The disciples responded to Jesus call to follow him by leaving everything they had. In their experience there was no time to waste. The transition from self-employed fisherman to Christ followers was immediate. For each of us responding to God’s call is unique. Take time to reflect this week on your response to God. Review the conversation questions and find someone to share your responses.
Read Luke 5:1-11
Getting started: The crowds have followed Jesus to the shore of the sea and among them are fishermen. These fishermen have an up close encounter with Jesus and are changed. They leave everything in order to follow Jesus.
Some questions
What impresses you most about this story?
Have you ever made major adjustments in order to be obedient to a call?
What does it mean to be a fisher of men?
What might that look like in our culture?
What can this group do to help you in your willingness to follow?
Action points
Reread this story each day this week and ask, “How will I follow today?”
Go fishing, spend some time by the lake and reflect on the disciples experience with Jesus.
“So how is it having church at Monks?” So many people have been asking me this question since we started meeting there last November. My answer is simply, “too well.” I hope I am representing us accurately when I answer in this way. It really does seem to fit us and it fuels our community. Meeting at Monks has freed up financial resources and enabled us to be far more generous than at any time in our brief history. Now we are able to address and respond to needs both locally and globally. This creates a favorable tension for the next question, “where we go from here?”
This is never an easy question for organizations but it is one that we want to embrace at this moment in our ministry. We believe that in this question there is a fresh vision for our future. With each step in our journey we have solified our identity. At this point it seems clear that meeting in a coffee shop has taught us a lot of good things about community and worship. We have grown here. We are learning here. Our challenge will be to not get comfortable but to live in the question of where God would have us go from here?
It has been a year since we started conversation groups at Crosspoint. These groups meet on Sunday morning at 9:30 AM with the purpose of creating community through conversation. We have a sermon conversation that meets weekly. Other groups may emerge throughout the year. Some people come and have their own conversations. That works at Crosspoint.
In order to extend our conversation we have decided to post our weekly conversations on this blog. Here is our conversation from Sunday, January 31.
Current Series–Do Something
It is the last day of January and time to look back on some of those things we intended to do this New Year. When you consider all things take time to consider those things in particular that you feel God has called you to do.
Text: Jeremiah 1:4-10
Some questions
Share your progress report. Have you been able to sustain some change this year? Share your story.
How hard is it to start again once you have lost momentum?
Have you started doing something for yourself or for others?
Respond to this question, where do you feel like you go from here? What’s next? What are the next steps?
How can this group encourage you?
Action points
Review your goals and resolutions for the New Year. Write them down and make adjustments as you evaluate.
Create one new goal unrelated to your New Year’s goals. One goal for yourself and one that will affect others.
Last Sunday we celebrated Crosspoint in the Park which initiates our first intentional relocation. It was a beautiful day and a perfect reminder that we worship wherever we are. This is true for each of us and it is true for our fellowship.
When we first started talking about the idea of intentional relocation we had no idea what it would look like. It just seemed that a community of faith that desires to be intentional could even be intentional about location. For this season (the remainder of the year) we will meet at Monks Coffee Shop. During this time we will provide a variety of conversations and opportunities to experience generosity. It is almost Christmas time and with the excitement of the season we look forward to the Advent Conspiracy and our unique expression of spending less and giving more.
You can learn more about the Advent Conspiracy at the link below:
My closets are full, my garage is full. I don’t need more, I need less.
At this stage in my life less is more. More freedom, more time, more life as I dreamed it might be. I don’t have an updated resume. I’m not moving up or out. I’m just here longing for the simplicity that might help me to enjoy life. I mean really enjoy life, like noticing things. I’m taking a different route, listening to different music, talking to a stranger and sitting in silence. I want less of the same and more of the unknown.
I’m going to live today as if God wanted me to do something. I want to pay attention and I can’t do that with more, I must do it with less. More of Christ, less of me.
In 1991 I crafted a personal mission statement in order to begin a more focused journey that would add meaning to my life. Through the years my mission statement has guided, challenged and pushed me forward. Simply put my mission is to make disciples. While this statement appears simple you should know that I agonized days and weeks before landing on these words. I wasn’t looking for something that would satisfy a season rather I was looking for something that would direct me for a lifetime. These words created an unexpected challenge. The challenge of developing leaders.
As I begin to embrace the challenge of developing leaders I made a critical decision. A decision I think every person or organization makes knowingly or unknowingly–will I choose create followers or develop leaders. Please notice the difference here. So many leaders are only concerned about the current state of affairs and the effect that good leadership and follow-ship can create. The effects of this kind of leadership are positive but I was wanting more.
