Some of the guys from our community group decided to get together for a poker night at one of the guys homes. We all had a great time... munching on snacks & pretending like we knew what we were doing! :-) It was fun. Anytime anyone lost all their chips, we'd just grab some more from the extras we had (several people brought their own sets for us to use). By the time the end of the night rolled around I think we had too many chips on the table - it was taking a good five minutes between hands for everyone to stack up their chips, count how much they had, etc.!

I've posted an album on our GBC Young Adults Flickr account. You can check out the pictures from the evening here: Guys Poker Night - June 27, 2006. 

Ask anyone you meet on the street, "Would you say you were spiritual? Is spirituality something that is important to you?" and most are likely to say "Yes."

In a research survey conducted by Christian pollster George Barna in March of this year he found...

Most American adults consider themselves to be not merely “religious,” but “deeply spiritual.” That’s the claim of 62% of all adults interviewed in the annual religious tracking survey conducted by The Barna Group, of Ventura, California. However, when the religious and spiritual commitments of Americans were studied more closely, those outcomes question the meaning of being “deeply spiritual.” Americans Reveal Their Top Priority in Life, March 14, 2006

The problem is not in people being spiritual - most consider themselves to be just that. The issue is that their spirituality doesn't impact or affect the life they live or the choices they make.

For the next month we will be looking deeper at what happens "When Faith & Life Collide." Each week we will be examining what faith looks like when it intersects with our life choices, our money, our sex life, & more. Join us for this new series beginning Sunday, July 2. 

Well, tomorrow marks the end of our Unlocking the Da Vinci Code series. I think I can honestly say that I've gotten a lot more out of this series than I thought I would when it all began. Of course they say the teacher always gets more out of it than the class just because of the preparation involved. Hopefully the rest of you haven't be too bored (or overwhelmed) with everything we've covered over the last four weeks.

I'd again encourage any of you who haven't read the book or seen the movie to do one or the other. If you're an avid reader I'd definitely recommend the book over the movie, but the important thing is to have some context to have spiritual conversations with people. Just because you've got a head full of facts & knowledge, talking with someone else just doesn't carry as much weight as if you have experienced it first hand. This is especially true because of the wealth of reaction & material out there refuting what The Da Vinci Code contends. People, I beileve, are going to be even more skeptical if you're coming at them as someone who is out to prove them wrong rather than to have a good conversation and allow the Holy Spirit to work (instead of you).

All of the sessions & class notes from each of the four sessions will continue to be available here, for those who want to refer back to it later on: http://feeds.feedburner.com/gbcpodcasts/davinci

It's all about the water... the kids have been like ducks ever since we got the pool up at the end of May. Josiah & Micah played in the pool with some neighborhood friends for 5 hours last Saturday!



A couple of weeks ago, while Andrea's mom, Nancy, was visiting, we took a day trip to Huntsville, Alabama, to see her Uncle & cousins. They had a water sprinkler toy set-up for the kids to play in & they had a blast! Emerie especially. She kept running over, barely standing in the water (it was cold, apparantely), sometimes even dipping her head in the water a bit (like in the video to the left) and then running back out laughing all the way. :-)

George Barna, a Christian pollster who has been gauging the spiritual lives of churches, families & individuals for the past couple of decades, has just release a new study on the growth of the house church movement within the United States. He finds...

The new study, based on interviews with more than five thousand randomly selected adults from across the nation, found that 9% of adults attend a house church during a typical week. That is remarkable growth in the past decade, shooting up from just 1% to near double-digit involvement. In total, one out of five adults attends a house church at least once a month.

Projecting these figures to the national population gives an estimate of more than 70 million adults who have at least experimented with house church participation. In a typical week roughly 20 million adults attend a house church gathering. Over the course of a typical month, that number doubles to about 43 million adults.

I think these findings speak volumes, not so much about church patterns, or people's structure/method preferences for how church is done, but really about people's desire for relationships (and beyond that to their desire for spiritual relationships). Some, I'm sure, have jumped aboard the house church bandwagon, so to speak, because they have something against the 'conventional' church. But I think it goes beyond that.

Continue reading "House Churches on the Rise" »

There is nothing better for man than to eat, drink, and to enjoy his work. I have seen that even this is from God’s hand. For who can eat and who can enjoy life apart from Him? Ecclesiastes 2:24-25, HCSB

Man, life is good! I just celebrated my 33rd birthday earlier this week. It was something that I honestly had trouble even remembering was about to happen. My lovely wife kept asking me what I wanted to do for my birthday - whether I wanted to go out, go to a movie, eat a certain meal, etc. I told her I'd like to just hang out with my family - so that's what we did. We had some great German food that my cooked, played some games with the kids and just spent time together. Saying that I enjoyed the evening is an understatement.

Continue reading "To Enjoy Life…" »

Okay, so I spent a couple of hours today again preparing for The Da Vinci Code series we're doing on Sunday mornings with the young adults. By the end of it all I was left with still more to do and a growing sense of stress. The material is great - it's something that I think speaks into our lives and is really interesting, at least to me. The problem is that there is just no way we can cover all the bases in a little over an hour each week. Especially this week. We're looking at Gnosticism and the Gnostic Gospels, why certain 'books/gospels' werent' included in our Bibles, etc. I could literally spend the entire time lecturing and dispensing a fair amount of information, but that's not why we're doing this series. I want our time to be engaging, yes, but I want it to be life-altering because we have opened God's Word and poured ourselves into it.

It's a bit strange to be stressed like this, I have to admit - at least when it comes to teaching. I've been doing this long enough and have written enough that most of the time it comes fairly easily. Even when it doesn't come as easy it is still enjoyable to me, because this is one of the areas that I know God has equipped me. The stress doesn't come as much from wondering what I'm going to say. It comes more from the overwhelming sense of responsibility I feel covering this kind of material. It really takes more time researching & preparing than a normal series because you're talking about theology, about history, about the roots, in many ways, of our Christian faith - and I just want to make sure I get it right.  

Continue reading "Overwhelming Responsibility" »

Summer has officially hit, I guess. We've scaled back our community group for the summer - meeting about every other week instead of weekly as we had been. Last night was the first time we had all been together in a couple of weeks. We opted to put the Bible down (dare I say!) and play for a night. The game of the night was Bunco - a highly contagious dice game. Actually, Andrea & I were talking after everyone left at the end of the night & we agreed it was the perfect 'get to know other people' game because it forces you to be partners with so many different people throughout the game. It was good to have some new faces in the group - something I know we'll be seeing more and more throughout the summer & into the fall (especially after we launch our new groups in September).

Being together with friends and enjoying one another really brought me back to my heartfelt conviction that this is really what it is all about: authentic community. No matter what we do, no matter what the young adults ministry at GBC looks like in the years to come - community will still be the cornerstone of all we do. 

Continue reading "Authentic Community" »