This weekend I did not check my email. Not even once. (Well, actually once, but only to see if my friend from Turkey and his newly adopted baby girl were going to come by for lunch on Sunday.) Other than that I didn’t ready anything.

I’ve been working a lot lately. Pretty much every spare minute of every day has been spent mulling over organic church planting/missional communities/intentional Christ oriented living, etc. So a weekend free from email was sort of like a signal to my brain to take a break.

Friday was Paul’s 33rd bday and we went out to dinner at Ponte Vecchio. Come to find out, this is owned by the dad of one of the little kids … {read more…}

Here’s an interesting tidbit….Did you know that the migraine medicine topomax causes increased anxiety in 10% of the people who take it. NIIIIICE! Out of the frying pan and into the fire…..

Well ThPM is searching for a purpose….again. I never realized we’d have to reformat so often! One of the things about organic church/community planting is that things morph so much. They’re never static. I have to admitt, it’s a little exhausting. At the same time, I think it’s a good fit for me. For instance, I used to be an events planner. That’s what I did before I got ordained. I rasied a lot of money for good causes. But you had to do an event over and over again — annual auctions and the like. The problem was, after the second year, after I’d ironed out most of the kinks, I was bored. So I guess morphing is good … {read more…}

I often ask the girls what they dreamed about the night before. This morning Eden held her hands out, exasperated, and said to me, “I was tattoo shopping with Grandma and I couldn’t choose which TWO tattoos I wanted!” The child cracks me up!

Well the little gathering at Lake Tahoe was rich rich rich. It pretty much turned into “take care of people from Seattle weekend.” Here are some impressions for you.

-Bill O’Conner playing blues riffs on his guitar during worship and offering us incantations to “selah……ressssst.” So peaceful. I wept.

-Todd Hunter reminding us that the technical sociological definition of community involves a group of people who see each other in an unplanned manner during the week. Most folks who meet at a weekly religious gathering can’t manage to do this. So is our main mission to become a community? Or do we gather together weekly to “get better” and living in our communities????

-Eric Keck telling me that they tithe to … {read more…}

Hey you guys. I’m getting ready to head out to Lake Tahoe with Paul. We are going to a gathering of organic church planting types. I hear it’s snowing there. (Neato!) Bill, one of the organizers, works at Squaw Valley Resort so he hooked us up with some great rooms. We are really looking forward to a nice flight without the children, good conversation with new folks, and a retreat from our everyday life (too many weeks of either having a migraine or a headcold.)

Todd Hunter is going to be there. I’ve never met him before, but I’ve been reading his blog and he sounds very cool. I saw him speak once and he sat down on the steps … {read more…}

Yesterday my sister in law emailed me from Africa. She’s a missionary there, in Kenya. She and her husband work incredibly hard to install water systems and build medical facilities and school houses. They are an amazing couple.

Anyway, she emailed us yesterday to tell us “very exciting news.” Now, when I see this in an email from my relatives, I assume this means someone is having another baby. (We are the only ones stopping at two.) However, this time she was super excited because her four year old daughter had accepted Jesus into her heart.

Now I’m happy about this. This is very, very sweet. But at the same time, this makes me wonder, because I have not so … {read more…}

Organic churches are shaped by the people who are there.

The other day I was meeting with some other pastors and one of them was saying that most of the folks in his congregation had a task to do. They were ushers. They set up the food. They gave the announcements. They were the church. If they weren’t there, church wouldn’t happen. Which meant everyone had to attend because they knew whether they were there or not mattered.

Most of us are used to going to a church where you mattered, at least in part, because you had a role to play, a job to do. Now this isn’t evil or anything. But it is different from life at ThPM. At ThPM, … {read more…}