I have had a fast and furious past few weeks. From a nice extended weekend at the lake to a week with 200 children at Children’s Camp to this week which has been full of meetings, it seems as if it never slows down! That being said, I love so much being a pastor that even though my schedule is full, I couldn’t be happier! Tracy and I were talking the other day about how unique it is that each of us is getting to fulfill our dreams for our lives. She is a stay at home mom and I’m a lead Pastor at an amazing church which is being used by God to take the gospel to the world. What a blessing!

Coming up this week, however, is a couple of very exciting events. We start our new sermon series this week entitled “Oasis”. Just as an oasis appears in the midst of vast desert, so to Christ appears out of the midst of our depravity and offers us hope in a hopeless world. I’m excited about the new series. On top of the exciting series, the good folks who design our stage for each series have built a 10 foot waterfall which looks incredible! I’ll try and post pictures in the upcoming weeks once the stage design is complete.

Beyond that we start VBS next week. Last year we had over 200 children and this year we are praying for 400! We’ll see how God blesses our prayers and how God uses our VBS to draw children to Himself.

Finally, below is a picture a friend took of my wife and girls as we played with fireworks last week at the lake. I thought it was particularly good so I thought I would post it.

Dr. Don Whitney, who used to be one of my professors at Midwestern, and is now a professor at Southern was the topic of an article that was published today over at Baptist Press. Actually it would be more accurate to say that a recent message on the topic of Church Discipline. I was just speaking yesterday with a group of area pastors about the need to be more faithful in implementing church discipline in the local church. We worked hard for a number of years at my last church to implement discipline and thankfully it was already part of our dna here at Frederick when I got here. I am convinced that the American church is need of many things. We need more consistent evangelism, discipleship, worship and fellowship. We need more effective pastors and more committed laypersons. What I think we need more than anything, however, is repentance. As pastors we have an obligation to lead our people to treat sin as serious and the biblical practice of Church Discipline is a necessary ingredient.

I would really encourage you to read the article. You can find it by clicking here.

It’s the end of another Sunday and what a good Sunday it was! When you look at numbers it wasn’t incredible, in fact we had the lowest attendance of the year I believe. It seems that summer vacation has hit us hard. In spite of that, however, we had a phenomenal day. It was exciting to watch as God moved in our hearts as we took the Lord’s Supper together. I’m always profoundly moved by the opportunity we have to remember His sacrifice.

The choir rocked this morning! Wow! They sang Thou Oh Lord for the second time and I am blown away every time I hear them perform it. I’ve had it in my head all day and I can’t stop singing it. I found a video of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir singing it, in case you’re not from Frederick, and they do well but they’re not as good as Chad and our Celebration Choir. Man, I am in awe every time I hear this. If you’re listening to it for the first time, it starts a bit slow but the second half of the song will knock your socks off. There was a time when I just didn’t like choirs in church very much but I’ll tell you what, Chad and our choir have changed my mind. When they begin our services they do a phenomenal job of setting the table and preparing our hearts for worship. Thanks choir!

It was a privilege to watch as God brought one family and another individual to join the Frederick family this morning. I’m always thrilled to watch as God brings more people to be a part of what He’s doing at Frederick!

For some reason God’s presence really seemed strong as I taught this morning. There are days when I struggle through messages and then there are days when it seems as if God is really speaking and it’s easy to move through the message. This morning was exciting as I taught about the church at Philadelphia. I’m working on uploading the video from the message given in the second service and I’m hoping to have it posted in the morning.

We got the privilege of spending this afternoon with our band and worship team enjoying lunch together which was a privilege. I love spending time with the special people that God is using at our church in powerful ways!

The day ended just right as Tracy and I sat on our front porch and watched our girls chase and catch lightning bugs. The little things like that are the best parts of life. We finished up with our girls by sharing in our devotion time and we just put them down for the night.

I hope that your Sunday was as good as ours was!

Today continued to be a good day in Indy. The general consensus among those I spoke to was that this was the best convention they had attended in quite some time. Between the unity of the convention and the direction of our leadership I am heartened and encouraged. Today was particularly encouraging as we passed Tom Ascol, Malcom Yarnell and Bart Barber’s resolution on Regenerate Church Membership. It’s about time.

Today was also fantastic because I got to spend the afternoon (which is free time at the convention) with my wife. During that time I ate at Chik-Fil-A twice and we went on a boat ride down the Indy Canal which was a blast. I’m telling you, my wife and two meals at Chik-Fil-A makes for a killer afternoon.

I also spent a bit of time this morning speaking with Jim Hardwicke, who many of you will know as the former pastor of Frederick Boulevard. It was encouraging to hear from him about what God was doing in his life and to share with him the exciting things happening at Frederick!

Speaking of Frederick Boulevard, I was encouraged yesterday to learn that our church was recognized as one of the top 500 givers to the Cooperative Program in the entire SBC! If you know me well you know that I love the CP. It is incredibly encouraging to once again be reminded of the missions heart and faithful commitment of our people at Frederick Boulevard. It’s a lot of fun to be Frederick’s pastor.

