in Tacoma, Washington, and a good friend and mentor to Coram Deo, will be in Omaha next week to lead a training event. Though Coram Deo isn’t hosting this event, we want to help get the word out and invite all of you who might benefit from Jeff’s wisdom.
Jeff is a wonderful brother in the gospel who shares our passion for the gospel and for missional community. When we planted Coram Deo, we thought we’d invented the term missional community. Then we met Jeff and his crew at Soma and realized they’d been doing it longer than we had! The more I’ve gotten to know Jeff, the more amazed I am at the similar influences we share. Wise observers will note many areas of overlap between Soma’s DNA and Coram Deo’s. In fact, CD’s gospel identities and missional rhythms were worked out in dialogue with Soma. Their input was tremendously helpful as we sought to articulate what it truly means to be a gospel-centered missional church.
The training event takes place on Wednesday, December 2, from 10 AM to 4 PM at Prairie Lane Christian Reformed Church. See attached flyer for more. Jeff will also be joining us for the Omaha Church Planters’ Quarterly next Tuesday, so if you’re a planter and you’re reading this, be sure to get on the list for that invitation-only event. (Email us for more info).
As announced this morning, in June 2010 Coram Deo will send Will and Debbie Walker (and a team of others) to plant a new church in Austin, Texas.
Listen to this morning’s sermon on the CD podcast for the full story, and for a theologically grounded description of what church planting is and why we do it.
The audio from last week’s Acts 29 bootcamp in Louisville is up at the Sojourn Church Planting page.
I think this was the best bootcamp Acts 29 has done. The quality and insight of the talks was second to none. Put them on your iPod and allow God to bless you as you think about ministry, mission, and leadership.
This past week Walker and I flew to Philly to meet with the folks at World Harvest Mission, publishers of The Gospel-Centered Life. Though we have worked with them for over 18 months to get GCL to publication, we’d never met their crew face to face.
WHM is the most influential organization you’ve never heard of. It was started in 1983 by Jack Miller, a godly pastor, missionary, and seminary professor who had a deep understanding of the gospel and of sanctification by grace. Miller launched WHM as a missions sending agency. He soon discovered that missionaries needed to deeply understand and apply the gospel to themselves in order to stay healthy and effective in ministry. So he and his colleagues began to develop some study material to facilitate personal gospel renewal. That material, now known as the Sonship curriculum, has influenced thousands of missionaries, pastors, and Christian leaders, including our own pastoral team at Coram Deo. More notably, the greatest modern voice for gospel-centered ministry, Dr. Tim Keller, learned much of his own gospel emphasis from Jack Miller. (You can read more about Miller’s influence on Keller, on my life, and on Coram Deo’s gospel DNA in this post from 2006.) The Gospel-Centered Life is essentially a revision of the concepts in Sonship, which is one reason why the WHM team was eager and willing to help us get it to market.
Here are a number of things we enjoyed about the folks at WHM:
They are hospitable. They treated us well, showing us around downtown Philadelphia and taking us to a number of good restaurants. They are kind and gracious hosts.
They are mission-minded. They have over 170 missionaries around the world. They are not a publishing company or a marketing group; they are missionaries. Their emphasis on gospel renewal – and the materials they publish – are intended to serve the mission.
They are humble. They invited our input into their organization, their strategic plan, and their future. As if we know anything!
They are kingdom-minded. It was clear that their interest in GCL was not driven out of a profit motive for them, but out of a desire to get gospel resources “out there” for the good of God’s kingdom.
They “get” the gospel. Someone at WHM (no one knows quite who) coined the phrase “It’s not enough to know the lyrics of the gospel; you have to hear its music.” What a great metaphor to summarize what we mean when we talk about “getting” the gospel. Christians everywhere know the lyrics. But the folks at WHM hear the music, and long for others to do so as well.
They have gospel influence. Astute observers will see elements of their influence everywhere. Paul Miller, author of the best book on prayer I’ve ever read, is Jack Miller’s son and a former WHM director. Steven Smallman, who wrote the pamphlet “What Is True Conversion” that we use in the Coram Deo membership process, is a former WHM director. Steve Childers, an RTS professor who trains church planters all over the world in gospel-driven church planting, served on the WHM board. Acts 29 pastors Daniel Montgomery, Darrin Patrick, and David Fairchild have been mentored by WHM staffers. The guys at CCEF, who put out great gospel counseling resources, have ties to WHM. The list goes on. Basically, almost anyone who “gets” the gospel and its role in sanctification has been influenced by WHM.
