Last week I shared something with the OneLife staff guys that I don’t say lightly: I’m more excited about OneLife Church now than I have ever been! Here’s why I’m so dang pumped about this coming Sunday.

• More people have come to Christ in the past 3 weeks at OneLife than any other 3-week time in our existence. I just KNOW there will be more this Sunday!
• This week we are talking about something that will BLOW some people’s minds. A lot of self-proclaimed Christians might actually become Christians if they grasp what we’re going to talk about!
• People are hurting. Our church and community are filled with the lost, lonely, and the least. But we are seeing signs of these people being ministered to through Communities (our groups ministry), Volunteer Teams, our awesome staff, and prayer. It’s beautiful to see the church BE the church!
• Momentum has never been higher. Our Communities are all full, new volunteers are coming forward every Sunday, families are being centered on Christ, and we are starting to make an ever-so-slight dent in our community. Keep the pedal to the metal, OneLifers!
• Our OneLife Kidz area is stronger than ever. Kids are truly being ministered to, not just babysat. We believe this time in our kiddos lives is the best time for them to learn and worship on their level to see them grow up in Christ. They don’t need to be in adult environments, they need kid-friendly environments. Our volunteers are incredible at making that happen and getting better at it all the time.
• We will be one week closer to a HUGE announcement that I’ll be sharing next Sunday. Here’s a hint…it will happen the week before Easter and has nothing at all to do with eggs or a helicopter. But it will be AMAZING!

If you miss a Sunday during this incredible time for our church, you are missing so much more than a service. Get involved! Help us do this thing! Jesus is changing lives and changing our community. Don’t miss out on that!

See ya Sunday at 10 or 11:30. And don’t come alone!

When generosity increases in a church, does it accomplish more than just padding a bank account or raising salaries? I’ve learned the answer is a big, fat YES!

A few short months ago, our 13-month old church was struggling financially. Attendance and ministry need had outgrown giving in a big way. The words “spending freeze” had become so common around our office that we actually started wondering if this was a church or the dang Weather Channel.

After a couple months of just hoping it would miraculously turn around, I decided we just needed to work on it. So we did. First up was a Christmas offering that we dreamed of reaching $10,000 (considering last year’s brought in a whopping $800, this was quite a stretch!). Lots of prayer and tons of hard work later we shattered our goal of $10,000 and topped $16,000!

Let the party begin. We had arrived!

That is, until January rolled around, our foot came off the gas, and we successfully had the worst financial month in our now 17-month history.

At that point we could just continue our spending freeze and hope for change to happen, or we could get intentional and strategic. So back to work we went, being intentional and strategic about creating a culture of generosity in our church. Vision casting, teaching, follow-ups, and online giving got our full attention. And the results have been nothing short of the miracle I was hoping for months ago.

Over the past three weeks we have seen the highest attendance, highest giving, and – most importantly – the most people to come to Christ in a three-week time period since our church began. Is it a coincidence that as generosity has increased so, too, has life-change and attendance? Not a chance.

When OneLifers become generous, spiritual maturity increases and they are more bought in to the vision. When spiritual maturity and buy-in increases, momentum increases. People don’t miss as many Sundays. They invite more friends. They pray for their church. The Gospel is spread, and lives are changed.

Creating a culture of generosity is about much more than numbers and dollar signs. It is truly about life-change and spreading the Gospel. But it takes work – work that’s definitely worth it in the end.

Thank you, OneLifers, for working to be a generous church!

* Special thanks to Casey Graham and The Change Group for helping me so much over the past few months to grow in this area! If you are a pastor or church leader, definitely check him out.

“Grace?! She passed away thirty years ago!”

Quick! Name that movie…..yep. Christmas Vacation.

Ok, now that that’s over, reality is most of us don’t have a much better idea of what grace is than Aunt Bethany. My hope is that OneLifers at least grasp the technical definition of grace since we’ve talked about it several times, which is “the opposite of what is deserved.” So we approached the topic this week with a question about what Jesus did for us that we did not deserve. We asked, “Why did Jesus have to die?”

Really…think about that. How would you answer the question? Couldn’t have God found another way to forgive? Why did it require Jesus’ blood?

To boil it down, we learned that the payment for sin is death. Somebody has to pay for our sin. It could have either been me and every other person who has lived, or it could be God. God chose to pay. So He sent Jesus to live a perfect life. He never sinned, but yet he died. And in doing so, he paid for my crime so that I wouldn’t have to. He gave me the opposite of what I deserved. Have gave me life. That is grace.

