Chicago Church Plant

Here is a piece I wrote for church a couple weeks ago. I think we’ll start doing more communications in a journalistic style. It feels informative, professional, and personal. 

I’m also personally really excited about this Chicago Church plant because Bonnie and I have been praying about the possibility of church planting. It’s great to see Resurrection taking a more active role in this plant and dream about what it might look for us to plant a church from Resurrection one day.

After years of prayer and waiting, Church of the Resurrection is overjoyed to announce that we are planting a church on the north side of Chicago. Resurrection actually began a site—called Resurrection-Chicago—three years ago. While there was great potential, it became clear that the timing was not right for this work. The Uptown Community Life Group was then formed and the past three years has found us continuing to pray in faith for the vision of a church plant in the city.

Sabbath-Keeping: Week 2

Here are the notes and the recording from week 2 of my class on Sabbath-Keeping. Check out week 1 here. 

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God set cycles of rest and celebration into the foundation of creation—cycles that the church still celebrates. This class will be a time of teaching and discussion around incorporating Sabbath into the rhythms of our lives as families, individuals, and the church. Join us as we think about how to accept God’s invitation to rest and celebrate with him.

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Writing Small Group Discussion Questions

Last summer (2010), Kevin Miller and I began creating a simple curriculum to go along with each Sunday sermon. We called it the Sermon Formation Guide. The hope was that it would give families and small groups something to spark further engagement with that week’s teaching. Our original format was a bit too long to write and discuss each week, so in August of 2011 we moved to this shorter format.

It has been a fun challenge to write questions that

With All of the Saints

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All Saints is a major feast of the church that is celebrated in early November (for more on the feast, click here). It celebrates the communion of saints—both those Christians who have gone before and who are now alive that we join with when we worship Jesus.

Festival Song

Each Sunday in our communion celebration the priest says, “Alleluia! Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us.” (1 Corinthians 5:7) And the people respond, “Therefore let us keep the feast!” Every Sunday is a feast—a festival to celebrate what the Lord has done for us in his Resurrection. Every Sunday is a continuation of the Easter feast and a taste of the heavenly banquet feast that is to come (Revelation 19:6-9).

My church is teaching me how to celebrate. Every year for Holy Week and Easter we put a lot of work into planning the biggest night of celebration we can. We ring bells and shout and dance and praise for hours! Why? Because Christians are a part of a cosmic celebration—a joy that cannot be bottled up even by an entire universe. Christ who had died is Risen (Matthew 28:6). His life is pouring through his spirit into the Church and into the world. Heaven is rejoicing that death is defeated, and we join in heaven’s song!

In this song, I tried to capture some of the excitement that I felt the first time I really began to celebrate Easter as the festival of Jesus’ Resurrection.

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Come to My Table

This song appears on our EP “In Wilderness and Glory.” Download the entire EP for free here.

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I wrote this for the first song of communion on Easter Sunday, 2007, when I was working part-time for a Presbyterian church in town. The recording is of Bonnie and I singing it as an offertory during Eastertide of this year, 2009.  It speaks in first person from Jesus’ perspective echoing Jesus’ words in Matthew, “Come unto me.” It also borrows from the banquet theme of Jesus’ parable in Matthew.

In Jesus, God has opened up his home and invited us to live with him, and to eat with him. The food of this table is Jesus died and risen, the bread of life and the new drink of an everlasting kingdom. Jesus can promise us everything because of the power of the Resurrection, the miracle that makes all things possible. God’s kingdom is more than we can imagine or hope for because Resurrection life is more than we can imagine or hope for. But in Christ, all of this is reality.

At the communion table, Jesus invites us to take part in that reality now, to sit at his table with our brothers and sisters, friends and enemies, and to partake of the mystery of his Resurrection. There is no meal as sweet and satisfying as the Easter Eucharist. Jesus invites us to come to his table of rest and when we come, we realize that we are coming home.

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