As only Martin Luther could put it…

“We tell our Lord God plainly, that if he will have his church, he must maintain and defend it; for we can neither uphold or protect it. If we could, indeed, we should become the proudest asses under heaven. But God says: I say it, I do it. Only God speaks and does what he pleases.”

- Martin Luther

“Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” – Matthew 6:31-33

If you’ve been paying attention to the blog recently, you know that I and two other guys are preparing to plant a church next year in Morgantown, West Virginia.  That means that me and my family will be relocating sometime between now and then.  All three of us as church planters have made the decision to be bivocational planters, working full-time jobs to provide for our families while only receiving minimal support from the church.  The upside of this is that it will allow our costs to be far below the average church plant .  The downside is that it means a job hunt in a place we don’t live at a time that’s not the best to be job hunting.

Enter the above passage of Scripture.  Over the past few weeks, as I’ve begun to think about job options in Morgantown, I’ve been gripped with a fair amount of fear.  Will I find a job there?  Will it be enough to support my growing family?  Will it allow me the time I’ll need to invest in Frontier?  There are a ton of practical considerations, and the whole prospect is probably more intimidating to me right now than the work of actually planting the church.  Yet there it is, in black and white – Jesus tells me not to worry about the future and provision.  He promises that the Father sees, knows, and is faithful to provide what I need.  It’s such a simple promise, even a child can grasp it.  Still, I’m finding it so hard to simply trust it.

Why is faith this way?  Why, though I’ve been liberated from sin’s power, must the remaining sinfulness of my heart make it so much easier to understand the promises of God than to rest in them?  I need the Holy Spirit at work in my heart, removing my unbelief and planting me in the promises that God has made to me.  I need the humble attitude of the father of the demon-possessed boy in Mark 9, who, when asked by Jesus if he believed that Jesus could heal his son, said, “I believe; help my unbelief!”  God’s word is true; his promises are sure.  They simply remain for me to rest in – and by the good grace of his will, I’ll be resting in Morgantown next year.  If he’s calling me there, he’ll get me there.  The Derek Webb song “Awake My Soul” says it well…

I know no other source or name
Nowhere else can I hide
This grace gives me fear, but this grace calls me near
And all that it asks it provides

In our final introductory video, my co-planter Scott Whitaker discusses our vision for planting Frontier Community Church.

In our second video, Adam Johnson – one of my co-planters – explains a bit about why we’re seeking to plant a church in general and why we’re heading to Morgantown in particular.

This week, as a follow-up to last week’s launch of my church planting team’s website, I’ll be posting a series of videos from the site that explain who we are and what we’re about.  In this first one, I talk a bit about who we are as a team and who we hope to be as a church.

After nine months of prayer, research and planning, today marks the beginning of the next phase of our church planting efforts and the public launch of our support campaign.  Next year, my family and two other families will be moving to Morgantown, West Virginia (home of West Virginia University) to plant what we plan to call Frontier Community Church.  Myself, Scott Whitaker and Adam Johnson will serve jointly as bi-vocational pastor-elders as we seek to preach and live the gospel message in the community and pray that God will draw together and grow a new body of believers.  Right now, we’re seeking affiliation with the Acts 29 Network and the Southern Baptist Convention, but more immediately we’re seeking partners in people just like you and your church.

As we prepare to go, we’re seeking supporters who will help us in our task.  We need people who will faithfully pray for our efforts.  We need individuals and churches who will donate financially to help the church through its early years.  We need people to partner with us on the ground in Morgantown to help make Frontier a reality.  If you’d be interested in supporting us through one of those avenues, or even some other way entirely, you can visit our information and support website.  You can also follow us on Facebook to keep up on the latest information. 

We as a team are incredibly excited to see what God will accomplish in and through us over the coming years.  We hope and pray not only to plant a church, but to plant a church that raises up other church planters to go into the surrounding state, region and throughout the world.  What an amazing privilege – and an awesome responsibility – it is to carry the message of Jesus to a world that desperately needs it.  As we prepare to do exactly that, please join us in our efforts to become a family of Jesus-worshipping missionaries for Morgantown and Appalachia.

