Cathedrals….

Before I begin, I wanted to say Congrat to Pastor Daniel and Tammie for the arrival of their daughter Faith. (Just in case you’re not on twitter and somehow missed the news).

Having said that, let me begin…

This post is based off one of the talks at the Leadership convention I was at over the weekend, but this is something that stuck with me and reminded me so much about Lifepoint that I had to post it.

Most people I know who tour Europe always mention two things to me. 1) The castles and 2) The cathedrals… which if you read the topic of this post is what I’m going to be talking about.

These monolithic? neolithic? Ginormous structures were massive houses of worship, built in a time where drafting software didn’t exist and heavy equipment was defined as a hammer that weighed more than 10 pounds….

Notre Dame I don’t think anyone would argue with me if I were to say it’s a architectural and artistic marvel… They began construction in 1163, the cathedral was completed in 1345 so that’s a 182 year period, during which time life expectancy was 30 years at best, or over 7 generations of time, the people who began work on the cathedral did so knowing they would never see the completion, but that they were building something that would outlast them.

And yes there were several cathedrals that went up under in under 50 years, but even so that’s beyond life expectancy for any one generation.

And the craftsmanship. There were artist who worked on the structures doing carvings and other touches, in places where people would never see the work their response when asked? God would see it. And they did this work and in some places it’s there for all to see, and in others only God would be able to see their work. They dedicated their lives to build these structures and NO ONE knows their names, they were there to do something great.

People dedicated their lives to the work because they had a vision of greatness, and in their case it was building a location that honored God to worship him.

As I sit here and type this I don’t know where you, the reader is in your life. I don’t know if you’re a member of an awesome church that’s mission is to reach people far from God, or if you don’t even know what this whole Christian thing is about and you look at people like me as if we’re mad, my hope today is that you would understand this, when people grab hold of a dream, a vision that’s bigger than they are, and when they’re willing to sacrifice to see the vision through, then they can accomplish great things.

If you’re a lifepointer and someone pointed you to this blog post I want to tell you a few things, that before the doors open on Sunday morning and people come pouring in, there’s a team who shows up before the sun (though NOT before the Son) arrives and they go about the business of unloading tons of gear off of 3 trailers to build an environment that helps people to focus in on the Word of God that pastor is going to bring.
That during the service there’s a small army of people working making sure that there’s as little to distract someone as possible, they might be holding a baby, it might be pushing a sound knob, it might be teaching a 5 year-old.
That after the service and you’ve gone home, or more likely out to lunch (be honest!) that there’s another group who’ll spend over an hour restoring the school back to how it was before we began (And in some cases even better), including reloading those same three trailers.
That during the week the staff and at least a platoon’s worth of volunteers are working behind the scenes to prepare for the next week,
That pastor is on his knees in desperate prayer to God his heart breaking for the lost that we KNOW is going to be walking into church, possible for the first time, possibly for the only time, and that we have one chance to reach them. That’s a burden of a senior pastor and one that I’ll never be able to fully comprehend. (Sorry off on a tangent).

For the most part, if you just come and go and show up to lifepoint you’ll be blessed, you’ll hear the Word of God preached straight from the Bible, you’ll hear worship music that amplifies and glorifies our amazing God.

And you’ll be just like a tourist walking through a cathedral amazed at the beauty of it all, and never know any of the stories behind the stories.

But if you get your hands on the net, if you decide to get out of the seat and join us in the field, you’ll find your life on an amazing ride with other people, who like those who came before are willing to pour out their lives for a cause a purpose that’s bigger then we are. You’ll be putting your lives into creating something that’s much more amazing than a giant building, it’s seeing life change and we get to see results in our lifetime.

And should we go on for another seven generations, another 182 years, I doubt seriously that people will know our name.

But if they know the name of Jesus, if they enter a relationship with their Creator, and Savior, than like the amazing artisan ship of centuries past, our lives would have been poured out into something that truly does last.

God Bless
Matt Furukawa June 8, 2009

Random posts with commentary…

Well when I first saw this, i hadn’t realized that it was ONN and not CNN, which led to some confusion and later laughs. Though one line they have in there is true, “I’ll buy almost anything if it’s shiny and made by apple” as i’m surrounded by mac users at LC (And no, I’m not a mac hater)…

Forget Napster, of Kazaa, or whatever it is that they’re going after these days, the mpaa and riaa need to go after China, and they’re not the only ones! Copyrights (and human rights if you really want to get right down to it) violations are rampant in the worlds most populous nation.

Pastor Furtick from Elevation Church nails something that I’m still working on in this post.

Pete Wilson from Crosspoint posted a link to THIS post, which i found to be very insightful.

