Missions

Why Do We Give? *

April 12, 2016 by Patricia Leave a Comment

The Christian Wallet: Why Do We Give? *
Sycamore Creek Church
January 17/18, 2016
Tom Arthur

Peace friends! And happy New Year.

What are the life skills you’re training in your children or grandchildren? There are certain spiritual practices we’re training our own children in. We do Bible reading and prayer each night before bed. We serve together as a family. We came to the S Penn Venue together in December to clean the building. We’re training our children to worship weekly, even when we go on vacation. We went with Sarah’s parents to their church when we were away after Christmas. We are training our children in confession and forgiveness. When one does wrong to someone, we ask him to ask the one he wronged to forgive him. When I do something wrong to one of my boys, I confess the wrong and ask for forgiveness. We also are beginning to train our oldest boy about money. He has three jars on the kitchen counter: Give, Save, and Spend. He gets three quarters each week and one quarter goes in each jar. He brings the money in the give jar into the church to put in the offering. We are training our children to give their money away. But why? That’s the question I want to deal with today. Why do we give? I want to give you three reasons why you’d give your money back to God through the church.

To keep close to the heart of God
When you give your money to the church you keep your heart, the deep place in yourself, close to God. Jesus teaches:

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
~Matthew 6:21 NRSV

Make sure you notice the direction here. Your heart follows your money. Not the other way around. The decisions you make about how you spend your money shape the form of your heart.

Last year Sarah and I sold our house in Petoskey. We had owned that house for about fifteen years. We put a lot of time and money into that house. When we sold it I was curious how much money we had dumped into the house. So I figured an average amount for our mortgage payment, taxes, utilities, and repairs and added it all up. The total amount we spent on that house came to about $170,000 over fifteen years! $170,000! $170,000 is enough to anchor your heart anywhere. And while we had the house, our hearts were in Petoskey. But when we sold the house it freed up our hearts to really reside and root in Lansing.

Forbes provides a list of the top five things you’ll spend your money on over your lifetime. These five things will require about half of all the money you make:

House (30%)
Car/Travel (10%)
Kids ($225,000),
College (10%)
Retirement (10-15% = Salary x 25)

Based on this list, our hearts will be in our homes, our cars, our kids, our education, and our retirement. That pretty well sums up what most of us spend our lives pursuing. But what really struck me about this list was that God didn’t even make a showing. Is God in your top five?

You give generously to the church to keep your heart close to God!

Paul, the first missionary of the church said:

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
~Galatians 5:22:23 NRSV

Many of you know that verse not with “generosity” in it but “goodness.” The Greek work implies goodness through being generous to those around you. When God’s Spirit is at work in you, generosity becomes a mark of your character. You do good generously, including with your money.

So is God not interested in my house, car, kids, education, and retirement? Not exactly. God’s vision for the world is a world of “Shalom.” Shalom is Hebrew for “peace”, but shalom is much more than the absence of war. Shalom is peace, well-being, and prosperity all around for everyone. Shalom includes justice to those who are without justice. There is no peace without justice. There is no shalom without justice.

Shalom pops up in one of the most famous blessings in the Old Testament, the Aaronic Blessing. Aaron was Moses brother and the first priest of the tabernacle. This blessing of his is recorded in the book of Numbers:

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace [shalom].
~Numbers 6:24-26 NRSV

God is definitely interested in shalom, well-being, peace, prosperity for all of God’s creation, but God’s primary mission is not to make you safe, comfortable, and entertained. God’s primary mission in Jesus is elsewhere…

To meet the needs of the poor and poor in spirit
Our world is broken and doesn’t have shalom, so Jesus came into the world to seek out especially those who are lacking peace. Jesus describes his own mission saying:

The Son of Man came to seek and save those who are lost.
~Luke 19:10 NLT

Your heart is with God when you invest in Jesus’ mission to seek and save those who are lost!

You give generously to the church to seek and save the lost!

Who are the lost? The lost are not always just the poor. In fact, when you read this verse in its context you find that it’s actually talking about the rich. The rich are lost!

Jesus entered Jericho and made his way through the town. There was a man there named Zacchaeus. He was the chief tax collector in the region, and he had become very rich. He tried to get a look at Jesus, but he was too short to see over the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree beside the road, for Jesus was going to pass that way.

When Jesus came by, he looked up at Zacchaeus and called him by name. “Zacchaeus!” he said. “Quick, come down! I must be a guest in your home today.”

Zacchaeus quickly climbed down and took Jesus to his house in great excitement and joy. But the people were displeased. “He has gone to be the guest of a notorious sinner,” they grumbled.

Meanwhile, Zacchaeus stood before the Lord and said, “I will give half my wealth to the poor, Lord, and if I have cheated people on their taxes, I will give them back four times as much!”

Jesus responded, “Salvation has come to this home today, for this man has shown himself to be a true son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and save those who are lost.”
~Luke 19:1-10

So what’s going on here? First, Zacchaeus is “very rich.” He was very rich because he was good at extorting money out of the poor in the form of taxes. He was so good at it that he was notorious, and the people couldn’t believe that Jesus would spend any time with such a notorious enemy of the poor. But Jesus had a different mission. His mission was to seek out people who were lost, whether rich or poor. And Zacchaeus was lost in his riches. But when he encounters Jesus his life is transformed and he begins to put his money in Jesus’ mission. He reconciles his past wrongs and gives away half of his wealth to the poor. Jesus’ purpose is not so much to get us into “heaven” but to get “heaven” into us.

Heaven in us is God’s mission in Jesus in our hearts. We give generously to get God’s mission in our hearts.

The lost are the spiritual and economically lost. Matthew records Jesus saying:

Blessed are the “poor in spirit.”
~Matthew 5:3 NRSV

Luke records Jesus saying:

Blessed are the “poor.”
~Luke 6:20 NRSV

Sycamore Creek Church has a vision for seven satellites in seven venues on seven days of the week. It’s our 7-7-7 Vision. Jackpot! We’re planning on launching a new venue in 2016. A “satellite” campus is a mission to seek out the lost. We’re not content to wait for the lost to come to us. In fact, the lost can’t find us. If you’re lost, you can’t find your way. That’s what it means to be lost. If you’re going to find the lost you have to send out a search party. We’re going to go out and seek the lost with each new venue we launch. Blessed are the poor in spirit.

You give generously to the church because the church is the primary community that is all about Jesus’ mission!

Blessed are the poor.

You give generously to sustain a community that meets the needs economic needs of the poor in its community

John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, preached and prepared the way for Jesus. He taught:

Prove by the way you live that you have repented of your sins and turned to God…

The crowds asked, “What should we do?”

John replied, “If you have two shirts, give one to the poor. If you have food, share it with those who are hungry.”
~Luke 3:8, 10-11

This theme of providing for the poor runs throughout all of scripture. We read in Leviticus:

When you harvest the crops of your land, do not harvest the grain along the edges of your fields, and do not pick up what the harvesters drop. Leave it for the poor and the foreigners living among you. I am the Lord your God.
~Leviticus 23:22 NLT

God was setting up a system by which the poor would be provided for. No one would be left out of shalom. God was showing compassion. The Hebrew word for “compassion” is very closely related to the Hebrew word for “womb” such that God’s compassion could be considered God’s “womb love.” God has love for all of us in the way that a mother has love for her children. And more…

Can a woman forget her nursing child,
or show no compassion for the child of her womb?
Even these may forget,
yet I will not forget you.
~Isaiah 49:15 NRSV

What does a mother want for her child? I asked my mother friends on Facebook what they wanted for their children. I think the answers sum up what shalom looks like:

Reliable home
Healthy food
Decent clothing
Thriving education
Safe place to grow up
Good friends
Love for God

How can a follower of Jesus provide reliable houses, healthy food, decent clothing, a thriving education, a safe place to grow up, good friends, and love for God to all those who are poor and poor in spirit? The answer is that a follower of Jesus can’t provide these things…alone. But we can do it together.

To focus and multiply your impact

We give generously to the church to focus and multiply our impact!

We do things together that we can’t do alone. Jesus takes what we have and multiplies it. There’s this moment in Jesus’ ministry when he’s been teaching a huge crowd out in the countryside, and the disciples begin to wonder how all these people are going to be fed.

That evening the disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away so they can go to the villages and buy food for themselves.”

But Jesus said, “That isn’t necessary—you feed them.”

“But we have only five loaves of bread and two fish!” they answered.

“Bring them here,” he said.
~Matthew 14:15-18 NLT

Jesus takes those five loaves and two fish and multiplies them to feed thousands of people. Jesus takes what we have and makes it more. Jesus multiplies our impact. We saw this happen at Christmas this year. I put the challenge before you, as I do every Christmas, to give away as much as you spend on yourselves. I thought I was stretching you to set a goal of $12,000. Our previous record was $11,225 in 2013. You responded to Jesus’ birthday at Christmas by giving $16,075.43! Over $16,000! Wow. Do any of you have a spare $16,000 laying around to meet local and world needs? Some of you may, but most of you don’t. But together, $50 here, $100 there, we’ll give away over $16,000!

You give generously to SCC because we’re a community that

For fifteen years has been helping provide physical “shalom” in Nicaragua by sending medical teams twice a year to provide medical clinics;
Fixed up a house in the Baker Donora Neighborhood adding shalom to our neighborhood;
Helps pay for rent, utilities, food, gas, etc.;
Regularly gives thousands and thousands of items to Compassion Closet personal needs bank;
Paints the local school to help provide a beautiful place to learn for our children in Lansing;
Provides mental health for our community through a Christian counselor working out of our building and funds for those who don’t have insurance or can’t afford her;
Provides a place to build spiritual friendships in a newly remodeled Connection Café;
Partners with each family to nurture love for God in our children through Sycamore Creek Kids and Teen Fuel.

When you give generously to the church, you’re focusing and multiplying your giving!

So what’s your plan to give generously in 2016? I want to suggest four steps for beginning to put your heart where God’s heart is:

Give for the first time
Some of you are ready to give for the first time today. That’s the first step. In 2015 we had 58 first-time givers and a total of 168 givers. Are you ready to give for the first time?

Give regularly
Some of you are ready to take the step to give regularly. You were a first-time giver in 2015 and maybe you gave sporadically, but in 2016 you’re ready to make a plan to give regularly each time you get paid. Sarah and I give 10% out of each paycheck. Our giving happens twice a month because I get paid twice a month. Some of you are ready to make that step and give regularly. In 2015, we received $252,596.17 total amount of giving from people who gave for the first time, sporadically, and regularly.

Give automatically
Some of you are ready to take the step of giving automatically. We live in a different world these days. I’ve lived in Lansing for six years and I just had to reorder checks for the first time. We pay all our bills electronically. In fact, most bills get paid automatically with little to no action on my part. Why would my giving to the church be any different? Most people who give automatically do so through EFT (Electronic Fund Transfer). In fact, in 2015 more was given to SCC through EFT than through the weekly offering. We received $120,926.47 in EFT. Some of you are ready to give automatically so you give faithfully whether you’re in town or on vacation, whether you remember to bring your check book or you forget.

Give proportionally (Tithe Challenge)
Some of you in 2106 are ready to give proportionally. The Bible talks about percentages of our income, specifically 10%. 10% or a tithe is the biblical minimum for giving back to God. God lets you keep 90%! That’s a pretty sweet deal. Giving proportionally means when you make more you give more. When you make less you give less. Maybe you’re buried in debt and your focus for 2016 needs to remain on paying off that debt. You can’t give 10%. That’s fine. What’s your plan to get to 10% or more? Do you give 1%? Then in 2016 step up to 2%. Or maybe you’re at 10% already, but God has blessed you with more than you need. Maybe for you giving proportionally means extravagant giving of 15% or 20%. There are people in our church who give those kind of percentages, and they’re not always the ones who are making the most. Whatever your income, some of you are ready to step up to proportional giving in 2016. I want to propose a challenge for you. Let’s call it the tithe challenge. If you’ve never tithed and you’re worried about whether you can swing it or not, make the commitment to tithe for the first time for the next three months. See what God does and how God provides. If it doesn’t work at the end of those three months, we’ll give your money back.

