One Year Ago...

One year ago today my life was changed forever...

One year ago today:

     I was unjustly fired...

     I was treated worse than an enemy...

    I encountered pain like never before...

     I fully understood betrayal...

     I knew what it was like to hate...

     I fell into a deep, dark place...

     A bitter root was formed...

    A hard lesson was taugh... 

    A new path was set...

     A tough journey began...

    A family was forever changed...

    A vision was seeded...

    A passion was ignited...

     A new man was formed...

    An old way died...

One year ago my life was changed forever...

I was set free.

Lord, it has been so very difficult to bear the burden placed on my shoulders this past year.  There were many times when I did not respond well to the situation in which I found myself.  There were also times when, through Your grace and power I was able to rise above anger and bitterness to see Your glory and to serve Your Kingdom.  As you know, I still struggle every day with what happened to me, how I was treated, and how Your church was torn apart because of the selfish motives of individuals.  Nevertheless, I thank You for Your wisdom, grace, mercy, provision, direction, and power.  I am Your man, set free to live for You, and not the whims of men.  I pray I live well, and give You glory as I seek to do Your bidding.  Please continue to guide me with Your hand, and to give me a heart to follow after You.

Reach-out, Reach-in, or Walk with?

            I can’t believe it’s Tuesday and I am just now writing about it, but this past Friday (Oct. 31) the Roots Community had it’s first major “collision” event (a collision event is one designed to allow dissimilar lives to collide in a way that they normally wouldn’t.  Sounds violent, but sometimes we have to crash into each other before we will take notice of our neighbors… watch the movie Crash and you may get it).  We hosted a Trunk or Treat for the Davenport and Haines City communities.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it is basically a “safe” form of trick-or-treating where people line their cars up, open their trunks or tailgates, decorate them and hand out candy.  Some of you may think that this is silly, and normally I would agree accept that this type of event is very needed in this community.  Why?  Because the majority of neighborhoods in the area of Davenport are either half empty or they are made up of mostly vacation homes, which would mean a lot of disappointed kids.  Now, our little rag-tag group consists of about 17 adults with a few children.  We couldn’t use all of our vehicles because we needed to run the event so we had to rely on family and friends to come to our neck of the woods and use their cars for our event.  I believe we had about 30+ cars.  Not a whole lot, but just the right amount.  In the end the event was very successful.  Jesse, our leader, estimates 1,000+ people showed up (I think it was more like 500+, but…) and we had 60 people express interest in our community (read: church).   Here are some pics from the event:

    

To see all the pics you can go here: http://s130.photobucket.com/albums/p243/kslique/TrunkorTreat08/?albumview=slideshow

 

            So why do we (churches) do these types of events?  Why do we offer something to the entire community during this time of year?  As I would drive around the area looking for work (please continue praying about that) I saw churches with signs advertising Fall Festivals, Trunk or Treats, and even a Safe House.  I wondered what they were trying to accomplish.  I could probably guess what their reasoning was since I have been a part of many of these events.  Most pastors and church members would say that they are a great “outreach” event.  Shoot, that’s the party line I would produce in defense of the amount of time and money needed to do such an event well.  The problem I have with that is semantic in nature, but really fleshed-out in practice.  The term “outreach” creates an immediate separation.  It suggests some form of compartmentalization wherein the church has closed itself off from the rest of society.  I once saw it represented as the church creating a fortress to protect its members from the very people to whom they are supposed to be reaching and ministering.  Perhaps the term should be changed to “reach-out”, but even then there is a suggestion of leaving one area and entering another… to reach out of our churches in an effort to touch and draw those who are not on the inside.  That’s not a bad thing, reaching out, but what happens when the “outreach” event is over?  As in our event, most churches will either require personal information for participation or they will ask for personal information to be volunteered (That’s what we did.  We asked.  We weren’t candy Nazi’s).  In just about EVERY church I have been in the cards are used for 1) creating a somewhat realistic event attendance; 2) generating a new spam mail list, and/or 3) populating a warm-lead list for mid-week visitation.  Problem?  They are usually waved in front of the congregation on the Sunday after the event and then placed on the pastor’s desk and quickly forgotten as the “regular” business of the church takes more and more importance.  One month later someone will ask for the cards because they are getting ready to mail out the newsletter and the pastor can’t find them because they got thrown away with all the junk mail that was piled on top of them.  A bit cynical I know, but this is how it usually plays out.  Outreach events tend to do exactly what their names suggest:  reach out of our fortresses into the danger zone to collect and gather as many people as possible for a short amount of exposure and then retreat back inside and hope a few stragglers follow us in.  I used to push against this in our staff and leadership meetings.  I would use the example of putting a pie in the window to cool.  We, as churches, are good at putting the pie in the window and enticing people to come in and have a piece.  What we are called to do is take the pie to the people and sit down and eat it with them in their homes.  There is a big difference between the two.  In church-planting circles this distinction is labeled Attractional vs. Missional. 

            The Roots Community has taken this distinction and decided to be both attractional as well as missional. Last Friday I believe we took a big step towards accomplishing that goal.  We were missional in that we provided a much-needed service to our community (as part of the community), and we were attractional because we did it well, and without manipulative fact-gathering tactics.  People were asking about us, who we were, what we were all about, etc.   That is the result of attractional, which was the result of being missional (or Incarnational).  We didn’t reach into, or reach out of.  Rather we co-existed with our neighbors and allowed a few lives to run headlong into one another.  Just like in a real collision, some information was exchanged, and follow-up will happen.  Perhaps we provided an opportunity for neighbors to finally talk to one another.  Perhaps we provided the opportunity for a single mom to let her kids run wild in a safe, controlled environment.  Or perhaps we provided a glimpse of the grace and joy of knowing Jesus that someone has been desperately seeking.  Either way, our hope and prayer is for transformed lives.