And speaking of insightful Perry Noble from Newspring has a three part post on what the Church can learn from the Auto industry Here, here and here.

Ben Arment hits a point on getin creative here.

Craig Groeschel of lifechurch has an amazing (if short) post here, reminding us hat it takes all kinds for the body… but my favorite line from his post is

He can use Baptist Christians, Methodist Christians, Episcopal Christians, and Spirit-filled tongue talking Holy Ghost rollin’ Christians

I’m actually working on a separate post in which I’ll reference Craig’s post, but for now,

The Payout…

Recently (well a week-ish) ago I had the chance to talk to Pastor about the payout for volunteers. Looking at what was it that got our teams to do the amazing things that they do, looking at what they do is nothing short of phenomenal, but why?

Why would people give up their Sunday (Morning for some, whole day for a few others) why would they make time during their week doing things for free that would astonish most people. Why do a few put 20+ hours a week into this?

Submitted for your approval (Yes with the accent): a few reasons why our Volunteer army does what it does. This list isn’t all-inclusive in fact its quite short, and I’m sure that there are a lot of things that people would say that aren’t on this list… but I’m the one blogging here and this is what I managed to come up with.

Reason number one: Bigger than yourself, AKA wanting to belong to something. People join many organization, or volunteer for community services because they like to be a part of something that it bigger than just them.

Reason number two: Emotional beneficiary, AKA That warm fuzzy feeling. A lot of people get a warm and fuzzy feeling for doing things for others.

Reason number three (and this is the real one I told pastor that I thought the pay out was for our volunteers): Life change, AKA grabbing the net. Or I could say buying into the vision.

Lifepoint is about one thing, reaching people far from Christ so that they can experience God’s plan for their life.

That’s what I think most of our volunteers get as their payout, we get the humbling honor to see peoples lives change. The day we talked about this I realized that we’ve seen more people take a radical step of faith and forever change their eternal destination than we started this church with, THIS YEAR ALONE, and we’ve got 4 months to go before the year is over, I don’t think there is anything out there that compares to a payout like this, and I daresay that there isn’t a single core volunteer who would disagree with me.

We Interrupt this regulary scheduled blog to bring you…

As probably the most active (and unquestionably the most verbose) Blogger in the Lifepoint Staff, (Both Volunteer and paid staff) I also try to keep current on what other churches and ministries are up to. As such I follow many other blogs, only some of which I have in my blog list.

The results of the above are occasionally I link to another blog for information or insight, or something of that nature. Today, though I just wanted to share something that I thought was really flipping (and by use of the term “flipping” I am merely attempting to state that this goes way beyond the term awesome) awesome.

As perhaps not everyone at Lifepoint knows (But will if they read this post) we are part of a network of churches (Ground Level Network) The church spearheading this is Elevation Pastored by Pastor Furtick. They are hugely impacting their community and have invested a lot into Lifepoint Church.

So back to the reason for this post, I was reading Wade Joy’s Blog (Elevation’s Worhsip Pastor) and found THIS POST, and then went to Pastor Furticks Blog and Read THIS POST and I got excited. and I mean excited, why? Read and see for yourself!

We Interrupt this regulary scheduled blog to bring you…

As probably the most active (and unquestionably the most verbose) Blogger in the Lifepoint Staff, (Both Volunteer and paid staff) I also try to keep current on what other churches and ministries are up to. As such I follow many other blogs, only some of which I have in my blog list.

The results of the above are occasionally I link to another blog for information or insight, or something of that nature. Today, though I just wanted to share something that I thought was really flipping (and by use of the term “flipping” I am merely attempting to state that this goes way beyond the term awesome) awesome.

As perhaps not everyone at Lifepoint knows (But will if they read this post) we are part of a network of churches (Ground Level Network) The church spearheading this is Elevation Pastored by Pastor Furtick. They are hugely impacting their community and have invested a lot into Lifepoint Church.

So back to the reason for this post, I was reading Wade Joy’s Blog (Elevation’s Worhsip Pastor) and found THIS POST, and then went to Pastor Furticks Blog and Read THIS POST and I got excited. and I mean excited, why? Read and see for yourself!

What a Day!

I’m not sure if words can describe the amazing day I’ve had today.

To start off we baptized 61 people this morning. And we only had 17 scheduled. How? Well I could explain but I’m going to guess that Pastor Daniel’s blog will have much more information about it in a day or so. I’ll link over to there once we get to that point.

Two of those people were members of my team! And another one is from our downtown leadership team! I was helping out backstage so I got to see all of them! For me it was really emotional, I wanted to cry in joy!

Earlier this year I posted about a talk that Pastor gave us about having the vessels for oil.

