I loved this weekend. I love it when a message feels like it’s catching up to something God has already begun to do.
Our series, I’D LOVE TO CHANGE THE WORLD is about 3 concepts that we borrowed from our Haiti “CHURCH TO CHURCH” partnership that we are involved in. C2C is about “PRAY, GIVE, GO”. It occurred to me that this is a pretty basic description of how God involves us in what theologians call “Missio Dei” (the sending of God). Oversimplified, I grant you, but it describes the plan of God to change the world through us. For various reasons we are taking them out of order, so this week we talked about “GO”. It was fun looking at one of the classic “go” statements in the gospels, Matthew 28:18-20.
The Worship was powerful. There are times when the worship preaches. I think one of the ways we should see worship songs, especially those that include wonderful, sweeping declarations of commitment and surrender is “preaching to our own souls.” I could sense that happening as our team led us.
One of the point we brought out was the importance of “HOLDING ‘PLACE’ LOOSELY”. For that part of the message I tag teamed with our worship pastor Jason Denison. 
He is modeling that. He explained how he and his fam are going to be living missionaly in her homeland of Norway for the next year. Even though Jason (and the rest of us) feel like he is still called to Journey and that isn’t ending, we are joyously entering into this year with him. He will still lead the worship ministry – coming back every month or so, on line, etc.
SD CITYFEST – The “GO” message had a major promotional component to it: promoting SD CITYFEST with Luis Palau. I believe this is going to have a huge impact on our city. The key is that it’s not just about the big gathering on September 11. Yes that will be amazing. But it’s about all the serving that will go on during the “SEASONS OF SERVICE” that we are in right now. The challenge looks like this
• Invite like crazy to the Festival event on Saturday, September 11.
• Find a way to serve and bless our community between now and then. (start by going to the website here)
I’m excited to see how God is going to use this.
