GlocalNet

The movement I was raised in was more of a dispensational premillennialist view point of life and theology.  From reading my blog, it is obvious I am no longer that.  I love the Arabs as much as the Jews and believe the temple has been rebuilt inside the heart of believers.  Jesus really can come whenever he’s ready! An empty grave made that possible - not a piece of real estate in Jerusalem.  Another dimension of dispensational premillennialism most people don’t realize is a view of the cessation of all spiritual gifts - that existed only in the time of the Apostles.  It’s funny to me, how charismatics have taken a theology of Israel but don’t realize the other side of that theology is that the supernatural is over!  But as a result of this, it left me isolated from another part of the body of Christ that took a different viewpoint. 

In the 60’s, there was a move of God in the church. It was frequently called the charismatic movement and was associated with various spiritual gifts - tongues being the biggest one.  I may not agree with everything that happened in that movement but I do believe it was from God - I don’t believe it was handled in a healthy way by either side.  It became really controversial and actually split churches because you had some from the charismatic side that demanded all speak in tongues and if you didn’t you were a second class Christian.  Others, in the mainline view point tried to stop others from experiencing what they were - so the stage was set for conflict.  It’s so interesting to me, how the most conservative Christians can agree to reach the lost world for Jesus - but refuse to try to get along - or give one another grace to disagree over non-eternal issues.

Enter that background - I’m in East Texas, my dad is pastor of First Baptist Church - and David Wilkerson moves to Lindale,  Everyone just assumed he would be going to the local Assembly of God Church - but he didn’t - when he was in town, he came to my Dad’s church.  My Dad is a strong expositor and Bro. Dave loved that.  We didn’t know what to make of that.  Would this create problems for the church?  Not at all - Dave had no agenda for our …

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Yesterday a friend tweeted me that I was in the top 200 Christian blogs in the world!  I asked him if I was #200!  I was 189 - since when did being the top 189 mean anything!!!!  But it was nice, I don’t blog consistently enough or honestly have enough time to blog like I’d like to.  I enjoy blogging - even more than writing books.  You write about what has just happened or what you’re learning in real-time or what you are passionate about.  Someone showed me the list - they even had my name wrong, called me by my brother’s name, Mark! - it led to other lists - top this church and that church - and to my surprise our church was on some of those lists. 

The same day I won my #189 rank - woo hoooo!!!!! - was the same day I was with 75 US church planters and 13 global pastors.  These global pastors started their churches that have grown by literally tens of thousands - some hundreds of thousands - they represent 25,000 churches that have evolved from those 13 initial churches and over 3 million believers.  Some of these men have been beaten within an inch of their life and imprisoned - some have lost friends.  They are in very difficult places in the world.  Most of them didn’t start out as pastors but as everything from bankers, doctors, police chiefs and professors and lots of other jobs – and they wound up accepting Christ - and then were called into ministry and wound up starting churches.  Now that’s a stat that’s pretty incredible.  How does God rank things?  I read how things were ranked on the largest churches, the most this and that, etc. Here’s how we might read in eternity God’s rank.

1.  The “being like a little child rank” - you know the story - Jesus said unless you become like a little child you will not enter the kingdom.  The idea is simplicity of life and faith.

2.  The “humble himself” rank - last night Kirk Freeman, a church planter who went to San Antonio and has done a fantastic job said “God wants humility more than anything else in leaders.”  When I look at these global pastors - they are the most humble and unassuming men you would ever meet.  Most pastors don’t realize who they …

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A few years ago I read The Medicci Effect, The Hidden Connections of Things, and another book called Consilience - those 3 books radically shaped my mind and thinking.  Mainstream wisdom is to focus in a single area - the more you focus the better you get and the more results you will have.  I would say - that is true, but just for a season.  Those 3 books helped me understand that cross-disciplinary learning, exploration, and experimentation actually lead to huge breakthroughs and open the door to the future.  As a result, I began to expand my circles of relationships and domains of society.  When you study a single discipline - isolated from the rest - you grow at one rate - but when you combine them - such as biology and technology to bio-technology - each area grows faster than ever. 