Why take one of these four steps? Because when you give generously to the church, you keep your heart close to God. Because when you give generously to the church you join Jesus’ mission of meeting the needs of the spiritually and financially poor. Because when you give generously to the church, you focus and multiply your impact through Jesus’ mission.

May those reasons be true in the life of Sycamore Creek Church. Dear friends, may…

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace [shalom].
~Numbers 6:24-26 NRSV

* This sermon is based on a sermon first preached by Mike Slaughter

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: giving, Missions, partners, tithe

We’ve been given a house!

May 5, 2015 by Tom Leave a Comment

Dear Friends,

I’m excited to share this surprise announcement with you: Our church was given a house by Wells Fargo! Not only that, but they gave us $15,000 cash to remodel it. OK, if you’re like we were, you’re thinking this sounds like a scam. And it did. But we followed it through, and it turns out that Wells Fargo has a community development department that gives a certain number of foreclosed homes to local non-profits to work on and do with as they see fit. Wow. Thank you God!

So we’ve been putting off this announcement because we wanted to see the deed and remodeling cash in our hands, and because we have a lot of other things going on already around here with our S. Penn Venue being remodeled. But the time for sharing this good news is now: We’ve got the deed and the cash!

This house is in the Baker Donora neighborhood just behind Subway across from our S. Penn Venue. The address is 1702 Lyons Ave. We have been referring to it as the Lyons House. So what are our plans for the Lyons House? Well, first off: a BIG SHOUT OUT to Ryan Chorpenning and Chris Murphy who have agreed to take on the remodeling of this house. They were already considering doing something like this on their own when this opportunity came along. Isn’t it cool how God works! Without their commitment we would not have felt comfortable receiving this gift in such a busy time of our own church life.

But what happens after we remodel it? Well, there are several options, but it appears at this time that the preferred option is simply to sell it and use the funds to expand our mission, to ignite authentic life in Christ and fan it into an all-consuming flame. The facilities team led by Thomas Oates in conversation with the Lead Team (and the Baker Donora neighborhood leadership) will be taking that decision under their wings when we get to that point.

So what can you do now? Well, Ryan and Chris would love to have your help. You can jump in THIS Saturday, May 9 from 9AM to Noon. They’ll be doing yard work, tearing out carpet, with some other general labor. Bring a hammer, carpet knife, gloves, yard tools etc. Many hands will make light work. Feel free to bring a friend (or three!). You can also join this team as a small group through the summer. And look forward to some fun! RSVP to help them be prepared (rchorpenn@hotmail.com or murphdog73@gmail.com).

Will you join me in thanking God for this fun surprise gift! Be in prayer for the team working on this and for the family that will be moving in. Be in prayer for the relationships that we have the opportunity to build in the neighborhood through this mission. Thank you God!

Peace,

Pastor Tom

Filed Under: Ponderings Tagged With: Missions

Giving Up On Perfect

December 16, 2013 by Patricia Leave a Comment

Christmas Is Not Your Birthday – Giving Up on Perfect *
Sycamore Creek Church
December 15/16, 2013
Tom Arthur
Luke 1:26-38

Merry Christmas Friends! Let’s dive into the Christmas story today…

Luke 1:26-38 NLT
In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a village in Galilee, to a virgin named Mary. She was engaged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of King David. Gabriel appeared to her and said, “Greetings, favored woman! The Lord is with you!”

Confused and disturbed, Mary tried to think what the angel could mean. “Don’t be afraid, Mary,” the angel told her, “for you have found favor with God! You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus.He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David.And he will reign over Israelforever; his Kingdom will never end!”

Mary asked the angel, “But how can this happen? I am a virgin.”

The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby to be born will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God. What’s more, your relative Elizabeth has become pregnant in her old age! People used to say she was barren, but she has conceived a son and is now in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God.”

Mary responded, “I am the Lord’s servant. May everything you have said about me come true.”

And then the angel left her.

We’re into the second week of a series called Christmas Is Not Your Birthday. Whose birthday is it? We all know the answer, but how many presents under the Christmas tree will have Jesus’ name on it? Instead of focusing on the birthday boy himself, what we end up trying to do is have some kind of perfect traditional Christmas. Our search looks something like this:

In the movie, Christmas Vacation, Clark Griswold is searching for the perfect traditional Christmas. He’s got an image in his mind that is similar to the image almost all of us have in our mind too. There’s a problem with our quest to attain this image of Christmas.

Mike Slaughter says, “In our attempts to create the magical Christmas experience we run ourselves into the ground emotionally, physically, financially, and relationally.”

Last year around this time someone turned in an anonymous prayer request that was so beautifully written that I saved it. It describes well the situation that many find themselves in while searching for the perfect traditional Christmas:

Please remember all those for whom the holidays are a difficult time. Perhaps they have lost loved ones whom they miss; especially when family gather at the holidays. There are those who have little or no family, or do not feel part of the family they do have. They may have major financial challenges that make it difficult to go see loved ones or to buy food for a nice dinner or gifts for their children. They may have both sad and happy memories of holidays past, but this year, they are sad and depressed and just getting through another day is a challenge. May our Lord be a strength and comfort to them! May we remember to extend a hand of hospitality and friendship, not knowing how much it may mean to those around us.

Speaking of the pain that many feel around this time of the year, how are your listening skills? Listening is probably one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox. If you could use some improvement on your listening and caring skills, make sure you check out the training we have coming up in February with John Savage. We’ll spend Thursday and Friday evening as well as all day Saturday learning how to listen and care for one another in more effective ways. John Savage has worked with our church in the past and is a retired United Methodist pastor, psychologist, corporate pain specialist, life coach, author of several books, and musician. Among all those things he is really just a very wise man. This is a can’t miss opportunity to improve your listening skills in your marriage, in your job, with your friends, and in your church. If you want more info, email Pat Brown (pat.orme@yahoo.com).

And yet amidst the chaos that is Christmas, Mike Slaughter reminds us that when we focus on the birthday boy himself, “Christmas is God’s vivid reminder that amid the uncertainty, God shows up to bring you peace, purpose, joy, hope, and wholeness.”

Unsanitary NOT PERFECT
So, friends, let’s give up on perfect. There was very little that was perfect about Jesus’ birth. The nativity was unsanitized, NOT PERFECT. Think about this for a second. Have you ever been in a delivery room? The two times I’ve spent significant time in a delivery room at the hospital, everything was squeaky clean. All the instruments used were wrapped in plastic and opened just for us. All the bedding was fresh and washed (at least to begin with!). The floor was spick and span. But this was not the setting that Jesus was born into. He was born in a barn. Have you been in a barn lately? It’s filled with flies and dung. And those flies had most likely been on that dung. Jesus was born in a very unsanitary situation. The public health officials would have had a heyday!

But our lives are not sanitary either, are they? Life is messy. The more we follow Jesus the messier it gets. Mike Slaughter says:

In turn, the Gospel of Luke makes it indelibly clear that walking in the way of Jesus is neither safe nor predictable. Sometimes we have the idea that when we do right, wrong is not supposed to show up. And if we are faithfully following Jesus, then life isn’t supposed to get messy, but it does.

Don’t for a moment think that just because you follow Jesus that life will get easier. It is likely to get harder!

Favored NOT Perfect
When the angel Gabriel appears to Mary he says, “Greetings, favored woman! The Lord is with you!” (Luke 1:28 NLT). Slaughter reminds us that:

God’s favor cannot be earned. God comes when we are doing everything wrong. God comes when we are doing nothing. God comes whether we are being naughty or nice. Why? Because God loves us and we are highly favored!

This announcement by Gabriel was not what Mary was expecting. She responds, “But how can this happen? I am a virgin” (Luke 1:34 NLT). Mary wants to know how she’ll be pregnant if she’s a virgin. She had done everything right so far. She had saved herself for her future husband, and then she ends up pregnant? We too do everything we know to be faithful to God and then you lose your job, your spouse tells you they want a divorce, your four-year-old is diagnosed with leukemia, your kid’s high school counselor calls to tell you they think your teenager is using drugs, and you ask, “How can this be, God, when I have tried so hard to do what is right?”

Imagine Mary’s conversation with Joseph. Imagine Joseph’s response, “God did it?” Joseph doesn’t believer her. He plans to quietly divorce her. She might be stoned to death for adultery. Slaughter reminds us that, “Nowhere does the Bible promise that a life of faith will always make sense or follow a predictable path.” Mary is favored even though her situation seems far from perfect.

NOT Perfect but NOT Alone
Gabriel goes on to tell Mary, “What’s more, your relative Elizabeth has become pregnant in her old age! People used to say she was barren, but she has conceived a son and is now in her sixth month” (Luke 1:36 NLT). She will not be alone in this because she has community.

My son, Samuel Lewis, was born on July 5^th. I posted this on Facebook and noticed that immediately below that posting was my good friend Jon Van Dop’s posting that their son, Nic, was also born on July 5! We were not doing this alone. I was, however, one kid ahead of him, and he had sat through several meals listening to me go a little crazy about learning to live with a baby in the house. Next time we met, he said to me, “You know when I used to listen to you talk about how you were frustrated and angry and going a little crazy when your first son was born, and I would look at you like I understood? I didn’t understand but now I do!” God used that difficult experience I had of getting used to having a baby in the house (after thirteen years of being married with no children!) to be a help to Jon with his first baby. Jon didn’t have to do this alone. None of us do. We have a community called SycamoreCreekChurch.

We not only have the community of the church around us, but we also have the Holy Spirit. Gabriel continues, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby to be born will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35 NLT). The Holy Spirit is God’s presence with us. Mary is told her child shall be called “Immanuel” which means “God is with us.” Even if the community is not immediately available, God is with you. The Holy Spirit is God’s comforter, God’s advocate, God’s love and mercy and grace with you.

NOT Perfect but Faithful
Mary surely was not perfect as a human being. There was only one perfect person, her son, Jesus. But she was faithful. Mary responded, “‘I am the Lord’s servant. May everything you have said about me come true.’ And then the angel left her” (Luke 1:38 NLT). This is the “divine consent.” Mary was willing to allow this to happen to her. She responded with faith even though the whole thing must have seemed a bit preposterous. And Mary continued to be faithful. Mary was faithful in bringing up Jesus by bringing him to the temple for the temple sacrifices, temple visits, and to study the scriptures. Mary was faithful when the religious leaders accused Jesus of heresy. Mary was faithful when Jesus was found guilty in a rigged trial. Mary was faithful when the appeal to Roman politicians failed. Mary was faithful while her son was flogged. Mary was faithful while her son was executed on a cross. Mary was faithful when her son breathed his last breath. Mary was faithful when Jesus was laid in the grave. Mary’s life was not perfect, but she was faithful to what God had called her to do: to be a loving mother.

Friends, we need to give up on the perfect Christmas. There is no perfect Christmas and the first Christmas was no image of perfection either. Slaughter reminds us:

So when Christmas comes around during an imperfect season of life, and you just don’t feel like celebrating, remember: it’s not your birthday; it’s Jesus’ birthday, and by celebrating Christmas, we are celebrating someone else who suffered too.

Instead of seeking the perfect Christmas, let’s seek to make Christmas about Jesus’ birthday and celebrate it accordingly. One way you can do this is to take our Christmas challenge: give away as much as you spend on yourself this Christmas. Some of you can do this by just being more generous. Others will need to cut your spending on yourself, your kids, your grandkids, and your boss or secretary in half so that you can give half away. Then bring that second half in on Christmas Eve and give it in the Christmas Eve offering. 100% of the Christmas Eve offering is given away. This year we’re giving it to our medical missions in Nicaragua, the second poorest country in this hemisphere. Twice a year we send medical teams down to do medical clinics. They bring life-giving and life-sustaining medicine and medical expertise to bring both physical and spiritual hope. Over the years on Christmas Eve we’ve given away over $31,000. Last year we gave away $3800. 2011 was our record year when we gave away $5800. Can we make 2013 a record year? Can we give away $6000? Can we make it a miracle year? Can we give away $10,000? If we can, it will be because you gave up on perfect and decided to celebrate Christmas like it’s Jesus’ birthday.

