1.  We started Launch Team Gatherings for Hope Church NYC!  It’s been glorious fun.  Some hiccups here and there, but we’re so excited for what’s to come!

from l to r: Me, Tina, Jen, Eli, and Peter

2.  Went to the Train Show at the Bronx Botanical Garden with Pete, Jen, and Eli back in December.  If you haven’t been, it’s really an amazing exhibit.

3.  Went to a Knicks game, compliments of dear friends Tom and Edna – the best seats we’ve ever had!  I’ve come to realize that the Knicks have the best fans in the world.  This clicked for me as I watched MSG rockin while the Knicks played the Bobcats.  Oh, and Tom has a ridiculous knack for running into celebrities.  Ridiculous.

4.  Went to Houston for New Year’s and Tina’s birthday.  It was my first New Year’s outside of NYC in I-don’t-remember-how-long-it’s-been.  I love my in-laws and I love Houston, Texas.  I also love all the friends my wife has introduced me to.  I’ll probably write about this one day – how I feel so lucky to have met the people I have through my wife.  Yes.

5.  Had a perspective-shifting class at Fuller in Los Angeles with Leith Anderson.  My next blog post will allude briefly to the class, but in short, meeting and learning from Leith and his wife Charleen (along with other leaders from around the world) was a great privilege.

From l to r: Stephen, Carrol, and Phil

From l to r: Mom, Dylan, Viv, and Me. Missing in Pictures: Steph and Carrol's boys Isaiah and Evan.

6.  In LA, got to hang with my mom, my brothers Stephen and Phillip and their families, and good friends Mike, Ivan, Stacey, Deb, Loc, and Christina.  So blessed to have amazing family and friends on the West Coast.

7.  Went to a Memorial Gathering in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put on by some senior friends at Roosevelt Island, many of whom lived through the Civil Rights Movement.   Thanks Uncle Jim!  It was such a gift to be there.

8.  We’re having a baby very soon…

It’s been a great few weeks… 2012 is going to be quite a ride.

I wanted to conclude this series with some reflections from a great little book called Letters by a Modern Mystic by Frank Laubauch, who was a missionary to the Philippines in the early 1900s.

The book is basically a journal of Laubuach’s attempt to be mindful of God throughout every minute of every day.  Literally.

His goal was to call attention to Christ one second of every minute of every day.  He writes of his successes and struggles in this endeavor, and it’s really inspiring to read about how devoted he was to being mindful of Christ in every task while he was awake.

What struck me when reading this account is not the intense discipline and focus he demonstrated (as impressive as it is), but how doggedly committed he was to this practice because of how much he loved Jesus.

He desperately wanted to submit to God’s will, and therefore he disciplined his thought life to call its attention toward God whenever possible.

Again, his spiritual practice/discipline was not a measurement of spiritual maturity, but instead it was a catalyst toward loving and submitting to God more readily.

This is a practice I’ve begun as well, albeit with mixed results.  Every person I’ve committed a sin against in the past couple of months can readily attest to my failure.

But as my good friend Jay likes to tell me, “Progress, not perfection.”

Perhaps you can join me in 2012 to commit to minute-by-minute “conscious listening to the inner voice, asking without ceasing, ‘What, Father, do you desire said? What, Father, do you desire done this minute?’”

I think God is telling me to stop writing and go exercise now.

I mentioned how evaluating spiritual maturity based on spiritual practices can be problematic, but by no means does this indicate that spiritual practices should be done away with altogether.

In fact, I’d argue that spiritual practices are necessary for growing spiritually, even if they might not be the most accurate indicators of spiritual maturity.

In other words, spiritual practices are not signs of spiritual maturity, but they are catalysts of spiritual maturity.

To succeed in any task, there is some form of practice or discipline that helps me to excel in that task, even if the task might be somewhat amorphis like “loving my wife,” a highly unquantifiable endeavor.

There are practices and disciplines that I must implement for a better marriage, for example, things like telling Tina how much I appreciate her, trying to serve her whenever I can, and actively listening to her whenever she speaks to me.

Growing in any area of my life takes work, and that work usually fleshes out as “practices” or “disciplines.”

Sidenote: Whether single or married, you should really pick up Tim and Kathy Keller’s new book The Meaning of Marriage.  It’s an extraordinary book – one of the best books I’ve read on marriage with helpful advice to singles.  

In it, the Kellers talk about how disciplines and practices can lead toward feelings of love in marriage.  The same is true for the spiritual life! End of Sidenote

Alas, any kind of maturity takes work.

