We made this video after church last week. it's a countown/teaser for our upcoming series. Freaking awesome! I have a couple of featured moments so wait for it....especially right at the end of the keyboard solo.

If you missed this please let me know - I'm happy to show it again but it auto plays every time someone comes to the site so I've taken it down for now. Thanks!

I found this thought posted by Ben Arment today and it really spoke to me. It reminded me today the living a life totally in the hands of God is probably either going to look excellent to people or idiotic.

Excellence can be obtained if you:

About a week ago I mentioned to Mel that I needed a hair cut and that maybe I'd see if anyone at Paradox could help me out. I was thinking mostly of our budget and getting a deal at the time. She reminded me that maybe finding a not-yet-Christian that I could build relationship with might be a better idea. She was right. I had that kind of relationship with Michelle at HairRazors in London. We spent a lot of time talking about God and our lives together. Funny how quickly I forget those things.

Well I took my wife's advice last night and went to the salon at our local Wal-Mart last night. It's amazing how when you're just looking for opportunities to share the hope you have in Christ that Christ provides those opportunities. Pam was the only employee working last night. When I walked in she was reading the Star and we started talking about Obama's hit list...

Despite a kind of dubious first impression she turned out to be very smart. We talked about the economy (who doesn't here these days?). She pretty quickly told me about her brother who works for GM and is probably getting laid off in October. His family is in debt up to their eyeballs and she's pretty concerned for them. She realizes they've made some bad choices. Pretty standard conversation.

Then she says "You know, he's getting all religious about it too". Seriously? It's like God just dropped the golden egg of witnessing into my lap there as I was getting my hair cut. 

I had a choice in that moment though - am I bold enough to tell her what I'm all about? Do I want to take the time and effort to go deeper with her? Happily the Spirit gave me the wisdom to do so. 

Her story is sad. She grew up as an adopted child. Her mother wants nothing to do with her, she doesn't even know who her biological father is, and her adopted parents took her to a fundamentalist pentecostal church. God was made out to be the cosmic killjoy to her, not a loving father. The church organist abused her and her parents never sought any justice for it. 

She believes in God but her relationship with him is severely fragmented. She wants to go to church but is afraid of taking her son to the same kind of place she grew up in. 

I invited her to Paradox. Would you pray with me for her? Pray that she'd take the step and come out to Paradox tomorrow. Pray that if she doesn't that my ongoing relationship with her would do some good and result in her going to some church and seeking to re-connect with God again.

Pray for me and I pray for you that we'd be ready, like Paul, in and out of Wal-Mart, to give an account for the hope we have. People like Pam need us to love them enough to do so.

Has God been providing similar opportunities for you lately? Mind sharing with us their stories so we can pray for each other and those who God is giving you the honor of witnessing to?

I love the game of hockey. I love playing it (even if I'm not amazing at it), I love following it by being in hockey pools and I love to watch it. Saturday nights are dedicated to Hockey Night in Canada at my house (do you all know how painful it was to give that up for rehearsals at WLA? Just sayin').

Recently I've felt God inspiring me to use that latent time as a ministry opportunity. So I think I'm going to try and experiment and invite some of you at Paradox to try it with me. I want to invite you to come to my place, to bring a friend who doesn't normally attend church or have much contact with religious people with you, and it watch the game with me and my family. The whole point - let's build better relationships between these not-yet-Christians and your Christian friends. Let's allow our love for one another to infect their thinking and put ourselves in regular places where we can have a chance to share the gospel.

Sometimes I think we make living missionally such a big weighty thing. It doesn't have to be. Jesus said "by this they will know you are mine, if you love one another". I honestly believe in the power of a gospel community. I believe simply putting people into the midst of intentional Christ followers and looking for opportunities to engage them in discussions about life and faith will yield amazing results for the kingdom. 

So yeah, if you've got time on Saturday nights and have friends (unlike me) let me know....let's hang out and watch some hockey together. Who knows...maybe the most exciting stuff won't be happening on the ice!

One of the driving motivations behind our church plant is to see culture influenced and changed. So often Christian culture just tries to copy or steal good ideas from the surrounding world and it makes us seem distant, detached and a bit lame. Rather than copying good ideas and making them "Christian" we need to be engaged in being people who generate good ideas, influence those who generate good ideas or learn to leverage good ideas in their current state.

I know my friends over at Xpiritmental feel the same way. I was browsing their blog today and came across this video. It's obvious that social media is changing the way we communicate. It's one of the arenas I think the church need to learn to leverage for the sake of the gospel and it's mission. If you have a few minutes, watch this video and grasp what it means for the world in which you live. What ideas does it generate for living every part of your life on mission with Jesus?

if you missed this and would like a copy plz let me know.