Jeremy Kratky, our worship leader, is gearing his family up to celebrate Christmas with some different traditions this year. He told me about a question his sister emailed him and how he responded. I asked him if I could share it with you. Here it is:

Tom,

My older sister asked me this question in an email earlier today: What does the Christmas season look like in your home?

Below is my response. Thank you God and Sycamore Creek Church for helping me see Christmas in a different light!

Christmas in my home is what you might imagine. It’s focused on relationships with some gift giving. Kristin and I have been convicted (in a good way) on how we spend our money around Christmas. Our church is currently in a series called, “Christmas Is Not Your Birthday.” We’ve all been challenged to give away as much as we spend on Christmas to people who actually have needs. Or, to spend half as much on Christmas and give the other half away. It’s a huge challenge and we’re not there yet. We did incorporate, however, a baby step this year. Rather than spend money on a gift for each other this Christmas (approximately $50 each), Kristin and I elected to give that money to a medical missions team our church supports which provides life giving, life sustaining, and life altering medicines, education, and hope to people in Nicaragua. So our gift to each other this year is a date night, which is already built into our monthly budget (so we’re actually not spending any additional money). Rather than it being just another date night, our gift to one another is this make a craft or riddle that represents a date night surprise. For example, Kristin loves musical theater. So I’m thinking about buying tickets to a show at the Wharton Center. The craft or riddle I create would work in the theme or the title of the show we’re going to see. The beauty of it is that we’d be going on a date night anyway, but this adds a celebratory component to it that makes it a wonderful gift. Thus, the $100 we would’ve spent on each other is now available to bless others. Each year on Christmas Eve, Sycamore Creek receives an offering that goes to this Medical Missions Team. 100% of it! If all of us do even one little change this year on how we spend money, we anticipate a HUGE offering that will bless others. We’re dreaming the offering might be over $10,000! For a church our size? That’d be a miracle! We still bought our kids their presents. We read the Christmas story as recorded in Scripture and we’ll sing Happy Birthday Jesus. We have a beautifully decorated tree and poinsettias strewn about the house. We have our mantle dressed with Christmas-y stuff. It’s rather cozy. Outdoor Christmas lights. We’re letting go of some old traditions (Kristin and I buying each other a gift) and making some new ones with our children. Jonah, Nora, and I made Christmas cookies the other night at a cookie decorating party I attended with a Dads group I’m a part of. We dropped them off to firefighters on the way home. I want Jonah and Nora to really understand that Christmas is about giving, not necessarily getting. Giving cookies to those firefighters the other night was something that Jonah and I suspected was on Jesus’ wish list; for it’s His birthday, right? As you can tell, this message series has been very helpful to me and my family. I’m thankful you asked what Christmas looks like, for it is different this year, and hopefully for years to come.

We just ended a three year capital campaign here at Sycamore Creek for building/space needs. We’re tithing off the top 10% to local and foreign missions. So this Christmas our small groups (growth groups), who each have committed to service in mission to our local community, are having fun giving away $1000 checks to their respective mission that particular group supports. We feel it’s on Jesus’ wish list.

Love you,
Jeremy

This year we’re also giving away $1000/week to the local missions that our small groups support. This week we gave away $1000 to Open Door Ministry. Here’s that giveaway:

Will you give up on the perfect Christmas this year and instead seek to make it about celebrating Jesus’ birthday? May God work a miracle in and through Sycamore Creek Church this Christmas. Amen!

*This sermon series is based on the book, Christmas Is Not Your Birthday by Mike Slaughter.

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Christmas, Missions, Money

Expect a Miracle

December 9, 2013 by Patricia Leave a Comment

Christmas Is Not Your Birthday – Expect a Miracle *
Sycamore Creek Church
December 8/9, 2013
Tom Arthur

Merry Christmas Friends!

Is it too early to say that? No way. Stores started decorating for Christmas weeks ago. We put our Christmas decorations up the week before Thanksgiving so they’d be up to enjoy over Thanksgiving weekend. So, Merry Christmas! It’s never too early to say it.

But what are we saying when we say Merry Christmas? What we’re really doing is saying, “Be merry because a birthday is coming!” But whose birthday? Your birthday? Your kids birthday? Your grandkids birthday? No, Christmas is not your birthday.

That’s the series we’re beginning today: Christmas Is Not Your Birthday. Over the next several weeks we’re going to look at how to celebrate Christmas as Jesus’ birthday rather than our own.

Here’s the problem we run into every year with Christmas: Christmas has become too predictable. What we need this year is a miracle! Christmas is the perfect place for a miracle:

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.
~The Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 9:6 KJV)

Hundreds of years before Jesus’ birth the prophet Isaiah predicted a miraculous birth, the birth of a baby who would be God and who would bring peace. That’s quite a birth, quite a miracle! But how did we get from that, Jesus’ birthday, to this?

The traditional “perfect” Christmas today includes: chaotic consumerism, stressed shopping, a terrible to-do list, disastrous date books, awful agendas, and deep deep debt (a pledge of allegiance to an economic Christmas orgy of overspending and debt). Jesus was to be called the Counselor. Maybe we should call him the Financial Counselor? The traditional Christmas isn’t traditional at all. It’s a “mixture of…a little biblical truth…some eighteenth-century Victorian practices, and…a double shot of Santa theology” (Thank you Mike Slaughter) on steroids provided by Madison Avenue with a shot of eggnog to make it all go down.

We’re left with the question: What exactly does God look like if this is how we celebrate the birth of the one called The Mighty God? God ends up looking like Santa Claus? God becomes a genie in a bottle with three wishes (if you’re good enough).

My own Christmas growing up was like this. I remember when my grandma would hand me the J.C. Penny Catalogue and tell me to circle the things I wanted from it. Now that I look back on this, it seems absurd to me. My grandma lived so simply that when she died all my mom had to do to clean out her possessions was to empty one drawer at the nursing home! And yet she bought into the whole traditional Christmas when it came to her own grandkids. Another aspect of the traditional Christmas with my family was that kids of divorced parents cashed in big at Christmas. Here’s how my Christmas schedule went:

Christmas Eve: Gifts with my dad’s parents
Christmas 6AM: Gifts with my dad and step-mom
Christmas 8AM: Gifts with my step-mom’s family
Christmas Noon: Gifts with my mom’s family
Christmas Afternoon: Gifts with my mom and step-dad.

Boom baby! It’s one of the few times that being a kid in a divorced family pays off. And of course, all these family members are doing their best to make sure that the other side of the family doesn’t one-up them!

So if this is how we celebrate the birth of the one called Mighty God, what does that God look like? Something is really jacked up, isn’t it? It’s jacked up because this baby wasn’t called Santa. This baby was called Jesus, the Prince of Peace. God doesn’t look like Santa, God looks like Jesus:

Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.
~St. Paul (Colossians 3:15 NLT)

In Jesus we see God and also humanity, at its fullest. Sometimes it’s hard to wrap your mind around God, but Jesus is easier. Jesus is a God I can believe in. And that’s a miracle.

The miracle of Jesus is that he was ordinary and yet extraordinary. He was ordinary in that he was born in an empire-occupied territory to an unwed mother. His parents were poor and lived as refugees in Africa amidst genocide back home. He grew up in Nazareth, a small town in the middle of the U.P. (OK, just kidding about the U.P. thing). He was a basic laborer. He worked with his hands as a carpenter. Jesus’ background was not extraordinary. It was about as average or below average as they come.

And yet Jesus’ birth was also extraordinary and miraculous.

All right then, the Lord himself will give you the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means ‘God is with us’).
~The Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 7:14 NLT)

Jesus is God with us and he was extraordinary in so many ways. His message was a message of healing. Jesus’ first sermon was also from the prophet Isaiah. He stood up in the synagogue and read:

God’s Spirit is on me;
he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor,
Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and
recovery of sight to the blind,
To set the burdened and battered free,
to announce, “This is God’s year to act!”
(Luke 4:18-19 The Message)

He was the son of God full of power and yet he reached out to those who were powerless. He was ultimately executed on a cross and resurrected three days later. He was ordinary but extraordinary. If God can work an extraordinary miracle through an ordinary Jesus, then he can work a miracle through any ordinary person, including you and me this Christmas. In fact, you are God’s miracle worker!

This miracle is going to take some preparing for. Christmas is Jesus’ birth and that means there is going to be a labor. Preparing for the miracle this Christmas requires the cost of labor pains. This birth was no “silent night.” In fact, that song is really just about as silly as they come. Sentimental, yes. Realistic, no. The birth probably looked more like this:

Jesus’ life cost him something. He lives. He taught and was persecuted by the religious establishment. He was executed on a cross. He raised from the dead. All of those who closely followed him were persecuted and executed as well, except one who was sent into exile. Those are some serious labor pains, not sentimental silent nights. As Mike Slaughter says, “The real Christmas was a snapshot of poverty and anxiety, not feel-good warm fuzzies.”

So this Christmas we need another miracle. We need the miracle of giving up on the “traditional Christmas” and building new traditions that put the celebration back on Jesus’ birthday, and this miracle is going to take some birth pains. It’s going to require you to give up some stuff that makes Christmas look more like your birthday or your kids birthday. It’s going to require you instituting some new traditions that look more like celebrating Jesus and what Jesus’ life was all about, his purpose.

What’s the goal or purpose of your life? Is it “the good life”? Retirement? Golf every day? Walking on the beach and collecting shells? Sitting in your man cave watching ESPN1, 2, & 3 on your 80 inch HD TV? Shopping till you drop? Lying around in a hammock? Those all might be OK for a season, but if that’s the ultimate goal of your life, then you’re life is going to get pretty boring pretty quickly. My step-dad just retired. He’s done good as a small business owner. He sold his business to one of his most faithful employees. He’s got a good life with my mom. They have a house in Indianapolis and two in Florida. They’re pretty set for the rest of their lives. But about two weeks into retirement he got pretty bored sitting in his living room with his iphone watching sports on his super huge TV. He told me that he was trying to figure out what to do with his life now that he’s retired. He went to his pastors and asked if they could use him volunteering fifteen or twenty hours a week. He wants his retirement to make a difference in somebody’s life. He wants to serve others. He wants his life to be like Jesus’ life.

As Mike Slaughter says, the new meaning and purpose of our lives at Christmas is that “We find meaning when we give sacrificially to those in need, because by doing so, we are giving to Jesus himself. It is his birthday after all!”

So take up a new tradition this Christmas: celebrate Christmas as Jesus’ Birthday! One way we’re doing this is by changing how we spend our money at Christmas. Most of us spend way more than we even have to spend. We go into debt to have the “traditional” Christmas. New rule: don’t go into debt to celebrate Jesus’ birthday! Rather, make this commitment: give away as much as you spend on Christmas. For some of you that means simply being more generous at Christmas. For others it means cutting your spending in half.

We’re going to give you an opportunity on Christmas Eve to give away as much as you spend on yourself. Usually our offerings all year long go to supporting the immediate mission and ministry of SCC, but at Christmas Eve we receive an offering and give it all away. This year we’re giving it all away to our medical missions in Nicaragua. Twice a year we send teams to Nicaragua to bring life-giving and life-changing medicine, medical expertise, and hope to individuals all across the second poorest country in the Americas.

Over the life of our church we’ve been able to give away over $31,000 in our Christmas Eve offerings. Last year we gave away $3800. Our record is $5800 in 2011. I’d love to see us smash that record this year. Can we do $6000? No, that’s too low. Let’s shoot for $10,000. Come on, if we give away as much as we spend at Christmas, we can easily do $10,000. Get your family and friends in on it. Give them an invite card to join you for Christmas Eve (one service at 5PM at Lansing Christian School and one service at 7PM at Jackie’s dinner with a $10 Christmas dinner), and tell them not to spend any money on you but to give it to our Christmas Eve offering. Now that’s a miracle!