From this I began to read history, science, theology, literature, business, government, etc. - as a result of this - my views, my approach unexpectedly took some sharp turns.  I have never left my orthodox faith - it did make me think deeply about how I understood it and how it worked in a broader context.  Add to that the travel in seeing different global cultures and the relationships I began to make with non-Christians and non-clerical Christians around the world - and you get a new paradigm in the application of faith.  What I realized was how we had isolated faith from everywhere but the church and religion when in reality Jesus has awesome power and appeal in broader context and conversations that we for the most part ignore.

This concept is driven home in the New Testament by an understanding of the church as the body of Christ.  You need all the parts to make it complete - and you need all the ministries - and all the people working towards a single goal but in different areas for it to impact.  If you study the Old Testament, you discover the prophets played a role, but just a role - kings, rulers, businessmen, etc., were the real story.  In the New Testament in reading the life of Jesus - his focus was not on the religious leaders of the day.  In reading Acts - the first church planting movement that impacted the known world in that day was from a business leader who …

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I’ve known the guy in the picture since he was a baby. He grew up at NorthWood.  He has his own landscaping business and this is his first trip to Vietnam.  When he arrived I was told he was kind of “shell shocked” by the culture and differences and was just taking it in - somewhat quiet.  When they got to the mountains where they are working - and building water buffalo corrals, I was told it was as if he came alive.  He knew what he was doing, wound up directing the work and really connected with the people there in North Vietnam.  I’m so proud of him.  One good thing about staying at a church where you’re part of the community - versus just a preacher on Sundays - is seeing people come alive and making a difference locally and globally.

On this trip, one lady is a leader with a company in stocks and she is directing micro-finance.  People have bought pigs for years, but if you get a water buffalo that really changes your economic ability, so that’s what she helped people get.  In the evenings, my wife, a school teacher, along with other teachers is teaching health and hygiene and English.  While they are there, two other groups from Glocal Ventures, churches in the U.S., are doing different things there as well. 

Nikki has been hanging out with Amy Colon - a church planters wife that we’ve known for years and years.  It’s neat seeing people grow up, seeing churches grow up, seeing a city grow up.  It’s all possible because the people in the church have been released to do what they know best in work and daily life.  It’s possible because we’ve redefined discipleship, not as learn, grow, and go - but hear and obey.  That’s something everybody can do with their skill.

Lately, I’ve received lots of emails from many different laymen, from many different denominations, networks, etc., and they’re all asking for help in the same way.  How can we engage our city and work globally like NorthWood?  We offer conferences and turbos throughout the year to teach that - but immediately - the first thing I would do - is help people redefine their job as their number one ministry - this is what the book REALTIME CONNECTIONS is about …

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Today, I buried a man who found Jesus a couple of years ago.  Not long after that they found a brain tumor.  He ran hard in pursuit of God.  In the worship room where we laid hands on him and asked God to heal him - we celebrated his life.  When we prayed for him, I saw a little kid with a baseball cap laying their hands on him - I thought it might be his child - it wasn’t - it was a lady who has battled cancer for 10 years - she had no hair from the chemo - though she knew her prognosis she was praying asking God to heal someone else.  She was incredible - the kindest most positive person I’ve ever met in my life facing something like that.  I buried her last month. 

A month ago I buried an ex-marine who helped us start our church.  When we began to pray about working in Vietnam - I really didn’t want to.  It was another church member’s idea - I was getting heat for wanting to work with “Commies” in Vietnam, but this man stood up for me and said we should do it - he didn’t realize I was ready to back out.  I loved that man deeply; he was a rock for me. 

Last night I went to see my dad who had been taken to the emergency room in Tyler - lots of problems.  When we got him in a room - as wild it was, he was in the room next to my father-in-law who had gone in the hospital a day earlier due to dialysis complications.  I sat in the hospital with my mom, herself in horrible shape, but none the less there for my dad, her body in pain. 

