One Mommy's Confession: Joy, Failure, and Forgiveness

This Sunday morning, during service, since there were few kids in class, we stayed in "big church" for Worship before going to our classroom for our lesson, which we sometimes do (we're a small church and can be flexible that way). As I stood with my daughter, who is five (for one more week), above the music, the Worship Team, the congregation, and my own hardly-tiny alto voice, I heard my daughter, clearly and distinctly, singing along to "Heart of Worship"...a song I didn't even realize she knew the words to. She sang it in her little slightly off-key childish soprano, and occasionally twirled on the spot with her hands up. 

Suddenly, I found myself moved on a level completely unconnected with the words to the song. I thought about this week, which had been chaotic and had held several disappointments and irritations for me. I thought of the rough mornings when I lost my temper getting ready for school, every time I raised my voice or said something unkind to my daughter (or to my spouse while she was present). I considered each time I reacted instead of acted out of love, and I was heartily ashamed. I found myself, though still singing the words to the song, crying out to God for forgiveness and thanking Him that despite it all, despite my failings and shortcomings as a parent and a person, that my daughter still knew God's Love and His Joy and still had a reason to sing about it, raise her hands, and dance.




I am so thankful that even when I fail, God has placed people like our church family and her school friends and teacher, and positive, Godly influence like our local radio station (KVNE Encouragement FM--which is probably where she learned the words to the song) around her, like backup warriors in the battleground, to guide her when I am a poor example. And I am thankful that like my daughter (who informed me this morning that I am "the best mommy in the world"), I have a God who forgives me every time I mess up.

Thank you, God, for giving me "the best daughter in the world."

Melissa McGinnis is the Children's Ministry Director for LHF.

Just Between You, Me, & God 9/10/2012

We’ve all seen the speaker that walks up to the podium, taps on the microphone until there’s a shrill feedback and then utters those famous words, “Is this thing on?” Communication is vital in our relationships and it is a two way street. There is a speaker and a listener, the one who receives the message. You may be the most eloquent speaker ever but if the microphone is not on or people are not listening then the message becomes worthless. Jesus even had to get people’s attention when speaking as He did in Matthew 11:15, “He who has ears, let him hear.” As a speaker and a listener I understand the difficulty that occurs on both sides of the communication. Face to face communication at least gives you the opportunity to look eye to eye with your receiver. The message of the Gospel is so vital, so important that the speaker, in preparation, often gets more out of the message than the audience because they have often lived the experience, the grace, the mercy, that they are trying to convey to others. With our blog and Facebook it is often hard to determine who your audience is and whether they actually got the message or not. I am told that this blog is received in countries around the world and in multiple sites around this country as well as a small loyal following locally. I am asking all of you now to please listen to my plea. Living Hope Fellowship is an infant when it comes to many churches in that we are only 5 years old. Our congregation is not large with an average worship attendance of only about 35. We have set ourselves up to be an outreach church that opens our doors to those who have been shunned by other churches or that don’t feel they live up to the standards of others or that may feel that they can’t “afford” to go to church. We have a small group of core members who have tried to financially hold the church together. No one on staff receives a salary so our pastors are all bi-vocational. Our main focus has been to provide spiritual and nutritional support to our community but our financial resources are running out. We are behind on our rent and have had to cut back on support venues like the Backpack Program that sent food home with 50 school kids on the weekends that would otherwise have nothing to eat--yes, right here in the good ole USA we have hungry kids. We are still maintaining our food bank on the second Saturday of each month where we currently provide groceries to 30 families each month. Please hear my plea, if you have ever been touched by God through Living Hope Fellowships worship service, outreach programs, blogs, or other posts, I ask that you would consider a gift of any amount to Living Hope Fellowship Gladewater in order that we may continue God’s work in our community. Gifts can be mailed to Living Hope Fellowship - P O Box 788 - Gladewater, Tx. 75647. Matthew 25: 40, “The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’” God bless you for your prayerful support of God’s work, Pastor Dean

Pastor Dean Hanssen is the Ministries & Outreach Pastor for LHF

Review: The Church Unique by Will Mancini

As an author, Will Mancini explores the dynamics of casting vision and moving the church forward through his book, Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement.  He is also a talented church consultant or clarity evangelist, as he describes himself, bringing his valuable knowledge as a pastor and educator into the arena of vision casting for all-sized churches.  His group, Auxano, is named from the Greek word that Luke used to describe early church growth in the Book of Acts.  As a conference speaker, his charisma and knowledge of simplistically sharing the elements of steering the Church in today’s complexities provides the conferencees a blue-print plan of organizing their church.  He is multi-media and social media savvy, having a twitter post and blog spot in order to reach the new emerging leaders of today.  Will Mancini is influenced by his family and the job opportunities as a chemical engineer, pastor, and advertising agent.
  