This weekend, me, my family, and the rest of our planting team visited Morgantown, WV, where we’re working to plant a church in the next couple years.  It was a very productive and exciting weekend, and we’re working hard toward some big steps in the process.  Stay tuned for updates soon!  Until then, here are a few pictures we took Saturday in the city.

Mark Driscoll’s The Radical Reformission (which I read last month) served as a sort of manifesto of the mission he set out to follow in the planting of Mars Hill Church in Seattle.  If it was the manifesto, then his Confessions of a Reformission Rev. is the story of how that manifesto was worked out culturally, theologically, and ecclesiologically to bring Mars Hill to where it is today.  Radical Reformission was the “why,” Confessions is the “how.”  While both were great reads and valuable tools for anyone who wants to reach their culture with the gospel, Confessions ups the ante in just about every way and is the best work of Driscoll’s I’ve read yet.

Driscoll tells Mars Hill’s story from its humble beginnings in a borrowed youth room to its current explosion in influence and ministry in America’s least-churched city.  Each chapter of the book details a chapter in the church’s history, marked off by the number of people who made it up at the time.  In each, Driscoll details the struggles that marked that particular stage of the planting process, both for he as a pastor and for the church as a whole.  This structure flows really well and does a fantastic job of communicating to the reader how the church got from A to B. 

Since it’s a history of the church, the book is largely a collection of stories, which causes Driscoll the author to shine like I’ve never seen him before.  His blunt honesty, clever wit, and theological fidelity make him perfectly suited for a book like this.  It’s engaging from cover to cover.  He also seems to have matured a bit since the writing of The Radical Reformission, with more humility and introspection coming through in his words.  While there’s not really much in the way of new content for Driscoll from a theological or ecclesiological perspective, the book’s real power lies in the content of the story itself.  As a pastor, and especially now as a prospective church planter, I’ve often looked at large churches and wondered how on earth they became what they are.  Imagining my little congregation becoming a church like that seemed incomprehensible from a practical perspective.  Seeing the story of Mars Hill’s growth – in spite of Driscoll’s freely-admitted errors – hammers home the point that it is truly only God who grows his church.  Driscoll highlights the decisions that were key moments along the way, dispensing valuable wisdom to those who follow in his footsteps, but not for one moment over the course of the book do we lose the unmistakable impression that he realizes he was just riding along on God’s ride.  This combination of practical advice and strong theological perspective makes for a powerful read.  Church planters, pastors, deacons, and anybody with a pulse for the gospel or their church will find this a great resource.  I commend it to you.

I’m not asking that question about your theology.  I’m quite sure that most of you reading this who take the Bible seriously would answer a quick yes.  I’m asking about how your theology practically works itself out into your living.  Twice in the course of the past week, I’ve had church-planting mentors impress upon me and the rest of our team the importance of taking seriously the reality of the spiritual stakes in what we’re about to undertake.  As planters, we will be pushing the gospel forward into places where it hasn’t been and into lives that haven’t believed it.  That will put us on the front lines of the battle, spiritually speaking, and it will draw the attention and retribution of the enemy.  Both our mentors recounted personal stories of suffering and opposition that they and their families encountered along their planting journeys that ranged from sobering to downright creepy.

To say the conversations were much-needed for us all, and for me especially, would be an understatement.  Sure, I know that there are demons, that there is a spiritual reality that goes beyond what we see every day.  I’ve got my theology pretty well in order, thank you very much.  The problem, I realized, is that I just didn’t believe much of it.  On a real, practical, gritty level, I didn’t believe these things I said I believed.  There are a couple reasons for this.  For one, in a way I think seminary intellectual-ed it out of me, largely.  After all, when you’re spending time ruminating on the details of old-earth creationism or the intricacies of eschatological systems, the notion of real angels and demons just seems so infantile, so childish.  The even bigger reason, I think, is that I really don’t want to be one of the crazy charlatans on TV running around bashing people on the foreheads to get the demons out and hopefully procure a nice donation to fund their private jets.  I want to be as far away from that guy as I can get, and so, as is human nature, in the reactionary process I’ve ended up running too far in the opposite direction.   Whatever the reasoning, though, the end result was a giant heap of unbelief I’d weakly attempted to intellectually justify.

