The Adventure Continues

I lead a very privileged life. I’ve Just returned from a week up in Joburg with Junction Church where what was required of me was to lead worship and help minister with heroes of the faith Keir Tayler and Mike Hanchett, two men who have seen and done much over the last 30 years. 3 things that gripped me afresh this week are as follows:

1.       Testimony is the spirit of prophecy

-Hearing story after story in meetings and over coffees of incredible power encounters, supernatural phenomena and kingdom break out moment has re-awakened a passion to live in such a reality. Accounts of faith moves, declarations and adventures of obeying the voice of God has stirred me to venture out the boat in these realms more and more. Its part of my inheritance!

     2.       Kingdom friendships are priceless

- Getting to stay with couples from the church in their own homes is something I cherish. Getting to be a part of peoples lives in such close quarters gives you a chance to grow real, robust and enduring friendships. Early morning theological debates, late night ministry philosophy discussions and all the inbetween joking and laughing knits hearts like not much else. Our futures depend on these

      3.      God has undercover warriors that are about to break out

-Spending time with, praying for, eating lunch with, praying a bit more for, drinking coffee with and you guessed it, praying some more for a host of young people in their late teens and twenties revealed the incredible depth of resources that the Lord is preparing. In a world that is marked by superficiality, the genuine desire for both radical experience and strong wells of theology show that God is about to bring prominence to a young people who take the call of God seriously and yet also with a wild abandon.

So looking over my shoulder at these three learnings, I once gain commit to surrounding myself ongoingly with people who are further than me in their God adventures (I need to hear their stories of victories won and mountains conquered), with those who are peers (we need to hold each other unswervingly to the hope we profess) as well as the next generation pushing through (they need to see my life of struggles, wrestles and triumphs).

My future depends on it. Our futures depend on it.

Generation Unleashed

 

A dear friend of mine sent me a whatsapp video of his 18 month old daughter taking her first two clumsy, stumbling, and yet awe-inspiring steps on her own tonight. And as he followed that video up with a half laughing, half choked up phone call, I knew that this was a moment he and his wife would tuck deep into the memory bank of things they will never forget.

This past weekend I had the extraordinary privilege to be a part of a moment that resonated deep within me, and has quite possibly become one such marker in my life.
Five years ago I met a couple named Geoff and Jane Kirsten who quite literally birthed dreams and awakened wells in my heart through one very late night of conversation. Coffees were drunk, my mind raced and plans and schemes formed as the embers of the dreamer inside of me were breathed upon.

Five years on, we met up again, four days ago, in a parking lot in Joburg as they squashed me into the front seat of their car bound for a 3 day student camp (a group called Satellite from 3CI) in the bush. Things have changed. I am no longer a skinny, wide eyed, awkward Durban teenager...I am now a skinny, wide-eyed, awkward, Cape Tonian pastor and they have blossomed into parents with wild stories of victories and scars. But as we drove and chatted something burned within me again. A sense of something new. As Chris Wienand says, there was a strange sense of electricity in the air, and the three of us could almost touch it!

Friday, Saturday and Sunday followed as a group of +-150 Pretoria based students and one red-haired, red-faced preacher felt a seizmic shift in our hearts and in our destinies. The stuffy, over-bearing, stiff and powerless imposter of religion was pushed aside as the cosmic, wild and joy-filled Gospel of Christ cut a clear and decisive picture and reality in the deep recesses of our souls and minds. Shallow moments of religious nods and hat-tippings were discarded with abandon for a life of diving again and again into the wild, unpredictable but all satisfying depths of His goodness. Salvations, baptisms, tears, repentance, joy, unhindered worship were the order of the weekend as the Spirit of God shook the bottle and began to loosen the top.

What happens next keeps me awake tonight. Just like 5 years ago, my heart is dripping with anticipation and unbridled excitement. Is it possible that I get to live THIS life?
 I feel like a teenager before a big date.

Or a parent watching breathless as their child takes her first few steps...

A generation is about to be unleashed.

IMMERSED part two

 

Last weekend saw us preach our second installment in our new series "IMMERSED", where we are exploring the fundamental doctrines of baptism that we find in scripture. Week one saw us inviting our church to wade deeper into the depths of real community life as we unpacked what it meant to be immersed into the body of Christ. In week two we painted a compelling and strong case why baptism by full immersion in water is so vitally important for us individually, corporately and for the world, so much so that we abandon the previously held religious connotations and mindsets that come with it and rather embrace the life changing power of obedience that leaps from faith.

The response to the Word of God being preached uncompromisingly was staggering. Multiple first time commitments to Christ in both meetings, mothers who attended the morning going home and bringing the rest of her family in the evening (and the family responding to the Gospel) and a queue of people signing up to publicly declare their fully immersed faith by being baptized this coming Sunday.

 It was a humdinger of a day!

And so tomorrow our journey continues as we seek to dive in deeper into the wild adventure of faith that we have been called to. Our church floor will be soaked no doubt, but our prayer is that that won't be the only thing completely drenched. The thing our city needs most is not more dry religion. It needs wet, wild and alive Sons and Daughters who have fully leapt into the ocean of adventure, forsaking the safety of the shallow-end, and pushed out into being immersed in the pursuit of Christ, community and the mission.