The thesis of this book is that through a micro-cultural perspective of itself, the Church can identify its uniqueness or missional make-over through living the vision of God that creates a movement-oriented church, a surety to its DNA.  

He begins the book with an introduction where he delivers his story and process that is uniquely his to share.  He entices the reader to dig deeper and search for the elements of their own ministry context and the subsequent definitions of DNA.  He divides the book into four sections, each having specific connotations to visioning.  In his first section, author Mancini writes about recasting vision in respect to being a unique church.  He determines think-holes or barriers to leaderships, debunks the fallacies of strategic planning by allowing creativity to flourish and uses comprehensive historical perspectives to build a leader’s wider perspective of numerical church growth. Lastly, he compares church-goers and their identity with area space of ministry.

The second section of his book offers a clear path to clarifying vision, its benefits and barriers and how it is achieved and communicated.  He offers common-sense direction at pursuing God with an articulate vision or mantra. He stresses the importance of leading a life attuned to God and living out the vision He places upon His children.


Expressing the vision is the basis for the third section of the book.  This is the building-block process of declaring the definition of the vision.  It is the hands-on approach of seeing the vision with new eyes and reacting with certainty the way to embrace the missional mandate the Lord places upon individuals, leaders and churches.   Author Mancini offers a mapping tool to strategize a church’s mandate for vision and development.  In the expression phase, he explains in a further chapter the marks, the “clear ideal and the working definition of a disciple” that are the benchmarks of Christian examination.  [2008:154]   Mancini then furthers his framework analysis by expressing the urgency of communicating properly through being grounded, radical, connectional and daily evolutional.  Lastly in this section, he writes about the need to push forward, keep focus, measure progress, and ask for honest input.


Part four of the book advances the vision through never allowing the status quo to dictate your mission/ministry, keeping the vision aligned and attuned and by transforming hearts in the community in order to create community change.  The author closes by advancing thoughts of uniqueness upon each church, its culture and its community.


Several questions arise as to the author’s subject that is relevant to my context with Living Hope Fellowship: 1) what really is the most important thing to say to a core group to begin to cultivate the desire to communicate the vision of LHF at all levels? 2) After completing the conversation with a core group, how will we remind and disciple people in our church culture context that we are sent from God every day? 


With these questions in mind, I find that I have often dismissed or overlooked the importance of the aspects of vision.  Mancini carefully lays the ground-work for establishing a vision-conscious church.  The framework is intense and must be scaled to meet different church contexts, but there lies the element of uniqueness that he appreciatively communicates and admires. His usage of the Integration Model to justify weaving vision into the life of the church will expose the vision framework for full engagement among the congregation and leaders.


As a new church start-up and being vision-minded from the beginning, many times as a pastor, I have not contextualized the process repeatedly enough to integrate the vision in everything we do as a church.    In this respect, LHF suffers from lapsing or blurred vision, bad communication and from service fatigue.  In LHF’s current context, it is imperative that the vision be recast to develop a new personal formation of ownership, an ownership that leadership, core members and congregational members will buy into that generates an awareness of LHF as a unique church. In my ministry context, LHF is moving forward with some general discipleship standards as to this vision-process by the partnership forged with Senda Beth-el Church, a Spanish-speaking church, in order to develop an interest in starting a new Spanish-speaking church in Gladewater.  This is differentiating LHF among other churches in the community as collaborators in the Kingdom’s economy.  LHF is broadcasting a clear, simple message of how unique we are to the community.


Pastor Ben Bright is the Missional & Administration Pastor for LHF. This analysis was written as part of his studies at Fuller Seminary online.

Review: Johnny Rogers ZuCamp Series

Working in Children’s Ministry, I am always looking for curriculum to engage my audience, which consists of mixed-age children ranging at any point in time from 2- to 10-year-olds. Often I design my own curriculum and “aim for the middle,” where my older kids act as mentors to my younger ones, learning in an applicable way. This works well, but sometimes it would be nice to use something that requires less direct preparation and more spiritual legwork.

