Thanks for visiting my blog. I’ve moved it over to Journey’s new and improved website. You can find it by clicking here. It’s easy to remember http://www.journeycommunitychurch.com
Go to the site and click on blog. You can’t miss it.
Again, thanks for checking out my blog.
Shalom,
Ed

Sometime weekends come together in a way that you can’t take much credit for. This was one of those! This was definitely one of those.

I love teaching in Acts. There are lots of reasons that are just about the books of Acts! But I also sense that this fits hand in glove with where God is taking us as a Church (ekklesisa). It’s a chance to talk about our values, who we are and to cast vision.

In that spirit we decided that we would feature a “My Journey” story every weekend. We had a panel of leaders from our “take charge” teams scheduled for August. For a variety of reasons it got moved to this weekend. The message was all about God’s word of commissioning to us, God’s “GO”! This truth was of course was embodied by these people I a wonderful way.

I loved the worship this weekend.

I also love the worship that happens all week long. God says, “GO”!

Let’s get real here – we want to see pics of the babies and their parents –but allow me to have you read a couple of thoughts on the weekend and then I promise, PICS PICS and MORE PICS!

TEACHER APPRECIATION
I love what God is doing at Journey to help us more and more be the FLESH AND BLOOD PRESENCE OF JESUS in our community and to our schools. We received a bunch of wonderful “Thank you” notes from teachers and administrators so we felt led to parlay this into a “Teacher Appreciation & commissioning” moment. It was very cool and my teacher friends told me it really affirmed their calling. More and more I’m feeling that’s the role of our services and of us pastors – to affirm YOUR calling!

PURSUE PEACE – We finished up our series with a huge essential: Pursue PEACE. We looked at the Old Testament background of Shalom and then dove into Hebrews 12. Fun!

BABY DEDICATION – This is a good time for us at Journey. It’s a great time for me! The thing that is most special about these times is the stories that each of those babies represent. This time there were a couple of stories, one in particular, that were straight up MIRACLE stories – God mightily, supernaturally, powerfully at work! Yeah God. May God use each of these little ones as world-shaking followers of the Lord Jesus! Here goes the promised pics! (disclaimer: I tried to get pics of everyone; but these are all the ones I have – If you email me yours I would LOVE to post them!)

Here is a poem my friend Ken Kuhlken (click here for Perelandra College) sent me. It is by his friend Olga Savitsky, from her book Shockabonda

CALL TO FAST…CALL TO PRAY

Call to fast…Call to pray

Call to fast…Call to pray

Call to fast…Call to pray

Call to the forever fast

Call to the forever fast

Call to fast guilt

Call to fast shame

Call to fast condemnation

I put them in His forever furnace

Call to fast doubt

Call to fast worry

Call to fast fear

I put them in His forever furnace

Call to fast…Call to pray

Call to fast…Call to pray

Call to fast the frailty of the flesh

Call to fast the fruitless works of fury

Call to fast the facade

Yes, I put them in His forever furnace

Call to fast…Call to pray

Call to fast…Call to pray

Call to fast our Adamic past

Call to fast our need to be the first and last

Call to fast our need to be as gods

Call to fast where we still need to be worshipped

Call to fast where we still want to be adored

Call to fast where we still crave appreciation

Call to fast where we still require thanksgiving

Call to fast…Call to pray

Yes, We His Forever Family

In His Forever Furnace

On His Forever Fast

This weekend we launched a WEEK OF PRAYER at Journey and spent the weekend thinking about one of those ESSENTIAL ESSENTIALS of life with God. It’s hard to imagine a spiritual practice that is much more core to life with God than prayer.

Of course the challenge in teaching on prayer is the sheer volume of stuff in the Bible about it. Not only that, there isn’t anything that I have more really good books on almost all of which are better than anything I am likely to come up with. But the fun thing is that everyone prays. I’m convinced of that. Even people who aren’t much into God mutter a few things toward heaven now and then and no doubt send out and SOS when they feel scared.

