I read an article on Fox News called “Christians are to Blame for the Commercialization of Christmas” that challenged me about how Christ centered my Christmas celebration really is. Not only did it challenge me, it gave me practical applications and i thought I would share with you.

At ekklesia communities church we talk a lot of being Gospel centered and our hope is to make sure that we point towards Jesus as much as possible, but what about Christmas? Christmas is so key to the Christian faith and it always surprises me how people are giving, singing songs about Jesus and celebrating the birth of Jesus. It’s pretty fascinating that one of the most popular holidays is about Jesus. But is really about Jesus?

The article talks about how Christians have given in to Christmas becoming a consumer holiday. More and more, Christmas is moving to Season’s Greetings or Happy Holiday, but the holiday is Christian. However if you look at our house, gifts, cards, decoration, and other things pertaining to Christmas it speaks of Santa and the Winter wonderland. Our houses are decorated with Christmas lights, reindeers, reefs, icicles and Santa Clause. Inside our homes, it looks the same with our Tree covered with ornaments, gifts wrapped with colorful paper and candy canes. Twinkle lights and colors are everywhere. Our greeting cards and gift tags say “happy holidays” and “Seasons Greetings”. We may have Nativity scene out, but does our home, gifts, and decorations say Jesus or something else?

I’m not trying to beat up on everyone, if you come to my house I’m embarrassed about how much twinkle and sparkle I have all over the house. It’s years and years of purchasing a candy cane here, a light up tree here and so on. As a pastor I didn’t even recognize that I was slowing moving the message of Jesus’ birth out of my home and the message my house conveys became something totally different.

Here is the practical challenge for those who want to keep Christ in Christmas or a have a more Jesus centered Christmas. I’m not saying stop decorating your house, but start decorating with things that resemble the reason for Christmas. Buy your family Christmas cards and make sure it says, “Christmas”, not “Season’s Greetings” or make sure they have a pictures of baby Jesus. By nativity scenes and make that the focal point of your outdoor and indoor decorations. By ornaments and other decorations that display the message of birth. I think you get the idea. As more and more people buy Christ centered decorations, the retail market will respond like wise and make better products.

I hope you would consider making some changes and how it could lead to a more Gospels centered Christmas and open up more Gospel Conversations. Have a great Christmas!!

I came across this video and loved it. Again we are seeing more and more people with this heart of being on mission. Here is the quote from the site:

“What would it look like if, as leaders, we focused less on the things that make our churches entertaining and more on making disciples?” This video challenges and reminds us that we are a sent people, called to take the gospel to the world. The grace that Jesus has shown us by coming after us frees us to then seek others. It’s time to rethink how we are making disciples.

This is Discipling from The Foursquare Church on Vimeo.

With a sluggish economy, times are tough for ourselves, people we know, and people we may not know! Despite it being a tough economy, we can still help those in need and offer hope. The Bible is littered with verses on helping those in need, providing for the poor, and feeding those who are hungry.  Here is one example from the new testament.

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.” Matthew 25:35

As a church, it would be awesome if we had food that we can provide to those who are in need and are hungry. What if you could provide food for those in need for essentially free and save yourself money in the meanwhile. On TBS there is a show called Extreme Coupon where people are doing it! They are extreme because they are spending thousands of dollars worth of groceries and some spending little to no money. Some actually make money or get gift cards back because they saved that much money from coupons. As a church and friends, if we started doing this, put aside what we needed and made the rest available to give away, we can bless others. Imagine if our church and friends all worked together and would take all the free items and start to store it up for those in need? We would have our own storehouse and surplus!

What do we do?

Several years back, Christine was introduced to Coupon Sense. Coupon Sense is a online coupon program that helps you save money and get free items!  I didn’t believer her at first, but she was able to get free items and cheaper groceries when she went shopping.  I know because I saw the receipt and was shocked!   She was so excited to come home and show me all the free stuff. In no time we had 20 boxes of cereal, tons of granola bars, shampoo, and other merchandise that we weren’t using.  We had so much we started to give it away. We looked forward to giving it away and go get more from the grocery store.   Joining Coupon Sense is a way to start down this road.

What is Coupons Sense?

Coupon Sense is just one of the software programs out there that help you organize you coupons, inform you of sales, and help you build your shopping list.  People who work for Coupon Sense know what sales are coming up at stores and put the products, prices, and match them up with coupons.  So they do the grunt work for you in matching, coupons, sales, and stores.  You just need to build your grocery list.

How does it work?

In short, newspapers have coupons for you to save money (it’s like cash). However, on certain days a store may have a sale on an item, in addition they may have double or triple coupons, and some may have buy one get one free on an item. Put all these together, you can get crazy discounts. The way it works is that you need to organize you coupons each week. The more coupons you have, the more you can save. Then you shop online in Coupon Sense for what you’re looking for and it will tell you what coupon, price and where. You’ll have an idea of how much your bill should be at the store.  Print your grocery list go to the store, watch the register, give them your coupons and start saving! You can read an overview here.