During Christmas we’re not only focusing on giving overseas, but we’re also giving away lots of money locally. This is the last year in a three-year capital campaign at SCC to save money for a building. When we began the campaign we decided to tithe on what we received for the capital campaign, so we’ve been setting aside 10% for missions. We’ve received about $330,000 so we’ve set aside $33,000 for missions. Half of that is going to our medical missions in Nicaragua and half of it is staying here locally. Part of the local money is going to the ministries and missions that our church’s small groups have committed to. So over the course of December, each of our small groups is getting a $1000 check to give to their local charity. We’re going to show you a video each week of that miraculous moment when someone from our church gets to give $1000 to a ministry they’ve been volunteering at for a long time. You’re not going to want to miss that! That’s what your giving does. It changes lives both here in SCC, in our community, and our world. Here’s a miracle for Holt Senior Care:

*This series and sermon are inspired by Mike Slaughter’s book, Christmas Is Not Your Birthday.

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Christmas, giving, Jesus, miracle, Missions, Money

How your giving changed the world in 2012!

January 23, 2013 by Tom Leave a Comment

Dear Friend,

The other day I was sitting with someone at our Monday night Church in a Diner and he said to me, “I haven’t been in church for forty years, but I really like what’s going on here.” Wow! Thank you, God! This middle-aged man was invited by a neighbor who is also new to SCC and has been attending Church in a Diner. One new person invited another new person. This made my night. Another evening I sat with a young man in my office who wanted to share some good news with me. His wife had been praying for him for many years. He had just had a “God experience” and was ready to commit his life to Christ. Whoa! That news made my month! Then I got a call from someone who has attended our church somewhat sporadically. He was an older man who was experiencing some pretty significant bumps in life. He didn’t see much need for Jesus before these bumps, but when the turbulence hit, he was looking for anything solid to hang on to. He reached out to Jesus and found a firm foundation. Amazing! Thank you, God!

People are finding Sycamore Creek Church a place where they encounter the compassion of God and it changes their lives. They come curious about God because of something creative we’re doing, and they meet Jesus in the life of our community together.

I want you to know that your giving makes possible environments where people encounter God. Your giving this year has had a significant impact:

We received $3800 in our Christmas Eve offering for Nicaragua and $800 in our alternative gift fair. That’s $4600 to put a dent of God’s compassion in Nicaragua through our medical missions!
Our capital campaign has received $268,993 in two years. We’ve paid off the mortgage on the parsonage, finished the basement, set aside 10% for a missions tithe, and saved the rest for a building. We’re on pace for our total pledged amount of $366,137!
We’ve expanded our worship opportunities by offering a Monday night Church in a Diner at Grumpy’s Diner that is averaging about fifty to sixty people a night, most of them new to SCC!
Since October we’ve seen total attendance growth across both venues in the 30% range! This growth has spilled over into Sunday morning as well. Five of the last six months have seen growth on Sunday morning! We are reaching new people and inviting them into the adventure of following Jesus.

While there is much good news to celebrate, there are some significant obstacles still before us in 2013. While attendance in the second half of the year is up, giving has gone down. We received $287,554 in 2011 and $245,789 in 2012, a 14% decrease, and we are projecting receiving $228,000 in 2013. This has forced us to act creatively with less money. In this context ideas like Church in a Diner were born. It isn’t impossible to reach new people with less money as our attendance figures show. I give thanks to God for your continued generosity. Would you consider taking a step of further generosity in 2013?

If you give but not regularly, would you consider giving a regular weekly/monthly amount?
If you give regularly but you’re not tithing (10%), is God calling you to step up to tithing?
If you tithe, is God calling you to radical generosity by giving 15-20% or more or by giving to a designated special giving (DSG) item listed on the back of this letter?

Thank you for following Jesus with everything you’ve got, money included. Together we’ll ignite authentic life in Christ in more and more people and fan it into an all consuming flame!

Peace,
Pastor Tom

P.S. The best way I know how to do any of the three suggestions above is to automate the process either through EFT or setting up a regular check to be mailed through your online banking. Then you give faithfully even when you can’t always make it to worship. Included is an EFT form for your convenience.

Designated Special Giving (DSG)

Below are listed various opportunities to touch people’s lives. A particular opportunity just might catch hold of your heart, imagination, or spirit, and God won’t let it get out of your mind. Would you prayerfully look over the list below and consider whether God is calling you to give to one of these DSG opportunities? DSG is an above-and-beyond giving opportunity, above and beyond other commitments you’ve made to the church such as your annual Commitment Sunday pledge, your 20 Years Deep Capital Campaign pledge, or your commitment to Dr. Mir in Nicaragua. If you can’t give the total amount listed, don’t feel like you can’t contribute. Perhaps God will speak to five other people too, and their total giving meets the need or opportunity. Take some time to consider DSG alongside your current giving, and watch what God will do in the coming weeks and months!

Main Projection Screen ($1,400 – $981 already given) – Help communicate the gospel effectively and excellently. Our current screen is showing significant age.

Youth Ministry Intern ($5000) – We’d like to hire a college student as a year-round youth intern to help our youth go deeper in God’s grace.

Nursery Gates ($100) – Keeps kids safe and helps parents worship with peace of mind. Makes our current nursery setup easier.

Floor Mats for the Nursery ($40) – Makes a clean soft place for kids to play.

Leadership Training ($300) – Conferences, workshops and coaching help our paid and unpaid staff continue to improve their craft and reach new people for Christ.

Signage ($100 to $2000) – We’re working on a new office sign, street signs, signs going into Lansing Christian School, and signs inside LCS that show our new logo and improve visibility. Signs create and communicate our identity to the community.

Percussion Shaker ($30) – Adds more variety to the sound of our music and creates an environment where people can go deeper in God’s grace through worship music.

Guitar ($1000) – The guitar the church owns has significant wear and tear over the years. A new guitar would add excellence to the music of our church which creates an environment for people to encounter God.

Nicaragua Meds ($2000) – We send medical teams to Nicaragua twice a year to share God’s compassion. A huge expense that pays significant dividends in health is medicine. Many maladies can be simply treated with the appropriate meds.

Coffee Shop Appreciation Gift Cards ($5) – A small gift card to a coffee shop can go a long way in showing appreciation to and retaining volunteers.

Member Care Training ($8000) – We are exploring bringing in John Savage several times over the next year. Savage is a consultant we have worked with before who specializes in member care through training in listening skills. This would help us expand our capacity for showing compassion within our community and help retain people when they experience bumps in life and the church.

If you would like to give to one or more of these Designated Special Giving opportunities, simply drop a check in the offering bag and write “DSG” and the name of the DSG (i.e. “DSG: New Screen”).

Filed Under: Newsletter Tagged With: evangelism, Missions, Money

Creative

September 18, 2012 by Patricia Leave a Comment

Church on the MOVE – Creative
Sycamore Creek Church
September 16, 2012
Guest Preacher: Mark Aupperlee
John 1:14-18 , John 3:16-18

Good morning! My name is Mark, and I’m a volunteer here at Sycamore Creek Church. I started attending at Sycamore Creek a little over six years ago, and pretty quickly I got involved with volunteering here by helping with set up in the morning. Actually, I’m still on a set up crew. Join me on the first Sunday of each month. It only takes about 45 minutes. After a while, I also got involved in a small group. Then I became a member of our church. Then I started leading a small group. Then I became a leader of all the small groups and joined the leadership of the church. Then I started giving messages on Sunday mornings! Phew. It’s been quite a journey. I would love to tell you that all those things have been easy, but it hasn’t been easy and it’s still not easy. It’s at times very hard. This summer, in the midst of a time when things were difficult, I asked myself, “Why? Why am I doing this? It’s hard!!”

In that moment of crisis I realized with incredible clarity that the reason I participate, volunteer, and lead in our church has to do with the type of Jesus-following community we’re trying to be. The type of culture we’re working to create. I’ve encountered, experienced, and grown in my relationship with God in incredible ways through Sycamore Creek Church . . . and I want to be a part of offering that to others. I want other people to be blessed through this church, through the community we’ve created, the way I have. I am firmly committed to the church that we are, and the church we can be: Curious, Creative, Compassionate. I am committed to the difficult work of continuing to be part of a creative community.

I define creativity as three things: “to imagine, experiment and make things happen.”

Living this out is difficult. Trying new things and being willing to hold loosely to the way things are is work. We tend to want the familiar, the same, the comfortable. You’ll notice comfortable isn’t one of the three words we think characterizes our church. As people, we will drift toward “the way we do things” because it’s the “way we’ve always done it,” and we’ll drift toward routine and ritual. Those things are comfortable. Trying new things, being creative isn’t. And in the midst of being creative, that experimenting part of creativity, some of our new things won’t work. Being creative is a willingness to fail. As a church, we believe we are “creative in all we do.” We imagine, we experiment, and we make things happen. This morning I’ll explore the basis for that and how we’re doing it.

When I was in high school I was not very creative, especially when it came to girls. I was an awkward high schooler with no idea what I was doing with girls. I didn’t know how to be creative. I had imagination! I did make some attempts to try different approaches, to experiment to “make things happen,” but it never worked out too well. My senior year I met and started hanging out with this wonderful girl. Her name was Jana. I really liked Jana, but I had no idea what to do about it. Well, then one night at a basketball game we got asked by a friend if we were dating. Oh boy. Here was a chance for creative thinking. I could work this to my advantage! Or not. Being the wimp I was, I asked Jana afterward, “What did you think of what our friend asked about us dating?” (That was a relationship punt!) Well, thankfully Jana had more creativity than I did and more guts. She fielded my punt and creatively gave the ball back to me. She experimented and said, “I’m interested if you’re interested.” On the outside, I was calm and cool in the face of that phrase and I responded, “I’m interested. Let’s date!” On the inside I was doing a celebratory dance! (I won’t subject you to my bad dancing . . . picture good dancing in your mind.) “I’m interested if you’re interested.” I can’t tell you how much I love that phrase!! Jana essentially said to me, “I’m interested, are you?” She made the first move and I just had to respond.

That story connects with me because it’s the beginning of an important relationship for me. It’s part of the love story in my life. My guess is that in some way it plucks at each one of you. It may make you smile. It may bring up memories for you. It may bring up longings. That’s because within each of us is a desire for love. It’s a desire that leads us into romantic relationships. It’s a desire that draws together families. It’s a desire that drives friendships. And it’s a wonderful desire. But it’s one that keeps us hunting. We never quite get enough from those relationships. Those relationships always are messy. There is always this feeling that there must be something more.

That’s because there is.

The Bible tells us that in the beginning we were created to be in a relationship with God. And in the beginning we were in that relationship. Then Adam and Eve, the first humans, made a move away from God in disobedience and distrust and the relationship was broken. It’s a decision that was made then and echoes still today as we make that choice ourselves. Throughout the first part of the Bible, the Old Testament, God reaches out to people. He cultivates a relationship with a person, Abraham, that develops into a people, Israel. And those people continually disappoint him. God works through judges, kings, and prophets, continually trying to woo people back to him. The problem is, none of it really works. There continues to be this broken relationship with God that leaves people without true life. There continues to be something missing.

Then in the New Testament God completely changes everything. Let’s read about it in John 1.

Two quick things before we talk more about this Scripture. First, a quick clarification about some of the language. John loves this “word.” Word! What or who is Word? . . . Jesus! John also loves his “light.” What or who is light? . . . Jesus!

Second, a lot of you may have read or heard this scripture before. Don’t shut down on me and presume you know what I’m going to talk about. Allow yourself to have fresh ears and a fresh mind.

The Word was first,
the Word present to God,
God present to the Word.
The Word was God,
in readiness for God from day one. Everything was created through him;
nothing—not one thing!—
came into being without him.
What came into existence was Life,
and the Life was Light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
the darkness couldn’t put it out.

There once was a man, his name John, sent by God to point out the way to the Life-Light. He came to show everyone where to look, who to believe in. John was not himself the Light; he was there to show the way to the Light.

The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
the one-of-a-kind glory,
like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
true from start to finish.

John pointed him out and called, “This is the One! The One I told you was coming after me but in fact was ahead of me. He has always been ahead of me, has always had the first word.”

We all live off his generous bounty,
gift after gift after gift.
We got the basics from Moses,
and then this exuberant giving and receiving,
This endless knowing and understanding—
all this came through Jesus, the Messiah.
No one has ever seen God,
not so much as a glimpse.
This one-of-a-kind God-Expression,
who exists at the very heart of the Father,
has made him plain as day.
John 1:18, 14-18 (The Message)

There are two things we learn about creativity from this story. First, that creativity is rooted in the past, the familiar. John starts his book the same way Genesis starts, “In the beginning.” He uses the roots of the past, imagery that the people of his day would have been very familiar with. They’ve heard about God as creator. They know the story of God’s relationship with people. John weaves in these familiar elements of creator and the relationship with God and goes on to talk about Moses and the law. John draws on the familiar, the known, to bring out a radical new truth.