WEEK OF PRAYER
For us at Journey, we have been working on raising the Prayer Temperature for quite a while. It’s like a fire that you just have to keep throwing wood on and one of the ways that we keep fueling it is by setting aside times to pray. Three words help you get the idea of this week:
√ FOCUS – We need to stop, reduce our activity level and turn our full attention to the Lord together, as a community!
√ INTENSITY – Occasionally we stretch a little and try to build our prayer muscles by praying a little, more, a little longer.
√ ENCOURAGEMENT – It needs to be clear that although we are stretching a little, this is not prayer boot camp! We will find refreshment and rest as we seek the Lord. We will find our selves encouraged, strengthened and having our hope restored.

I love when the peeps at Journey really bring it in worship. This weekend it was cool to see how people were bringing the intensity.

Sporting the new ‘do! Hey if Bono can rock this cut…

I hope you find a way to dive into WEEK OF PRAYER! Come to one of the nightly prayer gatherings. Pick up a prayer journal and follow along. Sign up for a 24/7-prayer hour. Select a day to fast! Let’s pray it up!

Every now and then one actually “smarten’s up”. Here’s where this is going: for the last 10 years attending the Leadership Summit, I have had a weekend message facing me that kept me trying to steal 20 minutes here and 30 minutes there texting friends back east who were at the Summit experiencing it in their time zones asking which session might be a little bit “miss-able”. Mind you this was not forced on me by anyone. Often Mike would ask me, “don’t you want to get someone in for the weekend”. For some lunk-headed reason I chose to speak.

Well finally this year, I asked my “really” good friend, Bill Yaccino to come and speak for us partly so I could focus on what God was saying to me & us at the GLS (Global Leadership Summit) and partly because Bill is a great speaker that fits well at Journey and partly just to hang out with him.

It was a powerful weekend. Bill graciously agreed to preach in our series ESSENTIAL LIFE on “Love MERCY”. He did a great job of opening up Micah 6:8

Mic. 6:8 He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the LORD require of you
But to do justice, to love MERCY,
And to walk humbly with your God?

Worship was crazy this weekend. I was floored, I mean destroyed by the old Charles Wesley hymn, Come Ye Sinners! Has there ever been a more beautiful presentation of the Gospel?

Sarah also shared how God is leading our College Ministry OUT and what they’ve experienced at Collier Park this summer.

It’s always fun to launch a new series. But you also find out in a hurry where the holes in your planning are. Often those planning holes for me look like – “how did I ever think I could deal with THIS subject with any integrity in 1 MESSAGE!” Ahhh, the tortured soul of the preacher guy! This weekend was a classic case in point.


A little Spanish this week!

The series is about some of those defining things about life as a Christ follower, those things that come up a LOT in the scripture. I thought it would be a good follow up to “ESSENTIAL GOD” (July series) and a good ramp up to VINTAGE US 2 (our fall series in the book of Acts).

Justice is such a huge theme in the Bible (problem 1 – lots of data) and it’s often been overlooked in the kind of churches that we would call “us” (problem 2 – neglected subject). Additionally, in some churches talking about “justice” has eclipsed and overshadowed the message of Christ’s death and resurrection and the opportunity for heart level life-transformation that is central to the message of the New Testament (problem 3 – suspicion of the subject). But it’s pretty clear that God is working in lots of churches and that the Spirit is speaking to all kinds of leaders about “justice” so I was stoked to dive in.

I loved how the worship was so substantive this weekend! The band did a song called “In My Own Little World” that pre-preached the message! Awesome!

Justice, looks a lot like serving and God had SO prepared hearts at Journey.

Next week’s ESSENTIAL: Love MERCY!

After a week away on a little family vacation it was so good to roll back in to the weekend services as someone who just enjoyed the services. What a great weekend!

POWERFUL WORSHIP
It was great to have our worship pastor, Jason Denison, back and looking a lot like Jesus.

Jason has been back and forth from his wife’s home country of Norway for this last year in which he took a sabbatical. Jason is an anointed worship leader and also incredibly effective at raising up emerging worship leaders. Just to be clear, HE’S BACK FOR GOOD. Pray for his families transition back to San Diego.

