God's heart beat faster...

Thats right.

I think last nights experience at KYC made God's heart beat faster.

I baptized 52 students into the Kingdom!

Sometimes we try to make our services too culturally relevant.  

Last night we forgot that we live in the culture of "I cant get this shirt wet, it was 80$" and acted like we lived in the days of the apostles.

We read some scripture on Baptism, then like the ethiopian eunuch, we just baptized people right then and there.  No one knew it was coming, it was a spontaneous baptism.

We set-up a blow up pool right in front of the stage.  

For the girls that were wearing "questionable" clothes we gave them a free KYC shirt to put over their clothes and we dunked them right there in the name of the father, son, and Holy Spirit!

But what are they going to do without their baptism certificate?

Why does the church make every thing so lame?

Church Numbers

I am reading the best book I have ever read on church leadership.

I'm not surprised because I love just about everything that Mark Driscoll writes.

Check out these stats, 

Right now our Youth Church is in the top 25 percent of all churches in the nation.

Anyone ready to be in the top 5%?

If we continue to grow like we have the past 2 years then sometime in 2009 we will pass 95% of Americas churches in size.

40 days of Purity!

God is calling us to a higher level of sexual purity.

Will you respond?

40 days....No Porn, No Masturbating, No Fooling Around, No Orgasms at all unless your married. 

Radical Purity in response to the Radical Grace of Jesus Christ that has set us free from the slavery of sin.

Can you do it?  Will you do it?

Don't be a Preacher!

If you want people to like you.

If you don't want to offend anyone.

If you only want to say what people want to hear.

If you won't say what the Bible has to say about the tough topics in life.

If your okay with "believers" sitting in your church and hearing the word without doing it.

Do the world a favor and quit!  Go be a motivational speaker somewhere and make lots of money, but don't try to be a preacher.

Preaching is proclamation.  It is prophecy.  It is about understanding the past, knowing the present, while seeing the future and proclaiming the steps it's going to take to get there while doing it all through the lens of Holy Scripture.

Preaching is all about confrontation.  Confronting the evil forces of today that try their best to steal our allegiances away from Christ. Confronting people with their beliefs and the Gap between those beliefs and the word of God.

It's easy to lecture.  It's easy to talk.  It's easy to discuss. It's even easy to motivate.

Sometimes it sucks being a preacher, last night was one of those nights.

I was going to preach on hearing from God, but God gave me a different word the night before.

Lust, Porn, and Masturbation.

My response- "Awesome, thanks God, I cant wait.  The people are going to love me.  This will be a really fun message to preach especially in the middle of summer when our numbers are already down a little bit.  Let's just give them all a really good reason to never come back again."

I wasn't excited, but I was broken.  I AM BROKEN!  This is not my church, it's Christ's church.  If He want's me to preach something tough, I will do it.  If he doesn't want me to be the biggest church in the state, thats fine.  So many "preachers" assume that God wants them to preach the thing that will offend the least amount of people and get the biggest crowd.

Real Preachers are ballsy enough to piss every person off, except Jesus!

Are you a Real Preacher?

Student Leadership Summit

Tomorrow I am taking our Student Leadership team away for a little R&R.

They have served the Kingdom well all year long and this is where we are able to get away and re-connect and pump them up with vision for the new year.

Last year was our first Summit and it was a blast.

So the next few days will be filled with early morning devotions, creek stomping, high ropes courses, hiking, low ropes courses, swimming, late night hikes with no flashlights, the leap of faith, campfires and allowing God to stretch our minds capacity to dream big things for our friends, families, schools, and cities.

Last year I set the camp record for climbing and nailing the leap of faith, 8 sec. from Ground to trapeze.  Im in better shape this year maybe I'll beat it.  Or you never know maybe a student leader can beat me.

Any takers?

He's about to be back in form.

So Jesus took a break from the worries of the world.

Okay, now I know that is like blasphemy or something.

What I mean is, for our last series, TEXT, we bought Jesus a cell phone and He started sending out text's everyday to anyone who wanted one from Him.

Our little brains didn't realize what a Big Deal He was and how many people would want to receive this daily text.

His contact book was filled past capacity within three weeks.  So we had two choices.

1.  Buy Jesus an iphone with unlimited contacts and TEXT options.

2.  Take a little break and get everyones cell phone provider info and TEXT using Jesus very own gmail account.  Jesus thought Hemail would be a better fit, but we settled for gmail.

We chose to try #2 first.

So He has had almost a week off but is getting back to the grind of changing the world one word at a time later this afternoon, or tomorrow.

I told Him that He was like 6 days late, but He reminded me that He is "always on time."  My Bad!

So if you want to hop this Jesus train, You can email him at Jesuskyc@gmail.com to get your daily text from THE MAN!

KYC

Personally, I thought last night was one of the best nights ever at KYC.

It started with Austin and New Wine remixing the Beetle's song Imagine.  It was so fresh and the words were absolutely right on with our focus last night.

We had another record breaking crowd, it was the first time we have been over 200.

Then I preached on "Recapturing the Wonder."  I talked about "getting your Peter Pan on!"  So many of us struggle with our faith because we have lost our imaginations.  Our imagination is where faith is birthed.  If I can't imagine God doing something amazing then I probably will never see Him do something that big.

During my entire message, Kris K, a student and artist from KYC, was painting the word "Wonderwall" on one of the side walls in the main room.

Then I challenged everyone present to dream big, "what could God do through them and KYC now?"

Austin came up again and played the song "wonderwall" by Oasis and the students took sharpie's and wrote their "wonder's or dreams" that they were believing God for.  It was so supernatural!  The things they wrote were amazing.  I stand in front of the wall and I am completely full of wonder.

If God wants to rock this world, all he has to do is answer those 200+ prayers on the wonderwall.  I dare Him to do it!