Highland on Twitter

So this is the video we showed yesterday at Church. This was a blast to make with our staff, thanks to Suzetta, Ben, Brandon and Sarah for helping to make this. For some reason they found it very natural to act annoyed at me, I think they may be pulling from deep waters there.

Obviously, It is totally divorced from reality, there’s no way I would be this obvious about self-promotion. I’m much more subtle than this. READ MORE

EXTRAS

So I’ve been pretty swamped this week and haven’t had much time to write. Next week I plan on starting a new blog series for a few weeks about Jesus and celebrations but for this week I’d like to share this.

This is a video that we showed at Highland a few weeks ago as we kicked off the new series EXTRAS. I read an article last year about the myriad of people who are in front of the cameras but behind the scenes in all of your favorite films and TV Shows. Most of them will never get discovered, they work hard and are paid little. And the question that kept coming back to me was…”Why? Why would anyone do this?”

So that’s what I went to find out. I’ll write more about my experience after I get further along in the series at Highland, but I will say this. I will never read the Bible the same way. There are hundred of tiny characters in the Holy plot of the Scriptures who just show up for a sentence or two and faithfully play their role to advance the story. They never knew how or if they would be remembered, but the story couldn’t go on without them.

I’d also like to point out that I am doing this series with one of my best friends in ministry Josh Graves, and that experience alone has been worth everything. There is something about having someone studying and praying and writing and dreaming together that makes ministry and its fruit so much richer. I don’t ever want to do a series again by myself. READ MORE

Separation for Church and State

When I was young we had a nice woman come and knock on our door campaigning for herself to be the new Saline County Treasurer. She was kind and bubbly, and she asked me if I would help her win.

I was 10.

But I said yes. Actually, my friend and I went up and down both of our streets knocking on doors and handing out yard signs and bumper stickers for her. We even had learned a few of her talking points as we tried to convince others to take up our righteous cause. It was intoxicating, to say the least. In fact, she really just got us started down the road of political action.She was the gateway politician for us. 2 years later my friend and I would get out the phone book and call every single person in the Benton area to vote for George H.W. Bush’s re-election against Clinton.

On the night of the election, we gathered with in the Republican Headquarters of Benton and waited as the results came in. We were devastated when they did. Clinton had won, and Saline County had even voted for him. Who would have thought that two 12 year old boys making un-authorized phone calls for Bush wouldn’t have worked?

And that’s kind of the end of my political activity. I’ve voted and had heated conversations just like the next person, but I’ve tried to stop putting as much weight as I used to on the political system. I’m still glad that we have public servants who (hopefully) try to work hard and honestly to serve their constituents. But I am a preacher and so my concerns are now quite different than the American government. They are much smaller, and much more important, and still somewhat tied together. READ MORE

Imagination Over Politics

I remember the first time I met a Democrat. I mean a real live, bonafide Democrat, not just one of the scarecrows we had set up in the backyard.  I had met a friend at Harding, and everything seemed to be going fine, we had similar interests, had served in similar programs and after a few months of knowing him he dropped the D-bomb. But he wasn’t at all what I had grown up expecting, I couldn’t find the horns anywhere.

In his book, To Change the World, Robert Hunter makes a thousand profound observations, but his first one, the place he really starts his book from is that we have over politicized every aspect of our culture. Today when we meet someone, we almost always, in the back of our mind our trying to figure out where they fit on a political spectrum. And whether or not the relationship can progress depends, in large part, on whether we are in tune with one another political ideology.

And it’s not just which way a person votes. Almost every aspect of who we are and the choices we make have been politicized. Hunter points out, “Categories of identity that are not in themselves political have been suffused with political meaning. This is precisely what has happened to the categories of race, class, gender and sexual orientation.” In other words, you are what you vote, and you vote what you are.

It gets worse. READ MORE

Strategy not Numbers

So bear with me on this one….

Some time in 1988, a group of about 200 people gathered in Warrenton, Virginia. They were an overwhelming minority in a world that had a very specific and negative opinion about them, and they were determined to do something about it. Each of these people were from different walks of society, but they all had a common goal. They were going to advance a cause strategically.

They were going to go into the five main areas of society: Government, Education, organized religion, media, and the workplace. And they were going to tell their side of the story.

And that’s exactly what they did. And 20 years later, the way people think about homosexuality has radically been changed. Now I’ve heard some Christians spit the words before “The Gay Agenda” but agenda just means leadership. And lead these people did. They were nothing short of brilliant in the way they leveraged their little resources and manpower to make a cultural impact that was impossible for anyone who lived during the 80′s to predict. They changed the world.

And they did it by a small group of people coming together to contribute to every part of society.

Now this isn’t a post on homosexuality or politics, or any of the other valid jumping off points we might find. It is a post about Christian cultural engagement.

Or the lack thereof. READ MORE

My Friend Rodney

I gave this sermon, along with my friend Rodney McIntosh, at the Highland Church a couple of weeks ago. (Highland peeps if you want to know about stuff like this you can connect with through what is being posted on Highland’s Facebook or Twitter pages.)

This is a sermon that I had dreamed about for a few months. It’s with my good friend Rodney. He’s one of the greatest leaders I know, and already a very gifted speaker. I’ve written about Rodney before on this blog…For the first half of his life, He was a leader of the Bloods in an area of Arlington Texas called Stop 6, and now with the rest of his life he is a preacher. For the past couple of years, Rodney has been traveling around to different churches preaching, and for a while, was going to speak at different Boys and Girl clubs about his story, and how the Gospel changed him. His dream is to plant a church, and that’s a dream that is well on it’s way.

If you are a preacher and would like Rodney to fill in for you, or you’d like to ask him to speak at one of your events…you can email Rodney at RodneywMcintosh39@gmail.com

If you live in Abilene, you should know that Rodney will be one of the speakers at the Stop the Violence event, in the Abilene Civic Center August 26-28 READ MORE