As I mentioned last time, some have to work harder than others due to nature/nurture, but nonetheless healthy maturing takes some measure of “a long obedience in the right direction,” as Eugene Petersen would say (Pete Scazzero calls building a framework of spiritual practices “Developing a Rule of Life.”

For each person the practices and disciplines are different.  However, we all need some sort of discipline in order to grow more loving, more healthy, more whatever the aim might be.

At this point it’s easy to react by saying, “the spiritual life is all grace!  you’re advocating some sort of works based system!”

Now, while it’s true that grace is the foundation of everything, we can too readily dismiss any type of healthy striving as an overreaction against anything that hints of dare I say, work.

The key, I believe, is that our end goal always be in mind when it comes to our disciplines – to fall more deeply committed and in love with Jesus – instead of having the list of spiritual disciplines as our measuring stick of spiritual maturity (a la the Pharisees).

In my next post, I’ll share one practice that has really challenged me this year, and I’ll mention the little book whence it came.

Why?  Because I’m a sinner.

No matter how much I pray or read the Bible or forgive people, there will be times that I revert to bad habits and selfish tendencies.  I can get irritable and defensive and unloving in an instant, usually depending on whether I’ve taken a nap or not.

Moreover, each of us have different temperaments, tendencies, and ways of relating to God that are different.  Hence, what looks like quantifiable spiritual maturity for you, may not be quantifiable spiritual maturity for me.

John Ortberg put it this way, “Disciples are hand crafted, not mass produced.”

Usually, spiritual maturity is measured by spiritual practices (known as “spiritual disciplines” in an earlier era), but in Scripture the most spiritually disciplined people happen to be the Pharisees, and it doesn’t take a scholar to see that Jesus’ harshest words were saved for the “religious” people.

Now this is not to say that we should do away with any core spiritual practices – it’s just to clarify that measuring spiritual maturity by the types or kinds of spiritual practices can be somewhat of a dangerous thing, especially if it’s used to judge another person’s spiritual maturity (notice I use the word “judge” instead of “assess” – there can be a fine line, I think).

Or, it can be a dangerous thing to insist that somehow I’m the most spiritually mature person there is, thereby losing any semblance of spiritual maturity by losing the very hallmark of spiritual maturity – humility.

—

It’s also true that some of us may have more raw “loving God and loving others” material to work with than others.  I’m not saying this as an excuse, but as a general observation.  If we’ve come from nurturing environments and have been given a certain type of temperament, then we might have a higher proclivity toward being a loving, secure person than others.

I remember reading somewhere in one of CS Lewis’ books (I believe it was Mere Christianity but I’m too lazy to pick it up due to my lack of spiritual maturity) that measuring spiritual growth by good deeds is different for each person because of where one started with Christ, as opposed to where one is currently with Christ.

So for instance, “person A” could have come from a generally healthy family system and been given a certain type of “grace” toward being freely generous.  Christ in “person A” still needs to work on some stuff though, and if he is prideful then he won’t grow much from the raw material that he’s been given.

Meanwhile, I could be a really arrogant miser who somehow meets Christ, and I’ve actually come a long way toward being generous and thoughtful, but because I started out as a miser, I don’t look nearly as mature as person A.   In fact, I still lag way behind according to most people when observing the “love meter” or “spiritual maturity” meter.

Ah, but I’ve grown much more from where I started, and that’s the part that people don’t see or understand.

More thoughts to come…

The person said to me, “Sometimes I wish I could do what you’re doing.”

I thought, “Are you serious?! We’re having a baby and I have no stable income!”

But then she said, “It’s like you’ve sold all your possessions to follow Jesus.”

—-

Honestly, we haven’t sold everything.  In fact, we didn’t sell much.  I simply left a pretty stable job, and we still own a lot of stuff.

We have an apartment, food to eat, clothes to wear, a car, and our Macs.  You know, all the “essential” first world stuff.  We also have loads of kids stuff from generous people that has given new meaning to “making room for a baby” during Christmas.

We have dear family and friends who will buy us meals at times, and will also let us crash at their homes if we ever dry up our savings.

But in some ways, I get why the young woman said “it’s like you’ve sold your possessions.”

I think this is how I understand what she said: “it’s like you’ve taken a leap into liminal space – the unknown, insecure, unpredictable feeling of losing the sense of control and security.  And you’ve done this because Jesus told you to.”

Jesus told me to.