Well this morning was a God thing, we had 51 sets of clothing prepared for, and when we had 24 people respond first service we were scrambling to get stuff dry and reset for second service.

We used all 51 sets of prepared clothing and not a single person had to “double up” and used a previously used set! How awesome is our God. I’m throughly convinced that if we had 52 sets of clothing there would have been 62 baptisms, he had us prepare the vessels and provided the oil until we ran out!

And our downtown campus praise team led worship this morning and did an awesome job!

So this morning was amazing, then following the service I climbed into a van and we drove 10(ish) hours to Atlanta which is now where I’m posting from.

Had crawfish and gator tail for dinner!

I know that Josh is doing a blogumentary from Drive and I’ll be posting regular updates myself. Actually as all of us who blog (Pastor, Pick, Josh and Myself) are all down here and all have our labtops I’ll wager all of us will be updating.

What a Day!

I’m not sure if words can describe the amazing day I’ve had today.

To start off we baptized 61 people this morning. And we only had 17 scheduled. How? Well I could explain but I’m going to guess that Pastor Daniel’s blog will have much more information about it in a day or so. I’ll link over to there once we get to that point.

Two of those people were members of my team! And another one is from our downtown leadership team! I was helping out backstage so I got to see all of them! For me it was really emotional, I wanted to cry in joy!

Earlier this year I posted about a talk that Pastor gave us about having the vessels for oil.

Well this morning was a God thing, we had 51 sets of clothing prepared for, and when we had 24 people respond first service we were scrambling to get stuff dry and reset for second service.

We used all 51 sets of prepared clothing and not a single person had to “double up” and used a previously used set! How awesome is our God. I’m throughly convinced that if we had 52 sets of clothing there would have been 62 baptisms, he had us prepare the vessels and provided the oil until we ran out!

And our downtown campus praise team led worship this morning and did an awesome job!

So this morning was amazing, then following the service I climbed into a van and we drove 10(ish) hours to Atlanta which is now where I’m posting from.

Had crawfish and gator tail for dinner!

I know that Josh is doing a blogumentary from Drive and I’ll be posting regular updates myself. Actually as all of us who blog (Pastor, Pick, Josh and Myself) are all down here and all have our labtops I’ll wager all of us will be updating.

Yes and Amen…

I just got off the phone with Jeremy.

They are en-route to home.

Everyone.

In better health, if a bit tired.

God answered our prayers Yes and Amen.

Yes and Amen…

I just got off the phone with Jeremy.

They are en-route to home.

Everyone.

In better health, if a bit tired.

God answered our prayers Yes and Amen.

Prayer Power…

Somewhere around 11:15 last night I received a call from one of our church staff. Now let me start off by saying I’m an optimistic realist, (IE I always focus on the positive, but I’m not ignorant to the fact that there is a negative), Now almost everyone stored on my cellphone has their own ringtone, (a rash and fiscally irresponsible decision but it’s too late now, and it has been useful) so as soon as I heard it I knew something was amiss, I know this person would have waited until the morning for good news so I dove for the phone. He was on the way to MCV in Richmond their baby was having seizures and he asked me to pray and get the word out.

This first thing I did was a very quick prayer, the second was to call my parents, then I got notice that they were being re-routed to Fairfax.

At that point I was mass texting my entire team to ask them to pray.

I got an amazing response back (proving that I’m not the only night-owl on my team) and we got down to business. (And intercession is major business in my opinion)*

Around 11:30 one of the staff came back with this message, “This is spiritual Warfare, use your sword!” I felt rather sheepish for not even considering that, but I grabbed my Bible and flipped to the Psalms. I read, I prayed I meditated, I worshiped, I sang, and I know that there were at least seven other people doing the same (well maybe not the singing). Finally around 12:45, and I have no other way to describe this, but I just felt a peace fall around me and I got up off the floor, closed my bible, and grabbed my ipod to listen to some worship music. Seven minutes later a text arrives letting me know that the seizures have stopped and the little one is resting calmly.

God we thank you for your mercy and grace. I thank you for being my comfort through this, and my strength. We ask for your continued involvement in the protections of this family and this child. Father I cry out for your mercy and ask that you continue to protect our staff at Lifepoint. Thank you for the cross, thank you for the stripes you endured, by which we are healed. In Jesus name.

I ask that anyone who reads this would pray for our staff and their families, for their physical, emotional, mental and spiritual protection. For the work that has begun here, that we would have the courage, the strength and the compassion to do what God has called us to do. That we would live lives obedient to his purpose.

Thank you and God bless.
~Matthew Furukawa
04/29/08

*Sidenote: post to follow.