Does it cost?

Yes it does, HOWEVER, there are ways to get it almost free. Coupon Sense has a monthly fee for their membership, but if you host parties and have a rep come out, you can earn credit. In addition, you will need get the coupons from the Sunday paper. We get 3 papers on Sunday for 3 packets of coupons. HOWEVER, you can get coupons for free if you work with your neighbors,  friends and even go to Starbucks or other places where they offer the Sunday Paper. So it may cost you some, but you will save!  What you save in groceries makes the cost nothing.

What’s the catch

Here’s the catch. In order to do this, it will take time.

• It does take time to cut and organize the coupons each week. Why? Well you organize them in the filing system the software provides so you can quickly grab the coupons when you shop.
• Also, you may have to break up your shopping list into different stores. For instance, Fry’s may offer a buy one get one free on milk, but you may get 10 boxes of cereal for free because of triple coupns at Bashas. So you would have to buy milk from Fry’s and cereal from Basha’s. You’ll learn to pace things out.
• Produce and other items are usually not included.
• To get the discount, you may try new brands to get the discount. You’re shopping on what’s on sale and based on what is going to give you the best advantage and that may not always be your favorite brand.
• It requires you to plan, which will help you budget

Making it work for others

The key to helping others is looking for the free stuff. Sometimes it may be things you may need and sometimes it may be things you won’t use, but others may use the free items. For example, you can start stocking up shampoo bottles by the dozen, even though you won’t ever use that shampoo so you can give it to others. Your shopping becomes purposeful and missional. In addition, its kind of fun because you’ll have your own contest of the best deals. You’ll feel bad at first because you’re know your getting a screaming deal and free stuff and feel like your stealing, but the coupons are paying for you food.

Please consider make this a routine for you family. Remember it will take your time, but you will have a lower grocery bill and be able to bless others. Remember our goal is to have all of the church and others start to build a surplus of food so we may bless others. To get started, Christine will have a informational class in the near future to answer questions and get us rolling.

Thanks
Steve

Soma Communities – Tacoma, WA from Verge Network on Vimeo.

This is a great video of Soma Communities in Tacoma WA. Since joining Acts29, Jeff has been a great influence to us. In January I went up to Soma Communities and now their whole church has been a great gift in helping us to live out Soma in the East Valley. Please take a few moments to watch the video. We hope to send them a video of what God is doing in the Easy Valley.

Hi everyone!

Paul and Kim Johnson here. This message is being sent out to several people including those on our Thursday Night Dinner email list for our neighborhood. Hopefully by now you’ve seen our heart as well as our church’s heart of being committed to making a difference in our community (not only our community as a whole in the San Tan Valley and Gilbert, but in our neighborhoods as well). That’s one of the reasons we as a couple started the dinners at our house on Thursdays so we can all get to know each other on a personal level and build a strong community of people.

In an effort to do more of this kind of thing, our church is looking for ways to give back to the community and I thought thing we could do is to get a group of people together to help in our neighborhood.

So a week from this Sunday, on the 27th starting at 8am, several of us from our church are coming to start from one end of the neighborhood (starting with the mailboxes) and pulling weeds, helping with yard-work or whatever else we can help with. There are several bank owned houses but we want to be able to help at each of our houses if we can. Obviously that depends on how many volunteers we can get. The more we have, the more we can accomplish.

I also realize, being on a Sunday morning that many people won’t be able to or want to help out and that’s OK! If you decide you want to help us and be a part of this project, let us know. We’re also looking for materials (wheel barrows, weed tools, etc.)- so if you can help by lending us something that could help we would love that.

So we’ll start at 8am and finish when we finish but trying to be done by noon with a BBQ at our house (337 E. Leslie Ave.) with seating in the garage and inside. We’ll also have a tent set up and plenty of water and Gater-Aid to keep cool since it’s probably gonna be a hot one!

So please let us know A: if you can and want to help, B: can’t help but have something you can lend us, C: have something that you could use help with (Brent, our resident handyman will be there) or know someone we can help on the block. Feel free to invite others to help out! We’re waiting to hear from the nearby Home Depot to see if they can donate garbage bags and I plan on contacting the Association to see if they can help in any way.

Please let me know your thoughts and comments or questions! Sorry for the long post!

Paul and Kim

Something is missing in many western, protestant churches. As I’ve traveled to Europe and Mexico, one of the most exciting things that I like to do my trips is to visit churches. As you walk into these beautiful churches,  you’re engulfed in art – from sculptures, stain glass windows, paintings, mosaics, etc. The are work sometimes gives me a visual context to work from or maybe picture things that I have never thought about before.  For myself, I can only imagine Heaven being more beautiful than the art on the wall.  The art reminds me visually of the Creator we love and serve.  Artist can reflect the Master Artist, Creator, God.