The convention highlight of the day, however, was the IMB report tonight. Tracy and I cried as we listened and watched Dr. Rankin and the other members of the IMB family remind us of the greatness of our task, the greatness of our missions sending agency and most importantly, the greatness of our God. It was a wonderful way to end the convention. I am going to attempt to get a copy of the dvd from this evening to show it to our folks at Frederick Boulevard on a Sunday evening in a few weeks.

Well, I am going to sign off now. I’d love to write more and I may in a few days. Now, however, I need to go to bed. I’ve got to be up in 7 hours when we’ll jump in our van and drive to Wilmington, NC for my brother’s wedding. Ugh.

At Frederick Boulevard we like to say that, “We exist to Reach, Teach and Unleash committed followers of Jesus Christ.” This passion drives everything that we do. When we look at our metro area we know that we have approximately 105,000 people within 15 miles of our facility. Of those 105,000 approximately 80,000 are disconnected from any church. Our goal, then, is to connect those 80,000 disconnected people with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As we think about new ways to effectively reach those 80,000 we are constantly challenging ourselves to do whatever it takes to reach them.

Our newest effort to reach the 80,000 disconnected people was announced this past Sunday in worship and I am so excited about it! One of the most significant populations in our community that are dramatically unreached is the Hispanic population. We also know, however, that they are probably not going to come to our facility. We have tried over the years to use ESL, as well as other ministries, and have not successfully brought them to our facility. So, in order to reach them with the gospel we are going to go to them rather than ask them to come to us. As Elders, we recently agreed to move towards the planting an additional campus of Frederick Boulevard that will be on the south side of St. Joseph and will be a Hispanic campus. We are moving towards becoming more of a multiplying church than ever before. This should be one of the most significant efforts we’ve ever been involved in as we try to take the gospel to those who do not have it.

So, please be praying for us as we move through this process. Our hope is to begin small in-home Bible studies over the next few months until our campus pastor is here and on staff with us. We then hope to move towards actual services beginning after the 1st of the year. It should be a lot of fun to be a part of.

If you are a part of Frederick Boulevard and you feel like God is moving you towards missions involvement, I would highly encourage you to consider volunteering to be a part of this new campus. We need families who are willing to engage in this new ministry. By the way, Spanish proficiency is not necessary. We have found that we are in need of bi-lingual ministry. Many of the parents speak Spanish as a first language and many of the kids are speaking English as a first language and so we need people who speak either English or Spanish (or both) to be a part of the ministry!

This is an exciting time to be a part of what God is doing in St. Joseph through Frederick Boulevard.

Over the past few months I have not written much original material for the blog. To be honest, school has been a bit of a load and my workload at the church has been pretty high. While the church workload will continue to remain high, school is out now and I’ve got a couple of things in the hopper that I wanted to let you know about.

First, I’ve known of Joel Rainey for quite some time through the blog world. Thankfully, however, I got to meet him in person not too long ago. Joel forwarded me a copy of his new book, Planting Churches in the Real World. I’m excited about reviewing it and hopefully should have that review posted within the next week.

Next, speaking of new books, coming up on June 10th I will have a interview with Ed Stetzer and Philip Nation dealing with their new book, Compelled by Love. I’m part way through the book and it is outstanding so far. I’m looking forward to that post. Since that date happens to fall while we are all three going to be in Indy for the SBC Annual Meeting I am also attempting to arrange an audio interview. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that we can arrange that.

Finally I’m beginning to work on a series of posts entitled “Mission Dei”. I find that a large number of SBC churches have no actual strategy in respect to missions methodology. A lack of strategic planning, in my opinion, leads to a lack of long term impact and allows for an unfortunate overexpenditure in regards to missions money. I want to help lay out a few principles that guide my thinking in regards to a comprehensive missions strategy for a local church. If you are from another church besides Frederick Boulevard, hopefully this will challenge you to think through your own missions efforts. If you read this from Frederick Boulevard hopefully this will help you to understand where we are going as a church in respect to our missions efforts. It should be an exciting series!

Finally, I’m going to leave you with a Weekend Worship video. It’s been a while since I’ve posted one but I recently ran across this new song from Chris Tomlin, City of God, and I’ve fallen in love with it. I wanted to share it with you as well. I hope you enjoy it this weekend.

We are in the middle of our new series entitled “life: living as the body”. This week we’ll be preaching on Romans 12 and I will be preaching on the importance of worshiping together. As part of my message I have been grappling with a working definition of worship. I’d love to have input from those of you who attend Frederick and those of you who do not. I’ll insert my working definition below and you feel free to critique it and offer your definitions as well.

“Worship is a sacrificial expression of our love for, and dedication to, God which seeks to reflect His glory and proclaim His truth.”