A NEW COACH ON OUR TEAM

Bishop Robert Hoshibata recently appointed the Rev. Beth Estock as a coaching consultant to The Epicenter Group: the third full-time person on our ministry team, and our first fulltime "associate pastor"!  Beth is coaching church planters and transformation leaders, especially in the areas where conventional church is failing to engage the population.  She also will lead several leader development clusters (perhaps the fastest growing dimension of Epicenter's work).  I am delighted to add Beth to our team for the following reasons:

THE POWER OF AN MRI

 

One year ago this week, as my hosts in the Philippines were driving me from church to church in the Cavite province south of Manila, I experienced chest pains.   Given my family history of early onset heart disease, this troubled me. On Palm Sunday 2011, I preached at Puno United Methodist Church in Quezon City.   Before worship, their pastor prayed over me and assured me that I would get home safely. After worship, a physician in the church examined me, and concluded that I might have pericarditis - exactly in line with my symptoms. She gave me a prescription, and my journey continued, with considerable discomfort for another three weeks.

HOW TO AVOID GETTING STUCK IN 1999

In September of 1999, we launched worship at the Soundside Campus of Gulf Breeze United Methodist Church with 590 worshipers the first Sunday.   We worked Charles Arn’s 1990’s check-list for how to start a new worship service as if it were Bible, and we had a good result.  September 16, 1999 remains one of the most thrilling days of my whole life.  We did a lot of things right and a few things wrong, but God was very good – and we added hundreds of new folks to active participation in an organized Christian faith community in the year that followed.

WHAT I AM LEARNING ABOUT "PARACHUTE-DROP" CHURCH PLANTS

When I worked as a new church developer for a United Methodist region a few years back, the one thing I said I would never do would be to try to plant a new church as a parachute drop: as a stranger and alien in a community. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I had helped establish two new faith communities in a place where I had lived and networked for several years. Dozens pitched in to help with both projects, and I lost sleep over neither.   Today (a decade later) these two faith communities together gather 1200 in worship on most Sundays.

MY CALL TO ACTION

I was sixteen years old, traveling with my church youth group in the New Mexico mountains: listening to an American missionary talk about his work in Korea. Blah, blah, blah the speaker went on. Calling us to action. It meant nothing to me. But it just so happened, as I zoned out from whatever he was talking about, that the Spirit of God started chattering in my soul. I experienced that night what my faith community confirmed to be a "call to ministry." I had no idea what I was getting into, but the sense of God's calling that began that night, has guided and motivated me now for more than 33 years.

WHEN COMMUNITIES GET LOST

Recently, a group of us in Virginia gathered with one of our clergy peers, Jan Holton from Yale Divinity School, to think about the nature of community.

During the time of the "Lost Boys of Sudan", orphans of war wandered for hundreds of miles as refugees in east central Africa.   Along their meandering journey, they would sometimes run into wild animals, specifically lions. They learned that their only hope of defense against a lion was to put the small children in the center of a human circle, and for the older children to surround them facing outward, in order to create the perception of something that was bigger than the lion.

Memo to Protestant Liberals (and Moderates): the Rapture did come and This is What's Left!

The other day as I left after two maddening hours at the Apple Store, running very late to fight the DC rush hour to pick up a friend for a baseball game, I got onto I-395 only to discover no traffic.   Whole lanes empty. I called my friend to joke, "The rapture came and it's wonderful - you can finally drive in this town!" Turns out it was just the Friday before a long weekend, and the legions had left town early.