It’s a privilege to count the folks at World Harvest as friends. We pray for their continued influence in the church and in the world for the glory of God.
Finally home from Louisville after a busy but refreshing week of preaching, strategizing, assessing potential church planters, and hanging out with my Acts 29 brothers from across the country.
Those of you who are skeptical, critical, or doubtful about the work of church planting will be encouraged to read what revered Christian leader Al Mohler had to say about the pastors of Acts 29. He doesn’t name us by name, but Scott Thomas does.
Dave Harvey kicked off the Acts 29 bootcamp in Louisville with a great talk on ambition, culled from his forthcoming book Rescuing Ambition (May 2010 from Crossway). Dave is a wise, seasoned pastor who planted a church with the Sovereign Grace network in Philly a couple decades ago. He still serves as an elder after handing the main leadership role over last year to a 28-year-old understudy.
Dave contends that the biblical, God-honoring idea of ambition has been all but lost. In its place we’ve substituted a false definition of humility (humble people shouldn’t have ambitions, aspirations, visions, goals). Some insightful observations from Dave’s talk:
We chase what we love. Our problem is not the pursuit of glory, but the pursuit of the wrong kind of glory.
Ambition begins with perceiving the value of something. We must perceive the value of the glory of God.
After we perceive God’s glory, we must prize it — we prize what we perceive.
One we perceive it, and prize it, we will pursue it.
We need to have the kind of ambition that spurred Paul in Romans 15:19-20 not to sit back and rest on the fact that he had “fulfilled the gospel” from Jerusalem to Illyricum, but spurred him to the continued ambition to “preach the gospel where Christ has not yet been named.”
Listen to or watch the entirety of Dave’s talk at the A29 website. You can also follow live-blogging from the Ambition conference at the Acts 29 website. Tomorrow Kevin Cawley is speaking at 10:30 AM and me at 11:30 AM.
I’d appreciate your prayers as Kendal and I head to Louisville this week. We’re excited about kickin’ it with our good friends at Sojourn Church, who are hosting the last Acts 29 bootcamp of this year. I’ll be speaking on Wednesday morning on “Discipleship and Ambition,” and Kendal will be gleaning worship and liturgy insights from the likes of Sandra McCracken, Kevin Twit (Indelible Grace), Tim Smith (Mars Hill), and Mike Cosper and Neil Robins (Sojourn Music). You can check here and here for more detailed schedule info.
Acts 29 Boot Camps are church planting conferences open to the public that focus on the vision of church planting, the calling of the planter, the mandate to multiply churches, and the theological foundation for gospel-centered church planting. This one is packed out with over 400 registrants, including 30 would-be church planters who are seeking evaluation of their calling and gifting through Acts 29’s rigorous church planter assessment.
Your prayers are appreciated as this opportunity comes at a particularly taxing time for me. Pastors always carry the burdens of their flock as they do the work of counseling and spiritual leadership. But this past month has stretched Walker and I to the breaking point with difficult situation after difficult situation. Confidentiality requires vagueness, but the pain and emotional cost of some of the burdens we’re carrying is great. Pray that in spite of my spiritual weariness, God will allow me the grace of being helpful to some young church planters for the sake of His kingdom and glory.
While in Louisville, we’ll have the privilege of meeting up with former Coram Deo elder JD Senkbile. We’re gathering with some other pastors to strategize together for church planting in southern Africa. Coram Deo sent JD and Michele to South Africa a year ago to serve as church planting liaisons for Acts 29. Since then, God has made it clear to them that the best way to fulfill that vision is to actually plant a church in the city-center of Cape Town. You can read more at the new Vox Church website. And, since JD is cooler than me, you can also follow him on Twitter, which might be a great way to stay up to date and connected with what God is doing in Cape Town.
Of course, the hard work of the week (strategizing, teaching, assessing, and the rigorous preparation for all of these) will be mitigated by fine food, good beer, and the smell of a good pipe, as Acts 29 brothers tend to enjoy feasting together as a celebration of our unity in Christ and a foretaste of the coming kingdom of God.
Thanks for standing behind us in prayer and for owning the vision of church planting. It’s a privilege to represent you and to share the evidences of God’s grace among us these past four years. To God be the glory!
Our partners in the gospel, Core Community Church, posted this great video today casting vision for church planting in Omaha. Check out their new website at corecommunity.org
Jeff Vanderstelt
This past week Walker and I flew to Philly to meet with the folks at World Harvest Mission, publishers of The Gospel-Centered Life. Though we have worked with them for over 18 months to get GCL to publication, we’d never met their crew face to face.