We live in an often rootless culture, in that everything is about right now. We don’t always appreciate the past and the roots it can provide. If you wanted to tell someone what it means to be an American, what would you do? You can start with what’s currently happening, but at some point you’d need to build upon our past. You’d at least go back to tell about how we got our independence. You’d tell about how we were formed as a nation and about the threats our nation has faced, the wars we’ve fought, the disagreements and injustices we’ve endured, and then you’d build to the present and the future. In order to talk about the new truth of what it means to be an American, you need to acknowledge our roots, our past. John taps into this to start his book. He uses the familiar, the roots of who the people are and the past they know, to introduce a radical new truth.

The second thing from John 1 is that we are introduced to a radical new truth. What’s that radical new truth? That God became one of us!! As verse 14 says, he moved into the neighborhood!! Wow! This is like no other God, ever. This should blow our minds! This is CREATIVE!! The God who is CREATOR, who created creativity, became one of us. He brought His love to us. He didn’t just wait for us to come to Him, but He made the first move on our behalf. Look at other world religions and there is no other God like this. This is the only God who became a person and sacrificed and humbled Himself on our behalf.

From our perspective, this seems unimaginable, doesn’t it? To become a baby! A tiny, needy baby! To live as one of us! To DIE for us! To offer us unconditional love and grace! Sending Jesus to the world is sometimes called the New Testament gamble because it is so creative, so different than any other religion or God, and it seems crazy. At times this whole concept is so crazy, so mind-blowing that we gloss over it and put it into a neat little box. It’s so hard to get our heads wrapped around the mystery of it, that we don’t fully appreciate it.

This mystery, this incredible thing of God becoming one of us, why did He do that? What was the reason?

This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it. And why? Because of that person’s failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him.
John 3:16-18 (The Message)

God is essentially saying to each of us: “I’m interested, are you?” He makes the first move on our behalf to make the relationship right, so that we might have whole and lasting life. We’re living in brokenness and God offers us a way out.

So, there are two things or ideas we get from these passages:

The new always is rooted in the past.
The God of creativity loves us in unimaginable ways.

All too often, this message of God’s love for us doesn’t reach us. We might get it up here, we might know the words, we might even be able to talk about it, but we don’t KNOW it to be true.

I’ve given you words and some thoughts that engage your mind. We’ve heard this too many times though. That second point is often words on a screen, a speaker talking, or words on a page. We may be able to repeat them and know them, but we don’t really experience those words to be part of our reality. I have a video that I hope will help us experience what unimaginable love is. In this video there is a dad who loves his son in unimaginable ways.

Here’s an introduction to what you’re about to watch:

“A son asked his father, ‘Dad, will you take part in a marathon with me?’ The father, despite having a heart condition, said ‘Yes’. They went on to complete the marathon together. Father and son went on to join other marathons, the father always saying ‘Yes’ to his son’s request of going through the race together.

One day, the son asked his father, ‘Dad, let’s join the Ironman together.’ To which, his father said ‘Yes’ too.

For those who don’t know, the IRONMAN is the toughest triathlon ever. It takes place in Hawaii. The race encompasses three endurance events of a 2.4 mile ocean swim, followed by a 112 mile bike ride, and ending with a 26.2 mile marathon along the coast of the Big Island. Father and son went on to complete the race together.”

The son in that video was born with cerebral palsy. When his dad runs and swims and bikes with him, the son feels normal. What a gift from that father! It should remind you of the gift you’ve been given. The gift of Jesus Christ that allows you to be whole again and to have a restored relationship with God. Through Jesus Christ God says to us, “I’m interested, are you?”

At SCC we know that love of God and God’s love is the foundation for who we are as a church: Curious, creative, and compassionate. We know God’s love and we seek to share it with the world. We use this word creative because it not only reflects who we are and who we are trying to be, but it also reflects the God whose love we trust in ourselves and share with others.

I’ve been building toward this main point: At Sycamore Creek Church we are creative in all we do because God was creative first. Ultimately, God’s creativity, His creation, is about us being in a right relationship with Him. Creativity reflects our creator. But honestly, being creative as a church doesn’t matter at all, it’s not even worth doing, if it doesn’t point us as a church and others outside the church toward God. We can’t separate creativity from the creator.

How are we doing that at SCC? How are we sharing creatively God’s love?

It’s a two-part process that involves loving God and loving others through staying true to our roots, our past as a church, while undertaking that creative process of imagining, experimenting, and making it happen.

At Sycamore Creek Church we have a mission: To ignite authentic life in Christ. We not only ignite life in Christ though, we also fan and grow the flame of life in Christ. We do that through a three-part process: Connecting, Growing, and Serving. We associate connecting at SCC with our worship services. They are how most people get connected with our church and with God. We associate growing and serving with small groups.

Looking at those two areas, worship services and small groups, you can see how we are creative in sharing God’s love. Those two areas are rooted in who we are as a church, they have stayed true to that mission of igniting authentic life in Christ, but they also have changed. We have taken some risks and tried some new things with worship services and small groups. We will continue to do that. If you want to come back here in 50 years and have everything about the way this church operates the same, you are in the wrong church! God is unchanging, but our world, God’s creation, changes. We will creatively change too so that we might be more effective in sharing God’s love with others.

First, small groups. We have not that long ago made an effort to link our small groups with mission. We imagined a community where we are outwardly focused, where we are not just sending money out to meet needs, but we are going out ourselves and involved with the community. This is rooted in our church having a culture of mission and going out to reach new people with God’s love. Now we are experimenting with how that might work. Our small groups have committed to a periodic mission that they do throughout the year during their small group time. We think that when we do this, we creatively share the message from God, “I’m interested, are you?” Our small groups still provide accountability, encouragement, prayer, and knowledge. But we’re imagining that we could pair them with another value and passion in our church and we’ve been working to implement that.

Second, worship services. One way we’re being creative in our worship services is through location. We have a huge goal in creatively sharing God’s love with others and that is to offer worship services at 7 different places on 7 different days of the week. That’s huge! That’s way out there. We have the imagination for that, but for now, we’ve been experimenting by focusing on adding one new location, Monday nights at Grumpy’s Diner. We’re making it happen one venue at a time. This change, this risk, this new thing is both an extension of our roots as a church plant, but it also mirrors our God who creatively came from heaven and went into our neighborhood. We are taking our worship service outside this building and bringing it to a neighborhood. It’s both a part of who we are as a church, and it’s also a new direction. We’ve imagined it, and now we’re experimenting to make it happen. Through the satellites we are creatively sharing God’s love with the Lansing area!

At SCC we are a church that looks around us and we see that something is missing. We recognize that need, that thirst for God’s love. We see it in each other and in the people around us, and we seek to creatively share God’s love. Jesus, the personification of love said to come to Him and never be thirsty. We are committed to being creative because God was creative in His love of us. We practice creativity by staying true to who we are as a church and as followers of Christ, rooted in the past, but with the flexibility and the courage to imagine and to try new things so that more people might encounter and experience and ultimately worship God. Through our actions, we bring the message of God and His love to people: “I’m interested, are you?”

I guess the final question is: “I’m interested, are you?

Questions for Small Groups

Each week we provide discussion questions for small groups that meet regularly to discuss the message for the week. Want to find a small group to join? Email Mark Aupperlee – m_aupperlee@hotmail.com.

1. Describe a time when trying something new worked or didn’t work.
2. Have you ever creatively shared God’s love with someone? How did it go? If you haven’t, why not?
3. Read John 3:16-18. What do those verses tell you about God’s love?
4. How can the small group pray for you to creatively share God’s love?

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: act, Creative, experiment, imagine, love, Missions, relationship, Worship

Mixin It Up – Mission Sunday

March 28, 2011 by Tom Leave a Comment

Mixin It Up – Mission Sunday
Sycamore Creek Church
March 27, 2011
Tom Arthur

Peace, Friends!

Over the last several months we’ve been mixin it up: putting together missions and small groups. Each small group has been working to explore various mission opportunities in our community, and then seeking to make a commitment to one of them. This hasn’t been an easy task, and we probably didn’t give the small groups quite enough time to complete it, so today we’ll be exploring and celebrating the mixin thus far, and come our spring Vision Meeting, we’ll be looking to make some more concrete commitments.

So we’re mixin up mission and small groups. How can we mix it up any more than we already have? Today I’d like to go back to our four week teaching series on the topic and mix it up backwards. Yes. Backwards. We started with a basic recipe, went on to an incarnational (aka “God in the flesh in Jesus”) model, explored mission to vs. mission with, and ended with mission as justice. Today I want to recap each of those messages but take the order backwards. So let’s start with justice.

Justice

In the book of Amos we read about what makes God lose patience. God shows Amos a vision:
Thus the Lord God showed me a cage of fruit,
He asked me, “What do you see, Amos?”
I said, “A cage of fruit.”
The Lord God said to me, “My people, Israel, have become fruitless;
I will not forgive them forever.”
Amos 8:2 (Tom’s Translation)

Yikes! God will not forgive them forever! What could possibly cause God to lose patience? God loses patience because God’s people, the spiritual ones, the religious ones, the ones who should know better, are cheating the poor and trying to wring as much profit out of them as possible while ignoring their plight. Thus, God shows Amos a vision of a basket (or cage) of ripe fruit because the time is ripe for judgment.

Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to this basic idea when he said, “Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.” Sycamore Creek Church, let’s not be a spiritually dying community. Let’s make sure our personal lives and our community life together is one that brings justice to the poor.

Mission “to” vs. Mission “with”

So why show concern to the poor? Because God calls us to be not just in mission to the poor but in mission with the poor.

We see both of these ideas in the famous passage found in Matthew chapter twenty-five. Jesus tells a story about judgment day and what happens. He says that when we did something to the least of these we did it to him. Here we see both mission to and mission with. I’ve underlined first mission to: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me” (Matthew 25:35-36, NRSV).

Now read it again and see the mission with: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

(Matthew 25:35-36, NRSV). Do you see the difference? This is perhaps the difference between “presents” and “presence.” God isn’t just interested in out presents to people (though that is important) but also our presence with people. Mission to is good. But mission with is BETTER!

Jesus blazed the trail to mission with. He came and gave us his presence, not just his presents from heaven. John says, “So the Word became human and lived here on earth among us” (John 1:14, NLT). And that bring us to an incarnational model of mission.

An Incarnational Model of Friendship

Incarnational? “Carn” means flesh so “incarnational” means in the flesh. God came in the flesh in the person of Jesus. One paraphrase of John 1:14 says, the Word became flesh and “moved into the neighborhood.” Or you might say, God became our friend in Jesus so that we might become friends with God.

Philippians 2:1-11 describes this well. We don’t have time to look at this fully today, but if you read what is sometimes considered the oldest passage in the New Testament because it is a very very early church song, you will see that this incarnational model of friendship means that our friendship with the poor is other centered, proximity (close), emptying of self, risk taking, and finds its source in God’s power at work in our lives.

Maybe one of the moments I felt like I lived into this kind of incarnational model of friendship was when I volunteered at a boys club in the projects on the south side of Chicago. Every Saturday I would go down with other Wheaton College students to take kids to the park to play. Every Sunday I would join more students who ran a Sunday school class for these kids. And every Wednesday I would go down with still more students for tutoring. I developed a special relationship with two young men. Their real names were Jeremy and Romerial but their nicknames were Squeaky and Nuke.

One Wednesday night as I sat on the floor in the hall of the school helping Squeaky and Nuke with their homework, I realized Squeaky was feeling my arm, gently rubbing it. I looked down and he asked, “Why are some people white and some people black?” Great question. I paused to prepare my answer. I was going to tell him what I thought at the time was the right answer. That people had begun light skinned and as they migrated to warmer climates, their skin color darkened over time to be able to bear the intensity of the sun. In other words, in my mind at the time, people had started out white and become black.