I wrapped the sermon up with a story I found that illustrates grace beautifully:

One day an Indian Chief discovered that someone in the tribe was stealing. This angered the leader greatly and he brought all the people together. He said, “Let the thief come forward and receive 10 lashes for his crime.” No one came and he upped the ante to 20 lashes. Then 30, then 40 lashes. He stopped there for he knew that it would take a strong man to survive 40 lashes with the whip. The crowd dispersed and the leader sent his men to find the thief. Within a week they brought the thief to him and the leader gasped, for the thief was his own mother. The guards were wagering among themselves as to what this great and wise leader would do. Would he keep his word, obey his law and whip his mother? Or would he let her go free, thus disgracing himself and the laws he sought to enforce? If the crime went unpunished, surely everyone would steal. The leader gathered the tribe together. They brought his mother forward and bared her frail back. “Ah, ha,” thought the people, “he’s going to whip her.” Then, just before the whip master brought the whip to bear, the mother cried out to her son and the leader strode over to his mother, tearing his shirt off as he went and draped himself over her frail body, taking the 40 lashes himself. The crime was still punished, but he took the penalty for her crime. That’s exactly what Jesus did for us. Jesus took our punishment on the cross. We should have rightly died for our sins, but Jesus took our place.

That is grace. Amazing grace.

The past three years of my life have been unreal. In some ways good, in some not so good. And the biggest thing I’ve learned is that both good and bad can be distracting from what God wants me to do.

Harrison and I were talking a couple weeks ago about how our life together has been anything but normal. Two weeks from now, on March 6, 2011, it will have been three years since I popped the question. Since then, here’s the craziness that has been our lives.

• We planned a wedding, honeymoon, rehearsal dinner – the whole shebang.
• We started a new church. Not for the faint at heart, to say the least!
• We got pregnant and started a family, complete with 15 weeks of morning sickness, 40 weeks of showers, planning, and buying, and now 4 months of smiling and laughing until my face hurts.
• We bought a foreclosed house under construction, finished building it while being homeless for 4 weeks, dealt with a mortgage company for 5 months, and moved.

Every single one of these events was life-changing, and every single one was a true gift from God. However, as we talked about the most recent in that list, it hit us that we let each of these do something that we’ve since allowed God to deal with us about – each was a distraction.

Most recently was this issue of our house. Every step of the process went completely different than planned. Construction took 3 months longer, which meant we were literally homeless and bumming a room from friends for 4 weeks. Budget went thousands over. Mortgage company threw curve balls and unexpected costs at nearly every turn. In fact, this past week before we closed was literally one of the worst in my life, not knowing what would happen next and the constant fear of “what if?”

Now that we finally are past it, Harrison jokingly asked, “What will we do next?!” My response? “Live. We’re just going to live.”

As I’ve processed that conversation, I am realizing more and more what I meant by that comment. I’ve realized that I let these things distract me. I should have allowed them each to point me to Christ instead of pointing me to self. I should have cut some busy-ness to just rest and beg God to use every second of my life to make a difference.

So going forward, I am not asking God to take away opportunities or big changes. Instead, I am begging him to help me not get distracted by those things. I want to be more focused on being like Jesus. I want to pray more. I want to focus on my marriage more. I want to focus on being an awesome daddy. I want to focus on leading the Church well. I want to write more, plan more, study more. I want to do whatever it takes to focus on allowing God to use my one life to make a difference.

So I challenge you – whoever in the world reads this blog – to join me in my own personal challenge. Let’s embrace the chaos that is life. But let’s do it with focus. Let’s be done with distractions.

Bobby Fuller got all the credit! At least that’s what I learned on Sunday. Our band did the song “I Faught the Law” to set up the sermon about, well, the Law. So I thought I’d be clever and look up online who originally did it. The original artist was a not-so-well-known group Sonny Curtis and The Crickets even though it was Bobby Fuller who made it famous. But since I wasn’t around in 1959, I didn’t know all of that! But of course, neither did anyone at our church. So my attempt to work that in to the welcome was an utter failure at best!

But the band’s version of it was not a failure at all. And our discussion of the law – God’s law – was spot on.

Many people get it all wrong when it comes to God’s Law, whether it be the Old Testament version of it or the New Testament version. They believe that God’s law or rules are ways that we earn favor with Him. Or that if God is going to love me, I have to do everything just right. But what we learned on Sunday is that God’s rules are not a condition of his love but are a confirmation of his love!

It’s like being a parent. I would never tell my little daughter, “Mariclaire, if you are good, I’ll strap you in your car seat when we get in the car. But if you are bad, I’m not going to strap you in! I’ll just let you get hurt!” Of course I wouldn’t do that! BECAUSE I love her, I’ll put some protections and boundaries in her life. That’s how God is. He gives us boundaries for our protection because he loves us, not to get us to earn His love.

As you go throughout your week, stay within God’s boundaries. Not to earn his love, but to experience his love!

Watch or listen to the sermon here.