Sunday worship celebration is one of the most exciting times in the life of BRCC.  Every element works together to provide an environment in which the Christian can be thankful for what God has done in the previous week and anticipate in hope what God will do in the next week.

Thankfulness and anticipation are two essential parts of worship.  The first reason is that both are active.  Worship can never be passive.  Through the Holy Spirit each believer actively gives their body (including their voice) to celebrating God.  Worship was never intended to be a passive event.  When we are thankful we are actively engaging in acknowledging God's activity in our live over the past week.  So often we ignore the work of God in our lives; we don't even recognize what gifts God has given us.  This often leads to believing that God isn't in their lives or is not concerned about their life - nothing could be further from the truth.  When a Christian is thankful, worship begins to take on its correct contour and shape.  Worship grows out of thankfulness.

Secondly, worship grows out of anticipation.  Anticipation is an acknowledgement that God has done big  things in the past and that He is able and willing to do them in the future.  Anticipation is expecting God to act in our lives.  When we anticipate God working in our lives our we are naturally led to thankfulness for what God will do.  Worship fully takes on its contour and shape with the combination of thankfulness and anticipation.

This Sunday, don't come to worship EXPECTING something to be given to you.  Worship is a celebration when YOU bring something to worship.  The first place to start is being thankful for what God has done and begin to anticipate what God will do in the coming weeks!

We all deal with failure, practically everyday. Sometimes when we do experience failure we question our faith and even God's love for us.  HERE is a great article on what to do when you fail.

Biblical literacy is essential in today's Christian life.  Sadly, we are failing the test of Biblical literacy on a day to day basis.  So HERE is a link to a layout of the parables of Jesus, showing which Gospels each shows up in and a reference verse for each parable.

This week starts a new discipline for me - posting my sermon slides online.  These are the sermon slides that I use on Sunday morning.  Some of them will have narratives with them, but some of them will just be the slides.  These are for people who miss worship on Sunday morning  and those who want a refresher.  

Enjoy and don't hesitate to contact me with any questions!

In addition to some of my ministry and personal posts, I'm going to be starting a "A la carte" post; hopefully doing them three times a week.  These posts will be dedicated to bringing to you some of the ministry and spiritual (sometimes academic) resources that I am using or have discovered.  I'm hoping this will help my readers in their ministry or personal life.  If you have requests as to what you would want to see here, just leave a comment here or contact me using twitter, email, or facebook - links are on  my home page.  

Here is a couple for today - 

I've been doing triathlons for 5 years and this past September I decided to do my first Ironman.  I picked Wisconsin because I have an affinity for the midwest and because it is supposed to be the most well supported race (except Kona) among all the Ironman races.  It was also ranked the second hardest Ironman race in the world (including Kona).  

There is so much to write that I think I won't write anything.  I have posted some pics to give you an idea of what it looked like and all we experienced.  Enjoy

Today our church is having our 24 Hours of Prayer.  How it works is that each hour in the day (24 in total) is chosen by a regular attender at BRCC.  During their hour they spend time praying for specific things in the church - ministries, people, vision, etc.  They also spend time reading the Bible and meditating on Scripture.  It's a great prayer event that really does a good job of bringing everyone together to pray for a common goal.

During my hour of prayer and reflection I read John 1.  The section that I focused in on the most was vs.43-51, Jesus' interaction with Philip and Nathanael.  Nathanael, first unconvinced of Jesus' divinity despite Philip's words, eventually confesses Jesus as the Son of God.  This was primarily because of Jesus' vision of Nathanael under the fig tree - exactly where Nathanael had been.  

Jesus follows up this interaction with this in v.s 50 "You believe because I saw you under a fig tree.  You will see greater things than that."  In vs. 51 Jesus gives Nathanael a few of the greater things that he will see.  Nathanael, perhaps, was pretty amazed at the words of his newly confessed Son of God friend.

Now, verse 50 started me wondering and thinking.  What would it mean to see even greater things after one confesses Christ as Lord?  There is no reason to see v.51 as an exhaustive, but short list.  Nathanael would have gone on to see Jesus heal, turn water to wine, etc - those would fall in the category of "greater things."  Is it possible that we (meaning the church) is seeing greater things or can still claim that promise in v. 50?  Are we just ignoring the great things or just mistaking them for something else?  How do we translate v. 50 for us today?

As a pastor I have many goals - growing the church being one of them.  I would like my church to grow in quantity (evangelism) and quality (spiritual disciplines/fruits of the Spirit).  Is it possible that I can expect "greater things?"  Will the Spirit, through our church's prayer and devotion, begin to do a greater thing in our community.

My answer is yes, but not for the reasons I just mentioned.  Our devotion (or late thereof) acts as a work - we can't earn God's love nor earn more of God's Spirit in our lives.  My answer is yes, not based on our devotion, but on God's Promise.  God promises to send His Spirit to us. Through this promise the Spirit will help the church grow by convicting hearts as to the truth of God and their own rejection of God.  God's faithfulness to us (like He was to Israel) guarantees that we will see greater things, but in quality and in quantity.  It may not always come in the form that we want or expect, but the promise is fulfilled day by day.

We can, like Nathanael, expect greater things from God.

I've read a lot of leadership stuff over the years, both church and business leadership stuff: Harvard Business Review, John Maxwell, Rick Warren - you name it, I've read it.  The truth is that I have read so much stuff that I have forgotten more than I have remembered.  There is one thing that has stuck with me over the past 15 years of ministry - be intentional in everything that you do; what you are intentional about will happen, what you hope will happen will not.

My thoughts about the church have been revolving around this idea.  At BRCC we spend time talking about the vision of reaching and growing people and "buying into the vision of the church."  We even have the vision statement of the church right on the wall of our stairwell leading up to the sanctuary.  The vision of the church is important because it determines the direction of the church.  It eliminates thing that you shouldn't do while helping you decide what you should do.  Just because a person or organization has a vision, that doesn't mean it automatically happens; one must set GOALS that help that vision to come to fruition

The reality is that we have not done a great job at BrookRidge in the past few years at setting goals within our vision.  We have allowed our church community to  kind of waver about in our events and our decisions.  There have been a lot of great things that we have done in the past few years.  We have really focused on fellowship and building relationship in our community.  We have seen our small group ministry grow as a result of this great fellowship.  We have had some great outreach events, like our Christmas and Easter outreach.  When we made the decision to go to one service the purpose was to create more and better fellowship and build momentum for great worship each Sunday.  I think we are well on our way (in 10 months) to accomplishing this.

Here is what we are not doing well - hard core reaching out to the community in a strategic way.  I have felt that our love for those in the community and those who have yet to feel the love of Jesus waver.  I'm afraid we might have replaced our desire to reach others with our desire to build internal community; to build community is great, but it needs to be done in partnership with evangelism - sharing Jesus in our own lives and through church community events.  As pastor I want us to have a equal emphasis on evangelism as we do on building community; right now I think we are a little off.