Enter Johnny Rogers. Designed for 6-12 years, there are multiple series available. The site where I (or rather, my husband, who loves looking for stuff on the Internet) found it (www.kidmo.com) offers several courses, but allows you to request samples to preview and “try out” with the kids. Forms were filled out and discs were shipped. What I received was Lesson 2 of the ZuCamp series, which teaches about putting God’s Love into action. Lesson 2, “The church cares for people,” focused on teaching kids that God’s Church isn’t in four walls, but within us, and by caring for people, we take the church to them (which lines up directly with our church’s Core Beliefs, Values, and Mission Statement).


I tried it with the kids, and it was a HUGE success! The video lesson DVDs include their own worship songs, which were an especially big hit with the twirling dancer in the class, but also upbeat and engaging enough to encourage our “too big for bouncing” brooding worshipper. The video lesson was quirky, humorous, campy, and cheesy in the very best sense. It was also Scripturally grounded and had a sound point made continuously through the lesson. The characters were over-the-top in a fun way, and the class got a particularly large giggle at the ZuCamp leader trying to resuscitate a rubber chicken. I found it enjoyable to watch and the kids were enthralled. After the lesson, the kids enthusiastically let me know they wanted more like it, and were able to tell me in their own words what they learned, including the youngest class members. To say I am impressed is an understatement, and we will be buying the entire ZuCamp series, and I am looking forward to trying other series as well (a complete listing is available at www.kidmo.com). 


In addition to the great lesson and worship music, the DVD contains “opener” music to be played while kids are coming in, a trivia section, and other reinforcement sections. It is designed to be popped into the DVD player and let run with minimal interference from the teacher. It does have a section menu so that relevant sections can be used, while those that are less applicable can be skipped. There are also resource CD-ROMS that come with the lessons with extra materials, such as worksheets, which are handy, but weren’t directly applicable in my Children’s Church setting because we have such a broad scale of reading levels in our group I generally avoid worksheets in favor of simple hands-on crafts that every child can do with little or no assistance. At $149.00 for the entire series, this is not likely to break most church budgets and can of course be used more than once (it could also be used for a four-day Vacation Bible School with a “camp” theme).


Thank you, Johnny Rogers, for making the lives of Children’s Church and Sunday School teachers just a bit easier!


www.kidmo.com also offers Phil Vischer’s What’s In the Bible? Elementary Program for Churches, and Lil’ K Preschool Program lessons (ages 2-5). I also previewed a Lil’ K video, and while it is not applicable to my Children’s Church situation, it is cute, reminiscent of “Blue’s Clues,” and has a strong Scriptural foundation as well. I have not at this time reviewed the What’s In the Bible? sample disc I received.


Melissa McGinnis is the Children’s Ministry Director for LHF. Her opinions are her own and she was not compensated for this review in any way. 

Just Between You, Me, & God 5/7/2012

Back from a week of vacation and trying hard to get back in the routine of daily life. It’s easy to get pulled off course. Day light savings time sends us in a spin twice a year, long weekends, a holiday in the middle of the week, even an alarm clock that didn’t go off when it should have can disrupt our whole mode of operation. Don’t get me wrong, I like vacations, but I get used to my routine also. It sort of keeps me balanced and going in one direction. You get up at a certain time, there are certain things you do at certain times and in certain places. We sometimes call them habits and if you’re not careful they can become ruts. So what is your daily, weekly, monthly, yearly routine like? Is God a part of your daily routine or do you just work Him in once a week, or maybe every other month or so, or is it just that once a year visit around Christmas or Easter? We had a visitor at our little church on Sunday. I happened to greet him as he came in and I welcomed him and ask if he was new to our community. I got an answer I wasn’t expecting. He had been working down South and was on his way home to a town just North of us but he wasn’t going to make it back in time for worship service at his church. He saw our sign and decided to stop in and share in worship with us on his way home. One of his routines is to worship God on Sunday whether he is at home or away on business, that’s how important God is in his life. Going to church on a regular basis has become less of a routine in more and more lives. There are only so many hours in a day so whenever we delete something from our schedule that gap is quickly filled in with some other activity. In Hebrews 10:25 Paul tells us, “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another---and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” Christianity is all about relationships, with Christ and with each other. There is power in numbers and when we come together with Christ in worship and fellowship, amazing things can happen in people’s lives. Please be faithful in your church attendance and participation and if you are not involved in a church, find one. Zig Ziglar once said, “If you’re letting a hypocrite stand between you and God that just means that the hypocrite is closer to God than you are.” Have a blessed week and bless someone this week with your attendance at church. Thanks for all you do, Pastor Dean

Pastor Dean Hanssen is the Ministries & Outreach Pastor for LHF.