My residecny cirriculum has a topic du mois (topic of the month for those of you not well versed in the language of love) and the topic for this first month is faith. So, as a good student, I'm thinking a lot about faith. A wise former boss taught me that faith in trusting God enough to obey him. So at the root of faith is our ability to trust God. 

The thing I was thinking about this morning was how easily faith comes until you need it. Take for example your friendly nieghborhood church planters. All full of faith they leave home with some support and a free house and an easy trip across the border. Life seems to all be going to plan. Then they find out they're pregnant. What's their first response? Fear. Panic. Anxiety. Faith is seemingly gone in the blink of an eye and you're left to wonder if God really is going to take care of you. 

Paul encourages Timothy in 1 Tim 6:12 to fight the good fight of faith. You know what that says to me? Faith does not always show herself easily. Sometimes you have to fight for faith. Sometimes, trusting God is not some simple magical thing that "just happens" but you need to pick up your bo-staff and whack fear, panic AND anxiety in the butt and only after that fight does faith appear. 

One of my mantras this year has been that I should "work like it depends on me and pray like it depends on God". Perhaps when it comes to faith we need to "fight like it depends on me and pray like it depends on God". 

Can you relate with that? Are there times when life has just been cruising along and the faith quotient was high and then WHAM! You get hit with something unexpected and you needed to fight for your faith? How did you get through that time? What was your weapon (if not a bo-staff) in fighting back for faith?

This weekend I get the opportunity of preaching at Paradox. It's a bit scary and yet I'm really looking forward to it. I'm going to be preaching out of Matthew and using Jesus' ongoing drama with the Pharisees to make this one point: what Jesus wants from you most is a life of mercifully messy relationships. If you wanted to frame that another way, Jesus wants you to invest your life in other people. 

I feel like god has been helping me to own that this week. I've gotten a chance in the last 7 days to hang out with some of my favorite young dudes from WLA. They seem to get me and I think to a degree I get them. I know there were similar relationships I left behind in Calgary.

Those kinds of relationships are the ones I seem to cherish most. Ones where we did life together and made investments in one another. I feel like when I'm with those people our love for one another shows in a very unique way and I can't help but believe that people notice that. 

The more I discover about Jesus the more I believe that his mission is to get us to show his love to others in deep and meaningful ways. That's his master plan. He could have just done it all himself but he didn't. He died to show us love and his call is for us to love and engage and invest on his behalf. As I get ready to ask people to do that this weekend I needed to see how it works out in my own life. If you can I'd encourage you to stop and think about those relationships in your own life. Don't the bring an unspeakable joy into your soul?

 Some of you might be wondering what exactly the residency with ELI looks like. Well, as of last week on aspect of it is a series of exercises, readings and journal entries designed to help us realize what our behavioral patterns are. The hope is that by providing awareness and accountability those of us in residencies will make sure our lives are matching the mission we're being called to.

I'm really impressed with the way they've decided to go about gathering this information on a weekely basis. I've put a screenshot here that shows the layout of the web based system. You can see (or could if you had Superman's eyesight...sorry)  each week has several reading exercises and journaling entries for us to complete. This of course is not the whole program but is a vital part of it.

Please pray that as we make our way through these exercises that God would use them to shape us to be more effective workers towards His mission.

Yesterday I was driving in my car, thinking about the sermon I have to write and deliver next week. It's the first time I'll preach on a Sunday at Paradox and I want it to go well. So I'm driving and crafting words in my mind and putting sentences together and this song comes on my iPod. It's by Downhere and is called "Beggar who Gives Alms". Read these lyrics and let them sink in:

There are no mystic jewels, embedded in my prose,
No moonlit haloed cherubs, perched on my piano,
No lyrics laced with pixie dust, no angels sings along.
I am just a beggar who gives alms

Chorus:
Gold and silver have I none, but such I have give thee,
Borrowed words from the one, who gave the gift to me,
The pearl that I could never buy, this life, this dream, this song,
And I am just a beggar who gives alms

I am not the creator, but a scribe with a pen,
I'm recreating visions, through a cracked and broken lens,
Only one has ever seen the home for which we long,
And I am just a beggar who gives alms.

It just hit me like a tonne of bricks again...I really have nothing special to offer that hasn't first been given by God. I'm nothing. I'm just a beggar. So if I can have one prayer from any of you this week it's that I'd be a faithful scribe who accurately and beautifully recreates the pictures and words God is trying to say to the people at Paradox. I promise to be praying the same for all my other impoversihed friends - that you all would find the richness of life in giving yourself wholly to recreating the beautiful life pictures that God is asking you to this week. We get the honor of doing that in our homes, in our offices, our classrooms and coffeeshops everyday. The more we embrace our role as simple beggars with nothing valuable unless it's used and paired with the power of Jesus the more potently we can live missional lives for Him.