Before I had a chance to give my answer to Squeaky’s question, Nuke jumped in and said, “I know why.” I said, “Tell us,” and he said, “Y’all lost your blackness!” Whoa! I realized in that moment of friendship through presence (not presents), of friendship through “moving” into a neighborhood that I most likely would never go into, that the way I saw the world was a very “white” way of seeing the world. In that moment, Nuke helped me see something I had never seen and in that sense, come closer to Truth.

Basic Recipe

So how do we replicate this same kind of thing at SCC? Well, in one sense SCC is itself a mission. We exist to ignite authentic life in Christ by connecting and growing. We are a mission to those who have spiritual needs to connect them to God and others and to grow in the character of Christ. (Actually we all have spiritual needs don’t we!) But in another sense SCC is on a mission. We exist to ignite authentic life in Christ by serving, serving our church, our community, and our world.

This is a mission to both the “poor in spirit” (those who have spiritual needs) and the poor (those who are literally poor). Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3, NRSV). And in the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20, NRSV).

Ultimately this is all about friendship. It’s about building friendships with those who have spiritual needs and physical needs. It’s about following Jesus’ model of becoming friends with us so that we might become friends with God. It’s about breaking out of our familiar friendships, the easy ones, the ones with people who are so very similar to us, and building friendships with people who are different than we are, who stretch us and draw us closer into the Truth. Mixin It Up is about mixing our small groups and missions together so that small groups become a door into missions and missions become a door into small groups. Why do we seek friendship with those who are in spiritual and physical need? Because God first sought out friendship with each of us, each of us who is in spiritual and physical need.

Friends, let’s mix it up!

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Missions

Mixin It Up – Mixin in Justice

February 8, 2011 by Tom Leave a Comment

Mixin It Up – Mixin in Justice
Sycamore Creek Church
February 6, 2011
Tom Arthur
Amos 8:1-7

Peace, Friends!

Today we wrap up a four part sermon series called Mixin It Up. What are we mixin up? We’re mixin up missions and small groups. These are two things that sometimes we don’t think to put together. Kind of like apples and cheese. When I first saw someone put apples and cheese together to eat, I thought, “That’s disgusting.” But then I gave it a try and was surprised at how good it tasted. The same is often true of missions and small groups. We keep them separate, but throughout the next two months, each small group will be meeting and doing some kind of mission project in the community. The emphasis here is not so much on serving but on building friendships with the poor and poor in spirit. Friendship is a give and take kind of thing. We receive as much if not more than what we give. And I’m not talking about just receiving the good feeling of serving. I’m talking about the kinds of things you receive from friends. Companionship. Laughter. Forgiveness. Grace. Salvation.

The first week we looked at a basic blueprint for how this was all going to work. Then we looked at Jesus’ incarnation, coming in the flesh, as a model for what that friendship looks like. Last week we looked at mission with vs. mission to. Today we’re mixin in justice. Missions as friendship with the poor and the poor in spirit is also about justice. Let’s look to the book of Amos to understand how missions is an act of justice.

Amos 8:1-7 (NLT)

¹ Then the Sovereign LORD showed me another vision. In it I saw a basket filled with ripe fruit. ² “What do you see, Amos?” he asked.

I replied, “A basket full of ripe fruit.”

Then the LORD said, “This fruit represents my people of Israel — ripe for punishment! I will not delay their punishment again. ³ In that day the riotous sounds of singing in the Temple will turn to wailing. Dead bodies will be scattered everywhere. They will be carried out of the city in silence. I, the Sovereign LORD, have spoken!”

⁴ Listen to this, you who rob the poor and trample the needy! ⁵ You can’t wait for the Sabbath day to be over and the religious festivals to end so you can get back to cheating the helpless. You measure out your grain in false measures and weigh it out on dishonest scales. ⁶ And you mix the wheat you sell with chaff swept from the floor! Then you enslave poor people for a debt of one piece of silver or a pair of sandals.

⁷ Now the LORD has sworn this oath by his own name, the Pride of Israel : “I will never forget the wicked things you have done!

This is God’s story for us today. Thank you, God!

I love puns. I hear the groans already. Have you ever heard of the O. Henry Pun-Off? It’s a contest between two people to see who can come up with the most puns about a topic. Each person has three seconds to come up with a pun. They go back and forth and back and forth until one can’t come up with a pun. The winning round a few years ago was on the theme of dance and the winners came up with over 30 puns on dancing. Here are my top ten (feel free to groan):

1. You’re bouncing of the waltz on that.

2. Do cows that are sick have moo-sick?

3. If I was Canadian I’d be doing ball-eh?

4. I’m a-ball-ed at that one.

5. I don’t know if I con-go on.

6. At the senior dance you need the right beverage. It’s called a prom-enade.

7. I’ve been working so hard I’d better put my ho-down.

8. I’ve got to hip-hop off the stage.

9. Dan’ce my best friend.

10. All this talk about dancing makes me think, “I-rish dancing was part of this competition.”

Just in case that wasn’t enough, here’s one of my own:

These punsters gave us ten puns, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make us laugh. No pun in ten did.

Ughhhh….

Why all this talk about puns? Because Amos tells a pun to get across his point about justice. Did you catch it when we read Amos? If not, here it is:

Amos 8:2 (NLT)

“What do you see, Amos?” [the LORD] asked.
I replied, “A basket full of ripe fruit.”
Then the LORD said, “This fruit represents my people of Israel — ripe for punishment!”

Ughhh….

It’s a little hard to translate this pun, so here’s how another translation does it:

Amos 8:2 (NIV)

“What do you see, Amos?” [the LORD] asked.
“A basket of ripe fruit,” I answered.
Then the Lord said to me, “The time is ripe for my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.”

That’s right. “Ughhh” because of the pun. But even more, “Ughhh” because of the injustice. What’s up with this? Isn’t God slow to anger and abounding in love? Apparently God’s patience also runs out.

If you read Amos over the next week, which I recommend (it’s only nine chapters long), you’ll come across four visions in chapters seven and eight. The first two show God’s patience. God shows Amos a vision of locusts that destroy the land and crops. Then we read, “Then I said, ‘O Sovereign LORD, please forgive your people! Unless you relent, Israel will not survive, for we are only a small nation.’ So the LORD relented and did not fulfill the vision. ‘I won’t do it,’ he said” (Amos 7:2-3, NLT). After this vision God shows Amos a vision of fire but relents on this one two. Then we get past God’s patience. God shows Amos a vision of a plumb line, a line that tells you whether something is straight. It is a line of judgment. God then says, “I will no longer ignore all their sins.” And lastly Amos gets this vision of ripe fruit and God says, “I will not delay their punishment again.” If the LORD is slow to anger, it does suggest that at some point God’s patience runs out. What is it that could possibly cause God’s patience to run out?

The answer to this question is that Israel has oppressed the poor.

God says, “Listen to this, you who rob the poor and trample the needy!…Then you enslave poor people for a debt of one piece of silver or a pair of sandals. Now the LORD has sworn this oath by his own name, the Pride of Israel : “I will never forget the wicked things you have done!” (Amos 8:4-7, NLT). In other words, they have “nickel and dimed” the poor. This theme shows up over and over again in Amos. God says, “They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals—they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way…” (Amos 2:6-8, NRSV). And then again, “Hear this word, you cows of Bashan who are on Mount Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy…” (Amos 4:1-2, NRSV). And again, “You trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain…and push aside the needy in the gate” (Amos 5:10-12, NRSV). Israel has neglected and even actively oppressed the poor among them.

But the wrong goes even deeper. For it is the church people who do this! This past week I did probably one of the most unchristian things I have done in a long time. I went to the vigil on Monday night for the young people who died in a car accident this past Sunday. It was a very very cold night. I was bundled up as warmly as I could be. It was a very moving vigil. Somewhere over 200 youth were there to mourn and remember and pray for their fellow students. Many of them were woefully underdressed.

After the vigil was over, I saw one of our church members, Erin Umpstead, who is a teacher at Holt High School. As we were talking one of her students came up to her and showed her the frost bite on her hands. She wasn’t wearing any gloves. No hat. She had flats on with no socks. I was moved by Erin’s compassion for this young woman. Erin offered her student her own coat, gloves, and hat. She didn’t accept but she did say that she needed a ride home. Erin had a couple of things she was still wanting to do, but she offered to give her a ride home after she had met some other teachers who were there.

The thought quickly went through my head, “I’m leaving right now. I could give this young woman a ride home.” The next thought that went through my head was, “Remember your training. It’s not appropriate for a pastor to give a young woman a ride alone. It might not look good. It could ruin your vocation.” You know what I did? I didn’t even offer her a ride home. I chose the safety of “appropriate boundaries for clergy” over the real immediate need that was there present before me, and I walked by myself to my car. I chose purity of religious perception over love. I kicked myself all the way home, and then I asked God to forgive me. If I knew who the girl was, I would ask for her forgiveness too. This is the kind of thing going on that Amos points out. The church people, the ones who are supposed to know about God’s love, are ignoring the poor.

God says through Amos, “You can’t wait for the Sabbath day to be over and the religious festivals to end so you can get back to cheating the helpless” (Amos 8:5, NLT). They go to “church” but then they can’t wait for it to be over so they can get back to making a buck off the poor. God adds, “Come to Bethel — and transgress; to Gilgal — and multiply transgression; bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days; bring a thank offering of leavened bread, and proclaim freewill offerings, publish them; for so you love to do, O people of Israel! says the Lord GOD” (Amos 4:4-5, NRSV). And again, “Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:22-24, NRSV).

This last one might sound familiar. Martin Luther King, Jr. used that last line in his “I Have a Dream” speech. MLK is perhaps one of the greatest examples in modern times of a Christian who stood up to injustice in a uniquely Christian manner – non-violently with the aim of retaining the possibility for friendship between blacks and whites and people of all colors. As we watch the mostly peaceful demonstrators in Egypt, we are seeing the same call for justice played out even today.

When I was living in Durham, North Carolina, I would often stop and have lunch with Allen, a guy who “panhandled” at the highway exit to my street. One day as we were sitting there eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and talking, a police car pulled up to us. The policeman asked us if we had a panhandler license. Yes you heard me right. A panhandler license. In Durham, you have to have a license to beg! To get this license you must have a picture ID and pay a fee. Then you have to wear this license around your neck along with a florescent vest.

Laws like this have been overturned as unconstitutional in many cities that have them, but in order for them to be overturned, someone with the resources and will to challenge the law must first be arrested. The policeman told us that we would have to move along or we would be arrested. (The issue here is not with the policeman. He is merely doing his job of enforcing the law.) Now I have tended to be one who steers clear of acts of civil disobedience like this, but for some reason, maybe it was because Allen had become my friend, a kind of righteous anger boiled in my veins. I was very heavily leaning toward being arrested, if Allen wanted to, but he was not, and so we moved on, and an unjust law that criminalizes the poor continues in Durham.

On Facebook this past week, I asked about times that people have stood up for injustice. Emily Vliek, a hospice social worker, wrote me this, and I think it is spot on:

Hey Tom-
I’ve been thinking about your post the other day asking if we have ever stood up against an injustice. I think I’ve learned a lot about this topic in my first years as a social worker, and I am by no means perfect or some ideal of standing up against injustice. I learn EVERYDAY! But I think that often “standing up against injustice” can sound like some grand gesture that only really strong or outspoken people can do. I automatically think of protests and sit-ins and MLK. While this is what he did, I think it can also be done on a daily basis in much smaller ways. Anybody can take a part in stopping injustice. I see this more as being an advocate role for others. Whether they are, “poor or poor in spirit” we can give a voice to people who have no voice or those who can’t seem to find their voice. Helping share another’s story can be a powerful way to stop injustice. In my work I try to make each of my patient’s and family’s struggles relatable so that we treat each patient as we would want to be treated. It struck me the other day that this is stopping injustice. Whether we are poor or poor in spirit we each have common experiences in our living, our dying, our parenting, etc. I feel that finding these commonalities and finding our common humanity is fighting injustice. When others don’t seem as drastically different from “us”…that can be a powerful change.