I wanted to see if leadership could extend beyond the current generation. I wondered if third generation leadership was possible. I recently read this quote, “the litmus test of any great leader is whether they can quickly write down on a piece of paper all of the people they have developed.” This is a good definition but I wonder if we can go further. Could we suggest that the test of a great leader is that those they led could write down on a piece of paper those they developed. Could we get to the third generation of leadership? While we are at it, can we even reach the fourth and fifth generation?
These are the kind of questions that have kept me in the game over the last years and into this new stage of life. It is for this reason that I hope to create an intentional mentoring and leadership ministry through Crosspoint Fellowship. This is the fourth vision point of our future at Crosspoint. It is an exciting time as we embrace this challenge for the next generation.
Here is a question for you: is it harder to be generous when you have much or little?
I guess we should be cautious how we answer that question. All I know is that in my ministry I’ve wondered what a generous church would look like. When we started Crosspoint I talked a lot about generosity. What I discovered is that it was easy to talk about it when you didn’t have much. There is a sort of comfort in that I guess. Knowing that not much is required of those who don’t have much. We were unofficially off the hook. Not so.
Generosity starts with the heart. Our very nature. Generous people are generous regardless of what they have. So shouldn’t that be true for the church? Or couldn’t it? I am hoping so. In fact I almost get excited thinking about it. A unique community, without much yet feeling as if it has everything. There is something that seems so right about that.
As we struggle to find our generous identity it is my hope that we can learn to bless others without trying to promote ourselves. I wish that we could aggressively give to missions and church starts. I think that day is soon for us. I want it to be now but I will be happy just to know that whatever we are doing, we are doing it with generous hearts.
When we first started Crosspoint one of the questions we were asked most often was, “why another church in Abilene”. We understood the heart of this question. There are churches everywhere in Abilene. Our answer became simply this, “because there is not another church like this one.” Our goal was not to become a bigger, better, cooler version of church. Our goal was to become a unique community of faith and a community of faith that would reproduce other unique communities.
In our view the reality was that Abilene needed more churches, it just didn’t need more churches of the same form. What we are learning is that there are so many who are looking for unique expressions of faith but can’t find something that fits in Abilene. We don’t believe that we are the only answer for those searching. We do believe that we could become a catalyst in Abilene where we could see many unique communities where those searching might feel comfortable.
So here we go. We are not even self supporting yet and we want to be instrumental in starting new churches. How so? Truth is that is why we are here. In Abilene. It is an overlooked mission field. Crazy huh, but no one else seemed to be considering it. We helped start a new church within the first year of our existence. It can be done. This dream reinforces one of the reasons we need to get Crosspoint on solid financial footing. We don’t want to be thinking about ourselves only. We want to be an outward focused church that can reach others through new faith communities.
There is no better time to do it. If we had the resources we might think we had something to do with it. Let’s start now. Let’s embrace the God-sized dream. Let’s place our future and our hope in God.
Crosspoint has always had a simple structure. We have never sought to be program driven church, rather we desire to be mission driven. It seemed that a simple structure would empower our community to have more freedom to be missionally minded. In this process we are discovering a more simple way. This simple way involves more than schedule and structure. It does involve stewardship of resources. One of our best experiences was when we unpluggedfrom a few things like weekly doughnuts and asked people to bring home baked goods. Now each week our table is filled with good and sometimes even healthy foods. Sure we have saved a few bucks but the significant lesson is that we empowered people and gained a greater sense of community.
The simple way extends to all aspects of our life. The tension in this lifestyle is that there will always be more. You will always find more that you can do to simplify. One checkpoint is to make sure that simplifying isn’t selfish. That is what I think is interesting about the simple way. It has an impact on others–community if you will. I don’t think healthy community can exist without the simple way. The simple way frees up resources and empowers a new way of doing life together.
In our recent conversation about resources at Crosspoint we are learning to live in this larger community of faith in a more simple way. We believe that this is one of the unique qualities of Crosspoint. We want to share our simple way stories so that our community can be enriched. If you have some thoughts then share them but more importantly live them. Let’s be an encouragement to one another in a simple way.
Last Sunday I gave the clearest talk that I have ever given on money. OK, now that I said that you can understand why I have waited all week to say anything more. We are living in our best times at Crosspoint. Our purposes are clearer than at any other time and more of our community is starting to get it. While our giving is solid it still falls short of our simple budget and we continue to rely on outside gifts to meet budget. This is frustrating because as a missional community we want to do more. Let me clarify, I’m not talking about having more but doing more. Here are the priorities I suggest we move toward:
Become self supporting. This is the number 1 priority.
Be a catalyst for starting new churches and ministries in Abilene and beyond
Give aggressive support to missional objectives.
Develop an intern ministry that provides the opportunity to clarify strengths and participate in a unique ministry.
Purchase a multi-purpose building.
All of these priorities are currently out of reach but are at the very heart of our identity at Crosspoint. This is our best time. Check back over the next few days as I go over some possibilities of each of these priorities.