I always think of Ps 90:12 “Lord teach us to number our days” because we don’t live forever.  Enjoy life.  Live for what matters.  Live for who matters.  Be a servant to humanity.  I believe all these things.  But at the end of the day the parade comes to an end.  Those of us who hope in Jesus can say with Paul “O grave where is your victory, o death where is your sting?” 

We have good reason to think we are never going to die - we aren’t.  Ecclesiastes teaches us that God has built …

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A few months back, I took a small group of pastors to the West Bank and showed them how we engage globally and did some mentoring.  Matt Carter of Austin Stone was one of them.  He went back and did this video on a man that has become a friend.  Nikki and Vicky Scott went and worked at his place.  Thought you might enjoy his story: Daoud’s story.

This morning Pricilla Shirer is speaking to several hundred women at Northwood Church that have gathered for our women’s TWIRL conference.  I’m really proud of Nikki - my wife - she’s worked really hard during the past year and a half in developing our women’s ministry and it has really grown. 
  I’ve watched my wife lead women and work around the world and do things with people and gain access in ways that I never in a million years would be able to do.  Last month she was in the West Bank working with Muslim women that were refugees teaching health, hygiene, and lots of other things.  I’ve heard so many stories about the ladies there.  She was just invited to a country in the middle-east that’s affluent but has massive slave trade and some of the women from various countries have taken asylum in their embassies trying to get home and away from their task-masters.  They want her to come and do training there as well.  In a few days she leaves for Hanoi and then up in the mountains near China where she will be teaching, and building corrals for water buffalo for a micro-finance project she’s involved with.  That doesn’t include the cell group she leads - all the mentoring and counseling she does - or the speaking she does.  She’s not paid a dime for any of that but is busier today than she was when she taught full-time.  Her ministry is extensive and impressive. 
  My daughter grew up watching her mother and me, and traveling the world with us.  Recently she graduated from Baylor and began working at NorthWood as an intern, then on “glocal” ministry for youth.  Now she’s in our global impact office because the work she did for the youth grew fast and wound up involving so many adults.  Her heart for the economically disadvantaged and refugees is seen not just in her work - but where she spends her time and relationships she has when she’s not “at work.”  She also blew me away when she preached for the youth a month ago - she was good!  Not that I thought she wouldn’t be - but that’s just not something we ever “did”. 
  My mom is perhaps the greatest Christian lady I’ve ever known.  Anyone who knows her knows her grace, compassion, …

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Last night I received an email from a close friend - Suhail Khan - who’s being blasted from many simply for being a Muslim.  He’s a Republican, involved in frankly the most conservative side of the Republican Party.  He was an aide to President Bush - friends with all the conservative guys that if I were to name you would know.  But some people don’t like him simply because he’s a Muslim and they take every opportunity they can to trash him.  It confuses some Republicans that a Muslim would share the same political philosophy as a non-Muslim.  I know many Christians whose character doesn’t come close to his.  I’ve traveled the world with him and listened to him promote religious freedom for Christians in the Middle-East.  What I love about that is that he IS a Muslim and has a voice that I never will hear in this part of the world. 

I hear about “Islamaphobia” in the West - and it’s true.  Muslims fear being a minority - the violence and suspicion are real and can make life very hard. Some people don’t want to give Muslims the same religious freedoms and rights that they grant to everyone else in the U.S.  It makes me sad.  I’m not a Muslim - I don’t agree with it.  BUT, neither do I agree with Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Atheism, etc. but I recognize that rights have to be given and the first of all human rights - is religious freedom.  It’s about owning your own brain.