Christianity, however, isn’t an intellectual exercise.   This isn’t a game.  The same Jesus who I trust rose from the dead and procured my salvation tended to take demons fairly seriously.  The same Holy Spirit who I praise for convicting my heart of sin inspired Peter to describe Satan as a very real person “roaming around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”  What God convicted me about most deeply this week is that when I disbelieve the reality of the spiritual realm, whether mentally or practically, I am really disbelieving him, since his word speaks plainly about not only the reality of this realm, but the absolute necessity of preparing ourselves to survive what we’ll find there.  As my friend Dan encouraged us last night to be on our guard – while maintaining a healthy and wise discernment – my heart was shaken to the core with the seriousness of the mission God is sending us on.  However, it was made even more resolute in the knowledge that our faith is in a very real God who has made very real promises about the very real power that we have received to overcome darkness through Jesus Christ.  It’s refocused me as a husband, father and pastor.  It’s the best wake-up call I could have had, and I’d ask you to consider if it’s one that perhaps, just perhaps, you might need too.

As I prepare to enter the world of church planting, I’m spending my time reading just about everything of use I can get my hands on.  After tackling Ed Stetzer and J.D. Payne at the end of last year, I’ve moved on to Mark Driscoll for the beginning of 2010.  Last week, I finished his book The Radical Reformission, with Confessions of a Reformission Rev. now on the slate.  If the latter is as good as the former, it’ll be a worthwhile read.

In The Radical Reformission, Driscoll seeks to lay out exactly what kind of challenge awaits the modern church.  The culture has moved on without us, seeing the church as an archaic dinosaur from decades gone by with little to no relevance for today’s world.  Much of that, Driscoll argues, is due to the standoffish way we’ve approached our culture over the years.  The temptation, then, is to plunge headfirst into cultural accommodation to try to win back the people we’ve alienated.  Driscoll, however, suggests that will be an empty pursuit, only resulting in winning people back to a worthless and powerless religion.  He argues that we must take the timeless gospel message and change the way we relate it to the world around us.  We must understand the culture in which we live – whether Seattle, Savannah, or Salt Lake City – and contextualize the message with our words and actions so that it can be best communicated to broken people where they’re at.  In his classic raw, witty style, Driscoll offers a way forward to help Christians do exactly that.

From a prospective church planter’s perspective, this was a fantastic “big picture” book.  Driscoll does a great job of spelling out with clarity and precision the cultural picture that we all have to deal with.  He clearly understands modern-day America and he’s got a heart for the people that inhabit it.  Viewing the book through that lens as a “Diagnosing and Reaching Culture 101” text, Driscoll could hardly have done much better.  Older, more tradition-bound Christians should read it as a wake-up call to the realities waiting just outside their church’s door, and younger, boundary-pushing Christians should read it as a strong reminder that the answer to our cultural disconnect isn’t hip ideas and catchy campaigns but rather the timeless message of the Gospel.  The book’s only real weakness stems from the fact that it’s now six years old.  While the culture hasn’t changed that much, Driscoll has, and there were moments in the book where I think 2010 Mark Driscoll might have said things a bit more carefully than 2004 Mark Driscoll.  Nothing glaring, but I can imagine some spots where perhaps someone unfamiliar with the topics could take things the wrong way, seeing Driscoll as more culturally (rather than theologically) driven than he actually is.  All-in-all, though, this is a fantastic read for church planters, pastors, and people who know other people who need Jesus.  Give it a shot.