DNA SERIES
This summer we are walking through who we are and what we are about with the hopes of instilling and beginning to live out our DNA as a church plant. You can find sermons of this series below.
Pretending And Performing
What do you count on to give you a sense of “personal credibility” (validity, acceptance, good standing)?
As God thinks of you right now, what is the look on his face?
Your answers to those two questions will typically reveal something besides Jesus in which you are finding your righteousness. When we are not firmly rooted in the gospel, we rely on false sources of righteousness to build our reputation and give us a sense of worth and value—to make us feel ok.
Breaking The Rules Of Legalism
How The Cross Rescues You From The Performance Trap by CJ Mahaney
One of the greatest hindrances to keeping the gospel central in our lives is our creeping tendency toward legalism. It’s an age-old foe to God’s plan of salvation through faith alone. From the earliest days of the church, legalism has thrown Christians off course and sidetracked them all over the place. And it’s just as active and destructive today as it ever was.
It’s important to understand that a legalist isn’t just someone with higher standards or more rules than you. A lot of us wrongly stereotype a legalistic person as one who doesn’t go to the movies, or who thinks that any music with a beat is evil. Legalism is much more subtle and serious than that. Here’s a simple definition that I use: Legalism is seeking to achieve forgiveness from God and acceptance by God through obedience to God.
Minimizing Sin & Applying The Gospel
Yesterday morning at our first core team gathering we discussed gospel-centrality and one specific component of growing in our awareness of both God's holiness and our sinfulness. Below are the two lists we looked at that described ways we don't grow in our awareness but minimize our sin and examples of applying the gospel specifically (along with the visual of the growing awareness chart).
Planting As A Team: The Oakleys
My wife Ashley and I courted through high school and got married as soon as we graduated in 2005. As young newlyweds, we had set out for ourselves a ‘five year plan’ by which we had determined how we would navigate through this life together; what careers we would pursue, where we would attend school, when we would have children, etc. Six months into our marriage however, the Lord showed us through a positive pregnancy test that His ways are not our ways, and that His thoughts are far above our thoughts. At the time, that’s about as far as we could see in terms of His reasoning for taking us down such a different path than we had wanted for ourselves, or at least, what we thought we wanted.
What Works For Us (And Might Work For You) In Family Worship
[from Brian Howard's blog Context Coaching]
Are you a parent?
Then you need to know that your kids are going to learn primarily what you teach them.
You might sometimes wish that you could delegate the spiritual training of your kids, but you are the one who is responsible to teach, train, and disciple your kids. This is not something to be outsourced to Sunday School teachers or Youth Pastors as past generations have sometimes done.
Planting As A Team: The Bertrams
We moved to Fort Worth twelve years ago—shortly after graduating college. Tara, my wife, had a job at Cook Children's and I began teaching in south Dallas. Newly married, first ‘real-world’ jobs and based on a recommendation from Tara’s prior pastor, we were quickly involved in a local church. Five years in, we had made wonderful friendships and were shepherded by a loving pastor, but felt something lacking in our faith. During this time, I became increasingly interested in the Emergent Movement – an imbalanced paradigm of “soft” biblical teaching and strong emphasis on social justice - poverty, race relations, immigration etc. I read every book I could get my hands on and argued with anything that moved. As I delved deeper into Emergent Christianity, I found ways to minimize and downright reject central doctrines of the Bible. Sin was pushed to the back burner, as thoughts of helping and pursuing the poor were pushed to the forefront of our minds and hearts. Because of this, self-righteousness, self-reliance, and self-centeredness became sovereign. After five years at our first church as a married couple, we left bitter and angry.
Marks of a Healthy Church
What is a local church? What is it to distinguish and mark the church?
“The local church is a covenanted community of regenerated believers who confess Jesus Christ as Lord."
"Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ's institution, there, it is not to be doubted a church of God exists."
Below are nine marks of a healthy church. This is not an exhaustive or authoritative list. There are other significant marks like prayer and fellowship. But these nine are marks that we believe have tremendous impact on the health of our church and feed into other marks.
2017 Timeline
In a recent newsletter I laid out the 2017 timeline for Grace Church. I've added it below along with a list view for our three seasons.
SPRING 2017
A time of prayer: As a family of currently 30 adults and 25 children (that includes four babies with due dates this summer!) and others who are interested in joining our family, we will gather once a month from January to April. Our first gathering will be on Wednesday, January 25th from 6:30pm to 7:45 at the Fort Worth Church of the Lord’s building seen above (fka Korean Central Church): 200 Mildred Ln E Benbrook, TX 76126. Grace Kids will be provided. There are currently 45 adults and 14 children registered! Please register yourself and your children here. We will devote ourselves to God’s Word and prayer. I will teach on Jesus as the grace of God to sinners and sufferers and the implications for our family. Then we will pray together for deep friendships as a family and bold evangelism so more people will meet Jesus and be welcomed into our family.
Being A Gospel Witness
This excerpt is taken from Being A Gospel Witness: 7 Marks Of A Witness From Mark 6 by Daniel Montgomery
ARE YOU A WITNESS?
The evangelical world has experienced a gospel craze over the decade, a renewed emphasis on church planting, and a revitalization of expositional preaching. We should be grateful and excited to live in such an era. However, sometimes even these principles can live in abstraction instead of reality.
Recently, I was in a discussion with young seminarians and the question was asked, “What is the evidence of someone being called to church plant?” After responses about theology, leadership, qualifications of eldership, and personality traits I remarked, “What if the would-be church planters were just asked, ‘Write out everyone you have evangelized in your life and how has the gospel grown in them since?”