church planting

another day…

kevinhaglund Leave a comment

The past few weeks have been interesting for me. I am a person who thrives in a routine environment. For many years, I’ve had a weekly schedule that has defined my life and provided structure–albeit, chaotic at times. On Monday, I recovered from Sunday and started my week slowly; on Tuesday, I crammed in a ton of meetings; Wednesday was worship ministry rehearsal and prep; Thursdays were tying up loose ends for Sunday; Friday was (sometimes) my day off; Saturday was a half day off with church at night; Sunday was full throttle in the morning, crash on the couch during football in the afternoon and awaken in enough time to meet with our small group at night.

I now find myself without that familiar and comfortable routine. While it has been kind of nice–like a vacation–it has begun wearing thin. I can see that I’m going to need to define a new structure for my week or I’m going to go stir crazy. One of the elements that I want to intentionally build into my new routine is time with people. I tend to be on the “task-oriented” side of the spectrum–often to a fault. Now, in our new paradigm of ministry, “people” are going to be  on my task list. (Yes, we “task-oriented” people have to do that!)

I don’t know if Jesus had a task list, but if He did, people were at the top of it. Our mission statement for browns mill church is “to live like Jesus and to lead others to do the same.” It would be a good motto for me to follow–especially as one of browns mill church’s leaders!

Here are some prayer requests for us:

  • Pray for our transition of being with people we’ve loved for nearly 8 years. To suddenly stop seeing many of them has been hard–especially for Suzanne who is very relational (much more so than I).
  • Pray for a new God-honoring, mission accomplishing routine for Kevin.
  • Pray for our house and the Coleman’s house to sell so we can relocate to Newnan and dive into new relationships.
  • Pray for impact within our existing relationships with neighbors. We are going to have a Winter Solstice party at our house this Friday night for our neighbors.
  • Anything else you can think of–just pray!

in the world.. not of

kevinhaglund Leave a comment

Our small group has been going through a curriculum written by Ed Stetzer called “Sent.” It is a call for Christians to return to the missional lifestyle and being in the world, but not of the world.

In I Corinthians 5:9-11, Paul writes:

“I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.”

Paul is saying that we are supposed to hang out with sexually immoral, greedy, swindlers and idolaters–as long as they are non-believers. We are not even supposed to eat with people who claim to be believers in Jesus but who are sexually immoral, greedy, swindlers and greedy.

This is a switch for most Christians. We tend to separate ourselves from the non-believing “sinners,” but end up tolerating Christians with those same behaviors. The call to embrace a missional lifestyle means taking this passage seriously and building relationships with messy people while confronting Christians who are choosing improper lifestyles. That is the challenge we are embracing moving forward in starting browns mill church.