Wow, I’ve really become one of those Christians.

—-

I once heard from someone that it’s good to have the experience of literally selling all your possessions every 10-15 years, simply as a spiritual lesson.

Can you imagine if we actually, literally, did that?

Ah yes, in some cases it would be unwise and would do more harm than good.

But in some cases it’d be awfully wise.

I think one reason it’s so hard for me to fathom selling everything from time to time is because my attachments really are that deep.

—-

One of the reasons I love reading the book of Acts is because it’s so full of radical faith.  Disciples of Jesus are straight gangsta when it comes to the gospel and living it out.

Somehow, modern faith gets so sanitized to the point that Christianity means finding the way toward more security, more control, more comfort.

And maybe that’s why the invitation toward being a disciple includes some measure of selling or leaving or or dying to follow Him, as if experiencing the sensation of loss and dependence is essential to the Jesus Way.

I’ve shared before how the feelings of loss or falling come in almost every stage of life, so we constantly have opportunities to trust God more deeply in the normalness of life.

But what if we actively chose to leap into the unknown from time to time too, a way of “selling our possessions” as a discipline of trusting more deeply?

—-

I realize why church planting has been so invigorating for me.  The hard work of planting is all the unseen praying and trusting that God will provide and that God will show up.

Sure, there’s some calculated risk in what we’re doing (thank God for coaching and denominational support), but there’s the real chance that what we’re trying to do might not work.

And that’s why my spiritual life has been so invigorated.  I’m forced into a deeper level of trust than I’ve had in some time.

Starting a church and starting a family can do that to people.

And at the end of the day, I have no idea what’s going to happen over the next few months.  But for some odd reason, I have a strong intuition that God’s gonna be in it nonetheless.

He always is.

We were actually approached by a few people to plant a church in Manhattan (including a couple of denominations) before we settled on Astoria.  If you ask Tina, I was thisclose to choosing Manhattan, but Astoria kept tugging at our hearts.  Here are some reasons why:

1.  Astoria is One of the Least Churched Areas of Queens, NY – I posted this on twitter (courtesy of David Ellis, pastor of Astoria Community Church), but if you were to increase the attendance of every Christian church in Queens by 1,000 people, you’d still be left with 1.5 million unchurched people in the borough of Queens.  That’s more than the entire population of the city of Philadelphia.

Queens is three times (3 x’s) as unchurched as Manhattan, and yet, 40% of the Christian churches in Manhattan have been planted in the last 10 years, showing just how big a draw Manhattan has been for new churches.  Meanwhile, church planting in Brooklyn and Queens have lagged behind (although these boroughs are much more populous).

As unchurched as Queens is, consider all the Korean churches in Flushing, the Spanish churches in Corona, and all the other areas of churched populations throughout this Borough.  Astoria does not have many churches, unfortunately.

I’ve listed around 15 English speaking in the area (there might be more), and the average size is roughly ~65 people.

David Ellis, who planted Astoria Community Church ten years ago, told me, “this area desperately needs more churches!”

2.  We Live Close By – Tina and I hang out in Astoria and LIC all the time.  As we walk/drive through neighborhoods, it’s been common for us to pray for the different areas and people we meet.

3.  Astoria is Remarkably Diverse – For an area that used to be almost entirely Italian and Greek, the region is very diverse.  Moreover it’s very diverse socio-economically too.

Consider:

- In the Zip Code 11106, where our Sunday Gatherings will likely be housed, there is a population of 43,000 and a poverty rate of 18.7% (poverty being defined as a household income below ~$26,000).

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

A friend of mine joked the other day that this will be the theme verse of Hope, the church we’re planting.

In this verse, David has the odds stacked against him, running from the powerful king and his army.

David’s trying to lead a movement, and these are the folks who show up.  Those in distress, in debt, and discontent.

Sure sounds like a church to me.

———

Lately I’ve been walking around Astoria, specifically around the area that we’ll be having our Sunday gatherings for Hope.  I’ve been praying that God leads me to the right people to talk to, guiding my steps and my conversations at every turn.

Yesterday, I happened to walk outside of a dry cleaner, and there were three people gathered, two gentlemen and a woman with a young child.  I knew immediately that I was supposed to talk to them.

So I introduced myself.

“Hi, my name is Drew, I’m a pastor and I live on Roosevelt Island with my wife.  We’re starting a church in this neighborhood.  Would you be interested in being part of it one day?”

The three of them looked at each other, bemused perhaps by my gumption, searching for a way to respond without laughing out loud.