Just Between You, Me, & God 4/9/2012

What a beautiful Easter Sunday in Northeast Texas yesterday. I live near Lake Gladewater and there is a sunrise Easter service at the lake each year and I was there at 7AM. Listening to the singing echoing across the lake, I watched as the sun slowly peeked over the tall pines and the mirror still water began a slow ripple to the shore. I closed my eyes and tried to put myself outside the tomb wondering how I would have reacted. Having heard the Easter story for as long as I can remember it’s hard to imagine the discovery of the empty tomb with fear and disappointment that something had gone terribly wrong as Mary and the others originally had. The turning point for them is the same as it is for all of us, the acceptance of Jesus as He becomes real and alive in our lives. The dark feelings of abandonment, confusion, and hopelessness, following the crucifixion, evaporated as the dew does in the new morning sun. Jesus changes everything. The disciples that cowered behind locked doors became bold and daring, stopping only with their last breath in spreading the truth that they knew deep in their hearts, that Jesus was the Son of God, that he had died on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins, that He had been buried for 3 days, and that He was raised from the dead and would live forever, just as we as believers can. Where did the boldness come from? The conqueror of death told them that He would be with us until the end of the ages. How could they not go forth and share this life changing Good News with everyone in order to offer them what had been freely given to us at such a great cost? So why, after the Easter resurrection, does the Church go back inside and close the doors behind them, afraid to go out into the darkness with the light that was given us? It is time for the Church of Jesus Christ to once again do as we were instructed in Luke 9:23-26 and pick up our crosses and follow Jesus. Jesus walked out of the tomb and too many of us walked in and took up residence there. Just as Jesus arose from the grave, the Church today needs to arise and stand up for the truth of the Gospel no matter what the cost. What have we to fear in this life when we have an eternity with Christ waiting for us? Arise from your slumber, awaken for you sleep, put aside the things of this world and begin your work for the Lord. Romans 13:8-14. I’ll see you in the mission field of our communities. God bless, Pastor Dean.

Just Between You, Me, & God, Good Friday Edition

Jesus died for the whole world. We tend to think of Good Friday and Easter Sunday as traditional Christian holidays. The truth is; what Jesus did on the cross and what happened on the third day when He rose from the grave, was done for all of us. Jesus suffered and died for Muslims, for Buddhist, for Hindus, for atheist and agnostics, for Jews, for believers and nonbelievers alike. Whether you are in Church every time the doors are open or if you’ve never darkened the doors before in your life, Jesus died for you. Whether you’re politically correct or conservatively outspoken, whether you believe in the psychic or the astrological alignments or if you put your faith in the One who created the stars, Jesus died for you. If you think that you can do enough good works in this life to outweigh every sin you’ve ever committed or if you think that your sins are so heinous that you could never receive forgiveness, Jesus died for you. Whether you think that the laws of God are old and outdated or that God has changed His mind about His creation and that He is no longer in control and doesn’t care what we do as long as it feels good, then Jesus died for you. Whether you think that you are too rich or too poor, that you are too young or too old, and whether you just don’t care one way or the other, please know that Jesus died for you. If this just doesn’t make sense to you then you’re not alone. I often don’t understand myself. How can Jesus death forgive my sins, even when I continue to sin? Jesus explains in a conversation with Peter in Matt. 18:21-22, “Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you the truth, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” Here Peter thought he was going above and beyond with forgiving someone 7 times for the same sin against him but Jesus counters with an amazingly higher number. Before you start keeping track of the numbers, keep in mind that Jesus was trying to make the point that no matter how many times we sin, though Him we are forgiven. Remember also that the sin was not just against Peter or ourselves, but against God. We are His creation, so when we sin against each other, we sin against God. Listen again to why Jesus died for all of us. John 3:16-18, “For God so loved the world (that’s all of us) that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” Brackets are my words. Jesus died for you; the choice that remains is your own decision with God to accept Jesus Christ as your Savior. Please let me know how you decided. God’s love to you, Pastor Dean