God might say to us through Amos, “Therefore thus I will do to you, O Israel; because I will do this to you, prepare to meet your God, O Israel!” (Amos 4:12, NRSV).

You might be thinking right now, “But aren’t we saved by grace through faith?” (Ephesians 2:8). By all means, but faith does not exclude doing good. In fact, ripe faith produces good fruit. Consider these three ideas:

Faith without works is dead (James 2:26).

Our deeds must be consistent with repentance (Acts 26:20).

Christians bear fruit worthy of repentance (Matthew 3:8).

Israel in Amos’ time has become fruitless, and God will not forgive them forever. My own translation of the pun in Amos chapter eight goes like this:

Thus the Lord God showed me a cage of fruit,
He asked me, “What do you see, Amos?”
I said, “A cage of fruit.”
The Lord God said to me, “My people, Israel, have become fruitless;
I will not forgive them forever.”

God has not called us to cage up our fruit. Salvation includes bearing fruit in our own lives and in the lives of those around us. Salvation is not just about friendship with God (justification) but also friendship with others (sanctification). Remember Jesus’ summary of all the commandments: Love God and love your neighbor (Matthew 22:36-40). Being saved, being a Christian means changing things here and now. We are not just souls waiting for salvation in eternity. We are whole people with bodies and real needs that need saving right now.

What does this kind fruit of justice look like when it is ripe? Consider these three examples: First, in the third century plague, Christians risked their lives by ministering to those sick and dying. If they could not cure them, they would make sure that none of them died alone. Second, I recently read about the story of Louis Zamporini, a U.S. POW in a Japanese POW camp. The guards in his camp treated him horrifically except one. Kawamura, one of Louis’ Japanese guards, was also a Christian. Kawamura gave Louis extra rations, didn’t beat him, and even protected him from the violence of other guards. Third, Archbishop Elias Chacour, an Arab Christian, runs a school in Israel for children of any religion: Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. In this way he helps build friendships that one day may bring peace in such a conflict ridden region.

What people with what needs need to be saved here in Lansing? That’s what Mixin It Up is all about. Through our small groups we’ll be forming friendships with the poor and poor in spirit. Sometimes all that we’ll be able to give is our friendship. That in itself is an act of justice. Sometimes we’ll be able to do more.

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: justice, Missions, mixin

Mixin It Up – Mission Is Friendship

January 24, 2011 by Tom Leave a Comment

Mixin It Up – Mission Is Friendship
Sycamore Creek Church
Philippians 2:1-11
January 23, 2010
Tom Arthur

Peace, Friends!

What do these people have in common? Ralph was a liberal pastor who didn’t believe in the virgin birth. Tom was a fundamentalist pastor who didn’t think women should be in leadership. Father Denny was a Catholic priest who believed in the pope. Allen was a homeless man who panhandled on a highway exit. Brandy was a lesbian studying theology. Christian was a young black woman studying for ministry. Yousha was an Indian born in Britain, raised in New Jersey, and a Muslim.

What do all these people have in common? They are all my friends. But what marks friendship. In the age of being a “friend” on Facebook, “friend” means something different than it has in the past. With all of these people I’m not talking about being a Facebook friend. I’m talking about people I have spent significant time with. What marks that kind of a friendship? I think you spend time together. You spend leisure time together. You talk and have conversations. You share your hopes and dreams. These conversations often happen over food and a shared meal. There is a proximity that exists in friendship. It is harder to be a friend when you live far away from one another.

I also think that a mark of friendship is risk. When you are friends with someone you risk giving of your resources. I mean your time, your talents, your money. You risk being in conflict with your friends, especially when you risk honesty. You risk being inconvenienced. You risk being humbled by being wrong. Your even risk death. Not necessarily your own but the pain of your friend dying. One of the most tragic moments in my life was when my best friend from childhood, Brad Ehrlichman, died on the Value Jet crash on May 11, 1996. If you have friends, some of them are going to die. If you keep to yourself, you don’t risk this threat.

Of course the bigger the differences within friendship, the bigger the risks! In that respect, the biggest risk ever taken in friendship was the risk that Jesus took to become our friend. Paul in his letter to the Philippians describes that risk that Jesus took to become our friend.

Philippians 2:1-11 (NLT)

¹ Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ? Any comfort from his love? Any fellowship together in the Spirit? Are your hearts tender and sympathetic? ² Then make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one heart and purpose.

³ Don’t be selfish; don’t live to make a good impression on others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourself. ⁴ Don’t think only about your own affairs, but be interested in others, too, and what they are doing.

⁵ Your attitude should be the same that Christ Jesus had. ⁶ Though he was God, he did not demand and cling to his rights as God. ⁷ He made himself nothing; he took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form. ⁸ And in human form he obediently humbled himself even further by dying a criminal’s death on a cross. ⁹ Because of this, God raised him up to the heights of heaven and gave him a name that is above every other name, ¹⁰ so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹ and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

This is God’s teaching for us today. Thank you, God!

Throughout this series we’re talking about mission to the poor (those in physical need) and the poor in spirit (those in spiritual need). I’d like to explore more fully this morning what that mission means. I’d like to define mission not as “service” which is how we usually think about it, but as “friendship.” In particular, I’d like to define it as the kind of friendship Jesus showed us. This is an “incarnational” model of friendship.

What do I mean by “incarnational”? Let’s break that word down. First is the prefix, “in”, which simply means what it means: in. Then we’ve got “carn.” You may know this part of the word from your favorite kind of chili: chili con carne. Chili con carne is chili with meat in it. So if something is “in the carn” it means it is in the meat or in the flesh. So what I mean when I say an “incarnational model of friendship” is that I want to look at what it means that Jesus came “in the flesh” to be our friend.

Paul says that our “attitude should be the same that Christ Jesus had” (Philippians 2:5, NLT). So Jesus had a particular attitude that led him to come in the flesh. We should have that same attitude too, according to Paul. Let’s see what that attitude was.

Friendship – Other Centered

First, an incarnational model of friendship is one that is other-centered. Paul says, “Don’t be selfish; don’t live to make a good impression on others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourself. Don’t think only about your own affairs, but be interested in others, too, and what they are doing” (Philippians 2:3-4, NLT). In other words, you use your resources (time, talent, treasure) for the benefit of others.

I had a talent in seminary for studying. I was good at it. (Probably because I’m such a perfectionist.) I also had a friend who wasn’t the greatest student. This friend also wasn’t the best at taking notes or studying. Every semester we were given one week off classes to study for finals. My preference would have been to simply study by myself. I’d be more efficient that way. But this friend really needed help. So we’d get together, and I’d help my friend study. I’d share my notes and my ideas. I’d make up quizzes. I’d ask questions. I’d assign homework. I ended up something like a personal tutor. It would have been easier for me to not do this, but this was my friend. So I shared. Interestingly enough, the situation turned out to be a win-win for both of us. My friend learned a lot and was better prepared for finals, and I learned that the most effective way to learn is to teach. Students, are your studying efforts shared with others? If we have the same attitude that Jesus had, then our focus will be other-centered. We’ll share what we’ve got.

Friendship – Proximity

Second, an incarnational model of friendship is one that is near. While this idea is present in the passage we read from Philippians, John may say it best in his gospel. He says, “So the Word became human and lived here on earth among us” (John 1:14, NLT). The Message says that the Word “moved into the neighborhood.”

Sarah and I have great neighbors in Petoskey. They’re the Tollases. While we lived there we became such good friends that they asked us to be the godparents of their children. It was a real honor to be asked. They wanted us to be involved in the lives of their kids. So every month Addison, their son, and I would get together and hang out. We’d go down to the Little Traverse Bay and play on the playground. We’d walk along the trails of the Bear River. We’d hang out and play chess. We’d toss a Frisbee in our back yards. We’d do the kinds of the things that friends do.

When I moved to Durham, NC, I was determined to continue to be an influence in his life. But you know what? It’s really hard to maintain a friendship when you’re not close by. Fifteen hundred miles distance tends to put a damper on friendship. I haven’t been the best godfather since we moved. I still see him when we go back to Petoskey, but I’d like to do more.

Certainly there is a way that the internet has changed the definition and experience of being near to someone, but there is no substitute for face to face time with someone else. It’s awfully hard to build a friendship if you’re not nearby or don’t make an effort to draw close.

We’re talking about being friends with the poor and the poor in spirit. Where do you draw near to those who have physical needs and those who have spiritual needs? Do you “live in the neighborhood” as Jesus did? If we want to have the same kind of attitude that Jesus had toward being our friend, then we’ll draw near to the poor and poor in spirit.

Friendship – Emptying

Third, an incarnational model of friendship is one that empties oneself. Paul says, “Though he was God, he did not demand and cling to his rights as God. He made himself nothing; he took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form” (Philippians 2:6-7, NLT). Jesus emptied himself of his “rights” as God in order to be near to us and be our friend. He took on our “condition” (flesh) so that we might take on his “condition” (children of God).

When you are friends with someone, you take on their form. You learn to like their likes and dislike their dislikes. My friend Scott Chrostek is a pastor at The Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City, MO. He tells the story of meeting his future wife, Wendy, at a Duke basketball campout weekend. Duke graduate students camp out over a weekend to get in a lottery to be able to buy season tickets. They stayed up all night talking. Scott was smitten. Here he was talking to a beautiful woman who was also crazy enough to camp out for basketball tickets.

Over their courtship he took her to soccer games, basketball games, hockey games (she was from the south), and Durham Bulls minor league games. One summer while he was doing an internship in a very remote rural area, she did play-by-play announcing of the Pistons games over the phone. This was it. Scott knew that Wendy was the woman he wanted to marry.

When they got engaged and he took her home on Thanksgiving to meet his family in Detroit, he decided that given their shared love for sports, that he would buy her the ultimate gift: Thanksgiving Day tickets to the Detroit Lions football game. When he whipped them out and told her what they’d be doing on Thanksgiving, her reaction wasn’t what he expected. She looked shocked, but not in a good way. Then the truth came out. She told him, she didn’t like sports! What? He didn’t understand. She explained that she did all those things because she loved him. She liked what he liked because she loved him. Scott was a little shaken, but after some careful consideration, he realized that he loved her even more for taking the time to like what he liked.

When you follow Jesus’ attitude for friendship, you empty yourself of your “rights” and you take on the interests of others.

Friendship – Risk

Fourth, an incarnational model of friendship is open to risk. Even the risk of death. Paul tells us that “in human form [Jesus] obediently humbled himself even further by dying a criminal’s death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8, NLT).

What kinds of things do you risk? You risk time and energy. You risk inconvenience. You risk conflict and disagreement. You risk being wrong and therefore humbled. You even risk dying.

I asked for examples of risking in friendship of my friends on Facebook and Jenelle Wildbur told me that she risked joining a small group. She didn’t know anyone. She’s a bit introverted (like me), and going to share your life with people you don’t know at first is a big risk. But then she added, “Now these women are all my best friends.” Jenelle risked her comfort zone with new friends and ended up with best friends.

Marilyn Mannino wrote me this story about the risks that come with the friendship of a new child. She says:

I don’t know if this qualifies but we formed a new relationship when little Joe was born. I’m talking about our relationship with Joe, the baby. He was born with pneumothorax and had to spend 9 days in RNICU at Sparrow in 1988.

It was inconvenient for us to have to learn CPR before he could be released to us (but so worth it). It was risky taking him home. He had to wear a strap all of the time to alert us if he ever stopped breathing. It was hooked up to a box that kept track of his respirations and number of times he quit breathing. That thing was a pain in the you-know-what at night when it went off (sounded like a smoke alarm) when he wiggled out of it. But so worth it. He graduated from that thankfully fine.

Then when he started on solid foods (5 months old) he developed continual ear infections. THAT was inconvenient because he wouldn’t let us sleep at night due to ear pain. We went on for over a year with different antibiotic treatments. Finally had tubes put in both of his ears. That was nice but he still wanted us to be with him all night. He would SCREAM & carry on if we didn’t. It was amazing how long he could yell (6 hours). THAT was inconvenient at night. It was a risk to let him do that but (through parent counseling) worth it because he FINALLY got over it and would sleep w/o one of us being in his room with him. That sapped our energy big-time as we were both working full-time. This went on for a couple of years. I don’t remember very much in that time span. Too tired.