Is the church missing art?  Are we missing out on untapped resources?  Are there other ways to worship God on a Sunday other than the art of music?

Vision
What I see are untap resources of artist to express worship to our Lord in the church. The vision is not to build those types of buildings with art, but instead have artist from photographers, painters, sculptors, graphic designers, etc. worship God through their gifts, but also to help people focus on the Lord the same way the church uses music to set the tone.  But i don’t want to stop there!  Our communities that we live in can appreciate the art as well!

Just a Beginning…
This is the beginning of a journey to get artist more involved in the church.  This is my vision and I’m looking for people to join me with it.  I have more to my vision than this, but I will unfold more in time.

Since we “went public” w ith Ekklesia in January, we have seen God move in more ways and allowed us to impact more lives than we could have imagined. We started off just a few of us in the planning stages and now we have several community groups meeting at different times in the Gilbert and Queen Creek area. We also outgrew Steve and Christine’s living-room for our bi-weekly Celebration Gathering, so we were blessed to find a church in downtown Gilbert who graciously, and generously offered us their facility for such a small expense!

We had our first gathering this past Sunday (June 28th) at Life Community Church on Gilbert Road just north of Joe’s Real BBQ (which I am totally stoked about being so close to!). It was a blast! We prayed together, sang songs of praise to our King, shared what He has been doing in our lives and in our home/community groups, and laughed and cried together. Janine taught the kids the Creation account in their class and my daughter Katie ran to me afterwords singing the new song she learned. I’ve never seen her so excited after a kid’s church class! Steve brought us an encouraging lesson from Genesis chapter 2 as we continued the series “His Story” that yeilded great discussion!

Then it was off to the Valero’s to hand our invitations to their neighbors to invite them to a neighborhood chili cook-off in the community park by their house on Friday, July 3rd at 6pm! We met some wonderful people and look forward to getting to know them better. Come out and have some great food and time together with us!

God is so good, and I am excited to see what treasured He has in store for us around the corner!

Unlike any other time in our human existence, we have so much information right at our finger tips because of technology.  In the Christian culture you can read magazines, forums, blogs online, watch sermons, classes, inspirational videos, and communicate with other Christians around the world.  We have become consumers of knowledge. So here’s the next question.  Why do people feel need to go to church on Sundays?

I know why I’m involved with my church, but why are you?  I know many people who attend multiple churches on Sunday and throughout the week.  The go to their ‘church home’ in the morning.  Next the go to another church offering to ‘get fed’.  Then throughout the week they listen to sermons and participate in various forums online.  Why do these people attend on a Sunday? To get fed?  Are they using this knowledge? You can get fed by some of the best preachers in the world without leaving the bedside.  Plus we could pause them to get a bit to eat and never miss a word.  We could rewind a portion of message if we didn’t quite understand what the pastor was saying.  We could select a different sermon if we didn’t like the current one.  We could do other tasks to help out our week while we listen to the sermon on our ipod.  The combinations are endless.  So why attend Sunday service?  Do we have too?

I want to purpose that church is more than a Sunday morning experience.  The greek word for church is ekklesia.  Ekklesia means an assembly of God’s people.  What if church is not a building you go to and sit, but an active body of people (1 Cor. 12:27).  Imagine if the church pulled together and used their gifts for the common good, hung out together, devoted to the teaching of the apostles and helping those in need (Acts 2:42-45, 4:32-33;1 Cor. 12:9).  Imagine a place where a body of believers were working together to carry out the mission of Jesus and resembled His characteristics.  Where would those people meet?

I believe the church is bigger than where you sit on a Sunday and how many people attend.  I believe the church as a active body of people impacting where they live for the Kingdom.  I believe that we can be inspired by others online as we engage our culture.  But we need to be an intimate community of people in order to have impact.  We need to use the resources that God has given us for His glory (Matt. 25:14-30).  We need to be the church.

Each week, I have the great pleasure of having lunch with other church planters. Some of these church planters are doing similar models and some are doing different models. Despite what model and location, these men are excited and want to help out. I always look forward to hearing what God is doing in their midst and where they feel God is leading them. I can’t help to think about how these men are living out this passage:

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are varieties of ministry, and the same Lord. There are varieties of effects, but the same God who works all things in all persons. But to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. (1 Cor. 12:4-7)

The common good is what we need to remain focused on. Not on our own good, but the good of the Kingdom. As pastors, it could be easy to hold on to what God has entrusted us for the good of our own local church, but instead when we focus on Him and His kingdom, we want to do what we can for the common good. I have been blessed and I hope that I have blessed other pastors by spending time with each other, sharing ideas, talking over philosophy, but staying focused on building up His kingdom. I hope we continue to uplift each others ministry and stay connected for His glory.