MICK WILSON
Our friend Mick Wilson brought a spectacular message on THE VINE from John 15 this weekend. Mick has the unique insight as the owner of a vineyard and Winery – Wilson Creek Winery (click here). I LOVED the message. I also loved the great quotes that Mick used in the message.

Here are a couple of gems:
“What comes to your mind when you think about god is the most important thing about you.” A.W. Tozer

“When I’m in the cellar of affliction I look for the Lords choicest wines.” Samuel Rutheford

It was also great to have the return of Vinnie – a 40 year old Syrah vine. God is a master of Vineyard Manager and although pruning is uncomfortable, He asks us to trust His wisdom and goodness.

Since Mick was last at Journey, he has been treated for cancer. So this was not just theory but living truth for him and for us.

It seems like I run out of adjectives to describe our weekends. It’s like no 2 are the same there is almost always something that blows me away. This weekend was so different, important and wonderful. I’m feeling grateful and humbled even writing it.

JOHN LYNCH


My friend and I think I can safely say now “our friend”, John Lynch, spoke this weekend. John is a unique communicator – I love the profundity of his grasp on the grace of God in Scripture. He’s able to communicate really important and sometimes nuanced truths in a passage in a way that everyone in the room can grasp. This message from Ephesians 4:22-24 was called THE 2 COATS and it was wonderful! Of course the best moment of the message was when John put on the 2nd coat and said “in this coat I feel like the man, I’m Shaft!” From where I sat I could see people explaining to their sup-40 friends who Shaft was and why that was stinkin’ hilarious! There was some serious life-change in the message this weekend.

WORSHIP
The communion and worship was so good this weekend. Our team introduced two MONEY songs in the last 2 weekends – “Only You Can Satisfy” and “Where We Belong”! Wow!

PETER THOMAS
Peter Thomas a LONG time pastoral staff team member shared how he felt God was leading him this weekend. He feels like God is calling him to something new. Like Abraham, God has told him the “go” before he told him the “where to” part. There was so much love flowing from all the people in the room who’s lives have been impacted by Pete’s ministry over the years. It was an emotional moment. But it was one of those odd happy/ sad times. Change is hard, but Pete is modeling the Follower part of Christ-Follower. Pete will take some time to rest, to take a deep breath and then begin to seek God for that what’s next answer. Pete said it and I’ll reiterate it just to be clear: he wasn’t fired. He wasn’t forced out. He isn’t feeling called back to Granada. He really doesn’t know what’s next. But he actually is following a leading of the Lord in his life.
If you missed Peter’s sharing click here to watch it.

We love Pete and Rikah and look forward with them to what’s next. You can reach him at his email address peter@journeycom.org and you will see him around. In fact NEXT weekend we will have a reception for him after every service. We’ll miss working on a daily basis together. But I’m sure our connection with him will continue.

O.k. The silence is broken!

Frankly, I’ve had a crazy busy July so far and my normal rhythms of life are out of whack – part of which means that I’m not making time to post stuff on the blog. Well that ends NOW! At least for a little while. I think I’ll post something on this past weekend and then write another post that will serve as a kind of catch up.

LOVING THE GOD YOU ALREADY KNOW.

This weekend at Journey we sailed into week 2 of a series on the Trinity called “The God You Already Know”. It’s my contention that since we get dunked into this relationship with God when we come to Jesus (1 Corinthians 12:13) there is a sense in which the Trinity is “Tacit Knowledge” for people that have truly been born into new life in Jesus. (I spent some time on this in the first message – I’d love for you to listen to the podcast if you missed it).

This week we talked about how the idea of the “Trinity” helps us to obey Commandment numero uno – Loving God!

COMMUNION – We are doing communion every week of July. I love that!

BAPTISM VIDEO – In the course of the message we showed a video of our last 2 Baptisms. It was so powerful! I love the picture of our relationship with God that Baptism is! I love the reality of God’s presence and Grace that we experience! It’s like Matthew 3:16-17 gets relived over and over!

Worship was powerful!

This was another great weekend at Journey. Last weekend was epic – we began the Essential God series, we made the BIG ANNOUNCEMENT and had a great weekend despite it being 4th of July weekend. July at Journey is shaping up to be a GREAT MONTH!