“We’re not church people,” the woman said, with the others nodding in agreement.  Then they laughed.

I laughed too, because it was funny that they thought the question was funny.

Then I asked, “Why not?  Do you think this neighborhood could use another church?”

“Oh for sure this neighborhood needs churches!” The woman responded.  “But we’re not church people.”

One man (I’ll call him Brian) chimed in, “I’m not gonna lie, I like the bottle, and I’ve been drinking since I was a teenager.  I really don’t want to change.”

The other man (I’ll call him Tom) said, “I haven’t been to church.  I was locked up for 20 years and there really hasn’t been a reason for me to go to church.”

The woman (I’ll call her Cynthia) laughed and said once more, “We’re not church people.”

———

One of the reasons I’ve fallen in love with church planting is because it’s an opportunity to reach and serve more people, a way of revitalizing the Church’s mission to speak and demonstrate the good news of Jesus in tangible ways.

If you check out this article by Tim Keller, you can see why church planting is an important dynamic for continual growth and advancement of the gospel, particularly for very people who are “not church people.”

Lyle Shaller puts it this way: “The single most effective evangelistic methodology under heaven is planting new churches.”

For those of you put off by the word “evangelist”, it’s a word that literally comes from the greek words “good”, and “news” or “messenger of”.

I think we could all use a little more good news in this city.  I think we could all use more good messengers, too.

———

“What if I told you that you are church people, but you just didn’t know it,” I said.

They looked at me skeptically, but interested.

“Because here’s what I believe about you.  I believe that deep down you’re willing to give God a chance if he showed you he was real and powerful.  I believe that if he revealed himself to you in such a supernatural, life-giving way, you’d follow Him anywhere.”

“What if I told you that despite what you’ve done in the past, God has something new for you?  What if I told you that ‘church people’ are just messed up people with broken pasts and presents who believe that somehow, God is in our midst and inviting us into a new reality, a new life?”

“What if I told you that we’d also have free donuts and coffee at our church gatherings in homes and on Sundays?”

We all laughed.

———

We talked for over 30 minutes.  People passed by and said hello, almost every person asking Brian if he had some beer, to which he would reply, “No, but let me introduce you to this Father.”

“Just call me Drew,” I would say.

We spoke of the suffocating grind of the city, the broken families that we see and experience ourselves, the need for hope where this is none.

We spoke of Jesus and how He gives life.  We spoke of how our neighborhoods need something, anything to revitalize us.

As our time came to a close due to errands that needed to be run, I asked, “Can I pray for you?”

“Sure,” they responded.  “Why not?”

One by one, I prayed for them.  Brian who was a self-described drunk.  Tom who was the self-described ex-con.  Cynthia who was the self-described “just trying to survive” person. I even prayed for the young 2 year-old grandson of the woman.

I don’t remember exactly what I prayed, but I knew I was asking God to guide my lips and my words, to speak truth and love over these kind people, and communicate whatever God wanted me to say.

I know one word that I continued to pray was “Hope.”

As we finished praying the Cynthia was in tears and the men were smiling.

As we were saying our goodbyes, Brian said with the others nodding in agreement, “We’d love to come to the church.  When does it start?”

Experiencing and Inspiring Hope Everywhere.

“…those who hope in his unfailing love.” – Psalm 33:18

- Our Home Church Groups will be located throughout the city -

- Our initial Sunday Gatherings will be located in Astoria -

If you’re interested in joining our Launch Team, feel free to email me.

To learn more, click here.

Two weeks ago, we were approved by the Evangelical Covenant Church denomination to plant a church.  We went through an assessment process that involved various meetings, counseling sessions, and practicums.  Somehow we tricked them into letting us plant a church.

But seriously, we’re so grateful for the denomination and all the pastors and leaders we’ve met in the denomination.  We’re really grateful for our Director of Church Planting, Jason Condon, and the supervision and resourcing we’ll be getting from the East Coast Conference of the denomination.  There are some really great Covenant churches in the denomination in this area, and we’re grateful to be joining the family.

Here’s more about the church plant in another blog post.  Thanks for all your encouraging comments, notes and emails throughout the past few months as we’ve been discerning.  It’s great to know we have so many people supporting us through prayer.

Also, a special thanks to New Life Fellowship where I served as a pastoral staff member for the past ten years.  I could not be where I am without my experiences there, and I am grateful to be serving the same Great God in this new venture.

Tina and I are so blessed.