So, I’m in the Middle-East and it’s no different.  I see the same amount of discrimination here - only it’s towards Christians.  In Egypt they’re writing about “Christianophobia” and how it must stop.  Christianity - though a middle-eastern faith - having been embraced by the West - is viewed not just in religious terms but in geo-political terms as well.  Thus, whatever a nation does, that has a majority of Christians, is viewed as the “Christian” position.  Candidly, I believe the persecution is far worse here for Christians in the Middle-East than Muslims in the west.  Riots where Muslims would be killed would not be tolerated in the U.S. and shouldn’t be. So since I’ve been here - I’ve been following the news on the Christians losing their lives in Egypt.  I’ve met people who have been imprisoned simply because of their faith.  I …

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I am in a city right now of 3 million people with 2.5 million of them being from other countries that are employed here.  Cities like this have been springing up all over the world.  At the same time, whether its North Africans coming in to France & Spain, Indonesians into Australia, or Mexicans trying to get into the US - people move. 

I see this in Texas.  The number one food we all love is Tex-Mex!  There are certain phrases that even an Anglo like me uses after being around Mexicans.  We love mariachi bands.  We interchange the names from each culture of our children:  Marco, Juanita, Carlos, and the list goes on.  There is a lot of intermarriage and despite legal issues, challenges, and sometimes confusion and conflict - most Anglo Texans wouldn’t feel at home without the Hispanic culture all around us.  We’ve come to love it.  Anglos are concerned about illegal border crossings - but rest assured, no one had better mess with “our” Texicans! 

The Chinese - some of the greatest case studies of global migration - always seem to have “China towns” established wherever they go, and yet they impact far more in societies than just Chinese immigrants.  Chinese are all over the world and may be the greatest adaptors to varied global cultures of any people - much can be learned from them.  As second and third generation children mature and grow up they merge their tribal culture with the broader culture and begin to impact the overall culture. 

A few months ago I was with a former leader in President Bush’s White House.  The man is Jewish, and he said he’s convinced the greatest gift of the Jews to humanity given by God was not the land but the Jewish people.  He outlined all the people that the tiny nation of Israel had produced in world leaders, scientist, businessmen, and many other areas.  His contention was that God allowed Jews to impact the world in an incredible way that only through living as a diaspora community could Jews have impacted the world as they did.  It was utterly brilliant and made me think deeply. 

As the populations move, there is an “unsteadying” of the status quo and those with established power are forced to deal with all of the issues surrounding migration.  The influence of “the other” present …

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I felt as though I was worshipping in heaven last night - literally.  I was with people of every race and a few dozen nations that work and live in this country and gather as Jesus followers.  It was 3 hours, but powerful the whole time.  There was another preacher from the Phillipines that did incredible.  There was an African choir - and dancing group that made me dance with them - I wasn’t any good!  There was a Filipino band.  Tons of others.  I was blown away by the play they did of Jesus -  I think I tweeted a picture of a Filipino Jesus!  I also loved the tech guy - he was a radical worshipper - I was wondering if he’d hit the right keys - better not Heath & Chris!!!!  Being in a room with hundreds of leaders of “house” churches who gather in mass was just awesome. 

I wanted to transport everyone I know to be a part of the worship.  I wanted my daughter Jill to be there.  I wanted our worship team to see.  I wanted pastors to see and hear - it’s so different from what you see back home.  Daniel & Josh - the Hmong and the Iranian I wanted them to see.  I wanted Phuc Dang to sing Vietnamese for them!  Nikki would have loved the dancers in robes.  Mark Kimmel would have - - - watched!  Omar would have been at home.  Matt - would have had a break from Building Community!  What did I see?

Abandonment in worship.  Not goofiness or stupidness - but abandonment.  People smiling, laughing, singing with all their might - doing their best.  Everyone was into it. 

Commissioning of a church starter.  This church starter was a lady who is from another neighboring country.  She has a high position in her job - met Jesus - came to this place - and is now on a very dangerous border serving people, seeing them come to faith in Christ and seeing a church emerge.  This lady is middle aged, classy, educated, sharp, and courageous. 

I saw cabbies, doctors, educators, food service workers, household servants, public works servants, diplomats, even an army chaplain - all worshipping together.  They don’t “do” domains - they live them.  Many came here not just to make money but to make Jesus famous. 

I heard God.  The …

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