After all of that he turned into a teenager & matured & SLEEPS & now we are so proud of him. It was SO worth it to go through all that. We love him!

Wow. That’s a lot of risk. Thank you Marilyn and Joe, Sr. for teaching us something about what it means to risk in friendship.

Jesus tells us how to measure this kind of friendship. He says, “And here is how to measure it — the greatest love is shown when people lay down their lives for their friends. You are my friends if you obey me” (John 15:13-14, NLT). Sometimes we lay our lives down literally. Sometimes we lay our lives down in the way that Marilyn and Joe, Sr. laid their lives down for Joe, Jr.

Friendship’s Source

So an incarnational model of friendship is one that is other-centered, near in proximity, emptying of self, and willing to take risks. How do we have the energy and stamina and love to be able to have this kind of a friendship with the poor and poor in Spirit? Paul answers that question in the form of a question. He says, “Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ? Any comfort from his love? Any fellowship together in the Spirit? Are your hearts tender and sympathetic?” (Philippians 2:1, NLT).

We gain encouragement to this kind of friendship by belonging to Christ or being friends with Christ. There is a kind of grace that rubs off on us when we are friends first with Jesus. That leads us to have a comfort in the love of Christ amidst the risks, emptying, nearness, and other-centeredness.

Paul also points to the fellowship of the Spirit. The Spirit of God makes our hearts tender and sympathetic. When we belong to Christ we are filled with the same Spirit that was in Christ Jesus, God’s Spirit, and our hearts are softened toward friendship with those who have spiritual and physical needs.

The ultimate source of all this is having “the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5, NRSV). When we seek to follow after Jesus and practice the same way that he practiced, our minds are transformed and we are given all that we need to be friends with the poor and poor in spirit in the same way that he was friends with us. That’s a long-term perspective. It doesn’t all change and happen overnight. It takes patience. Friendship takes patience.

Friends, just as Jesus was friends with us, be friends with the poor and poor in spirit.

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Missions, Mixin It Up

Mixin It Up – A Basic Recipe

January 19, 2011 by Tom 1 Comment

Mixin It Up – A Basic Recipe
Sycamore Creek Church
January 16, 2011
Tom Arthur
Matthew 5:3
Luke 6:20

Peace, Friends!

What things do you like to mix up? Are there things you like to mix together that are a little unusual? I love scrambled eggs. There’s nothing really unusual about mixing together eggs and milk, but when it’s all mixed together, I like to put a little ketchup on top of it all! Now that’s mixin it up! Ketchup and eggs…

Today we begin mixin it up. A dash of small groups and a pinch of missions. There are a lot of different ways to mix up missions and small groups. There’s some pretty basic ways like a hand whisk. Then there are some pretty complex ways like a Kitchen Aid. Some take more commitment than others, but they all do the same basic thing, mix it up.

Now on the one hand it may seem like small groups and missions go together just fine just like eggs and milk. And that’s right. I’ve heard a lot over the last year and a half about how each small group would really like to be doing service projects. The only problem is that as a church, we’re not mixin it up very often if ever. I’d like to explore a basic recipe today for mixin together missions and small groups. Let’s begin with what missions is.

Missions is Friendship

Missions is about friendship first and foremost. Friendship with God and with one another, and friendship is a two-way street. Thus, missions isn’t just about us giving, but it’s also about us receiving. We’re going to explore missions as a two-way friendship more fully next week, but today we’re going to begin looking at the giving side of missions: friendship with others, meeting people’s physical needs, and friendship with God, meeting people’s spiritual needs.

There are two key verses for today. The first comes from what is often called The Sermon on the Mount found in Matthew chapter five through seven. At the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus lists a series of blessings, often called the beatitudes. He says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3, NRSV). Then in Luke we find what is sometimes called the Sermon on the Plain. Here Luke shares Jesus’ teaching but with a slight twist. He says, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20, NRSV). Here we have the two sides of missions. Ministering to the poor in spirit (meeting people’s spiritual needs of friendship with God) and ministering to the poor (meeting people’s physical need of friendship with one another). Let’s begin with the spiritual needs, the poor in spirit.

Missions is Evangelism

Missions is evangelism. Evangelism comes from the Greek work evangelion which means “good news.” Thus, missions means sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with others. What is the good news? In a nutshell I would say that the good news is that God became friends with humanity so that humanity might become friends with God.

Here I think of missionaries who go to other countries to share this good news with those who have not yet heard it. This is a classic image of the missionary going to exotic locales and meeting indigenous peoples and bringing the message of Jesus and the Word of God.

SCC is itself a mission. We invite people to join this good news by joining our community as we seek friendship with God where our spiritual needs are met. We seek to ignite authentic life in Christ by connecting people to God and others, growing in the character of Christ, and serving the church, community, and world. When we invite people to join our community by worshiping with us or attending a small group, we are participating in missions.

Several years ago our church embarked on a major ad campaign to invite people to join us. We had billboards around Lansing. We bought commercial time on TV. We made various invitations for you to invite your friends, neighbors, family, and co-workers to come join us. This was missions. We must resist the temptation to think that missions only happens separate of what we as a community do on a regular basis in worship and small groups. SCC is itself a mission, and we continue to invite people to join in friendship with God by joining our community as we seek ever deeper friendship with God.

Missions takes place every time we make an invitation card for a message series. Those cards are missions. How many people have you invited to join us? How did you come to SCC? Did someone invite you? All Christians, then, are missionaries. We are missionaries to our school, our workplace, our neighborhood. Anywhere we go is a missions field to invite people to join our community as we seek friendship with God.

Thus, when you serve the church by making our ministries happen—Kid’s Creek, StuREV, FYBY, worship, media, praise band, set-up and tear-down, small groups, and more—you are participating in missions. We seek to help those who are poor in spirit connect in friendship with God and others and to grow in the character of Christ by serving in our church. This is the first aspect of missions: serving the poor in spirit by meeting the spiritual needs. Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Missions is Service

The second part of missions is service to meet people’s physical needs. Blessed are the poor. What kind of good news is it if the good news is only after we die? Sure, good news after we die is good news, but if that’s all we share, then we’re missing half of the good news, and the first part of missions, friendship with God, loses credibility.

Neglecting people’s physical needs has, at times, been a legitimate critique of missionaries. But there is another image of missionaries that comes to mind that helps balance out this critique. That is the image of the missionary who goes and builds hospitals, schools, sanitation, agriculture, and more. Here I think of Emma Trout who recently went to Tanzania to help build wells. Or Lori Miller who has gone to Ghana to help learn and teach about sustainable sanitation. Or Teresa Miller and the many of you who have gone with her to Nicaragua to provide medical clinics.

A friend of mine, Amy Scott, used to work in Petoskey. While working there she was told of a church group that came in and had a meal. When they left, the waiter found on the table not a tip but a tract. Yikes! On the other hand, a friend of mine, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove who grew up Baptist, tells a story about going to Washington D.C. shortly after graduating from college to help change the world through politics. On his way to some meeting there was a homeless guy lying on the sidewalk. He stepped over him and went on his way. Shortly after doing so, his conscience got him as he remembered his teaching from Sunday school about the poor being Jesus. So he ran back to his office, grabbed a tract and wrapped it in a twenty and went back and gave it to the guy. He realized that he had to meet both this man’s spiritual and physical needs and this was the best he could imagine at the time. Jonathan has gone on to participate in a movement called New Monasticism in which Christians live in the city together and provide hospitality to the homeless.

You need not go to another country to meet people’s physical needs. Every Christian is called to help meet the physical needs of his or her neighbor, the person whose locker is right beside yours, the person you sit next to in class, the co-worker in the cubicle next to yours, the single mom in the apartment across the hall from yours, the hurting family member, or your small group member who is in the hospital. All of us are poor at some point in our life because none of us can meet all our own physical needs by ourselves. This is mission to those who are poor. They are all around us and sitting right next to us right now.

Recently I was at a meeting where the book, The Externally Focused Church, was being discussed. In this book is a list of ways to know your church is being successful. Here is that list:

The number of cigarette butts in the church parking lot.

The number of adoptions people in the church have made from local foster care.

The number of classes for special needs children and adults.
The number of former convicted felons serving in the church.
The number of phone calls from community leaders asking the church’s advice.
The number of meetings that take place somewhere besides the church building.
The number of days the pastor doesn’t spend time in the church office but in the community.
The number of dollars saved by the local schools because the church has painted the walls.
The number of people in new jobs thanks to the free job training center you opened.

How successful is our church? SCC seeks to help those who are poor by serving our community and world.

Missions is Evangelism and Service

SCC is successful in some ways and in other ways we have a very long way to go. From my own personal observations, we tend to be a church that is good at giving our money. I have actually been blown away several times at the generosity of our church in giving to meet physical needs, but we have, I think a long way to go in giving of our friendship to those in need. I’d like to briefly map out a plan for how we intend to improve this in the coming months. We’re going to be mixin it up: SCC will love and serve the poor and poor in spirit in our church and community by building and sustaining diverse friendships through support groups and small groups committing to missions.

This plan focuses on both the poor and the poor in spirit. It also focuses on those needs in our community and right here in our church. There are two initiatives that go along with this plan: support groups and small groups committing to missions.

Support Groups

Support Groups provide ongoing care for those who are in need of it. These needs are often of a nature that small groups aren’t able to meet. We have begun first with an umbrella support group led by Pat Orme and Rick Ray. It meets on Wednesday nights and anyone can go for any reason. If you’re struggling with a physical ailment and need support, if you’re struggling in a failing marriage, if you’re struggling with trying to become pregnant, if you’re struggling with an addiction, and the like then this support group is for you.

Another kind of support group that we have is Financial Peace University or FPU. FPU helps support those who are struggling with debt to find financial peace by living simply, paying off debt, and giving generously. A new FPU class is beginning in the next several weeks and I know that many of you are in need of this kind of support. Several of you have taken this class in the past, but you are no longer following the FPU principles. You need to take it again and find the continued support you need to get out of debt and live not just within your means but below your means. Make 2011 the year that you get your financial house in order.

Small Groups and Missions

The second initiative is mixing together small groups and missions. Over the next two or three months we’re going to be turning each small group into a mission team. Each small group will appoint a mission coordinator for that group. Over the next two or three months each time they meet, they won’t meet to read a book or study the Bible, they’ll meet to meet the physical needs in our community.

A launch team has put together a list several pages long of local opportunities for service that happen at the exact time or close to the exact time that your small group already meets. Each week each small group will try a different service opportunity. Come March 27^th during worship each small group will make a public commitment to serve regularly in one of the opportunities. How often they serve will be up to each small group, but I would recommend that they serve at least once for every book they read or study they do together. So if you read a book over six weeks, then you’d serve on the seventh week. This commitment, of course, will have to be made in conversation with the group and the mission opportunity itself.

Each of these service commitments will then be communicated to the broader church community so that anyone can join whether they are part of that small group or not, but that small group will make up the core team that commits to being there. In this way service and mission will be a door into small groups and small groups will be a door into service and mission.

There is one last part to this whole mixin it up series. We’ll be joining together in a church-wide mission project: the Church of Greater Lansing’s Food Drop. On February 26^th we will join over 30 churches in the greater Lansing area for a rally and worship at Holt High School at 11AM and then will deliver food boxes to those in need in our community. Over 2000 boxes will be delivered that day! Jeremy Kratky, our worship leader, will be helping to lead worship that day, and I’d like to see a big showing from our church. Can we get 50 or more people there? I think we can! There are also opportunities to serve that day to make the whole thing happen. There are even opportunities to serve leading up to that day. You can find more info here: http://trinitywired.com/food-drop.

Mixin it Up!

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Being on the discrimination side of segregation, MLK understood this dynamic of missions being about both spiritual and physical needs. He wrote, “Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.” Our faith is dying or dead if it doesn’t include meeting both spiritual and physical needs. As we mix it up in 2011, will you join us in the kitchen?

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Missions, Mixin It Up

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Mixin It Up – Mission Sunday

Mixin It Up – Mixin in Justice

Mixin It Up – Mission Is Friendship

Mixin It Up – A Basic Recipe

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