            Lord, I pray that you help us to always see our role in Your kingdom as creating opportunities for people to come into contact with the love and grace that You offer.  Help us as we pour over the information provided from individuals.  Help us to see them as real people with real lives and real problems.  Continue to provide for our needs in a miraculous way.  We lean on You alone for provision, and know that it will be a catalyst for lives changed.

The Christian-Church Conundrum

     Yesterday I had an interesting thing happen to me.  I found myself trying to explain my "situation" to people who were completely unchurched.  Now, they understood the idea of me being in ministry and even the idea of me helping start a new church, but I could tell they didn't fully understand the concept of "professional/career Christian" or all the intricacies of church politics that could result in the termination of said professional/career Christian without any provocation or simply on personal proclivities.  Let me back up a little bit.  A couple of weeks ago I was clicking around on Craig's List when I came across an ad for a guy wanting someone to do some graphic design for cheap.  He is a man in Lakeland who is writing a book and needs someone to design his book cover.  He doesn't have much to pay, but I don't have much of anything coming in, so I answered the ad.  He liked my work and even the quick proof I did for him so he "hired" me for the gig.  Yesterday we met at The Pub to sign a contract, pay me a deposit, and just get to know each other.  He spent a while telling me his story, the idea behind the book (it's a health "how-to" for 40+ adults), and some ideas for marketing.  He then asked me about my family, and his friend (who came along) asked me about ministry.  She wondered about whether it was a "career choice" or a calling.  I explained that it was definitely a calling, and that anyone who made it a "career choice" would eventually burn out or have a serious moral failure.  She looked a bit puzzled, but seemed to accept what I was saying.  Further investigation led to the situation of my termination.  

     Now, I will admit that there is still a great deal of anger and bitterness that I harbor about the whole situation.  I am not fully over it, and it does shape my disposition towards most established churches and the systems that create these churches.  I battle it daily, and covet your prayers as I do so.  Anyway, I did not want to exhibit my anger and bitterness to these people, but I also desired to 

be honest and transparent with them.  What I found myself doing was having to explain the intricacies of church polity to people who had absolutely no knowledge or understanding of church culture.  I might as well have been reading them a technical manual on Cellular Array Processors (I don't know, don't ask).  Anyway, in the middle of my "explanation"  it occurred to me that the very thing that has taken up 1/3 of my life holds little to no significance or consequence to the world outside of Christian culture (the "real" world as some have called it).  I found myself wondering how something could hold such sway over my emotions and destroy families, but not even register on the radar of importance for the rest of society.

     This conversation has caused me to seriously ponder what we do inside our churches.  I have always found much of what we do under the name of "The Lord's work" to be suspect, but trying to explain the inner workings of church without painting a very, very bad picture became an extremely difficult thing to do.  Here we had people who were genuinely good people (read: "nice") who have a pre-conceived notion about churches.  Why?  Because we have spent so much time making sure the people inside the church are happy and entertained, that we don't really even try to maintain any form of connection or even relevance to the very world to which we are called to minister.  I lament that I might have made their picture of churches a bit worse, but hopefully their view of Christ-followers is a little better as is their understanding of what it means to live as God intended.  I'm sure it will take a while to fully help them understand the difference between Christians (people who give themselves that moniker) and followers of Christ (people who are called Christians by others because they are diligently trying to live like Jesus Christ did), but I am glad to have the opportunity.

Re-connect...

Just a short report to keep you all up to speed.  This Friday the Hendrix family disconnected and took an overnight camping trip.  We went to a state park that was only about 20 minutes from where we live, so it wasn't a big chore to get everything together and head out.  This was the first time we had been camping as a family, and the first real camping trip the kids had ever been on.  That is a sad statement considering my family used to go camping all the time when I was growing up.  I guess we have been so caught up in "doing" ministry over the years that we haven't taken the time to re-connect with God's creation.  Anyway, it was really great to get away from everything that has become a distraction to us.  I was able to see my kids re-connect with their imaginations; I was able to re-connect with God's beauty; I was able to re-connect with what it means to be a great dad; and I was able to re-connect myself with the truth of God's grace and providence.

    

     Now that we are back home and re-connected to the "regular" life that we have, I now feel ready to re-connect with the purpose and vision that brought us here in the first place.  I hope to be able to take more time throughout the week to disconnect a little in an effort to re-connect with what is really important.

    

Hope you all have a great week!

Disconnect... please!

I'm still trying to figure out how it takes me so long to make an entry on this.  It's not like I have this overwhelming schedule or anything.  Well... ok, I did last week.  Jesse and I attended Basic Training, a boot camp of sorts put on by the Florida Baptist Convention.  It was brutal!  10 hours of sitting in a room listening to people talk at us while we filled in the blanks in our workbooks... EVERY DAY FOR 4 DAYS!  It wasn't a good week at my house.  BJ was stretched from being a single mom, and I was stretched from the boot camp.  By the time the tension in our lives met head on, we didn't have our normal filters or emotional buffers, so we just let each other have it.  Don't look at me like that, you know it happens to you.  We've made up and are happy with each other again, but it just showed me another area where the enemy likes to sneak past our defenses.  Another thing that was made apparent to me was the fact that I need time away.  I'm not crying for a vacation.  What I mean is time away from my environment where my mind can be free, my eyes can soak in the beauty of God's creation, my hands can hold my wife's hand and play with my kids, and my feet can travel new paths.  Not having an office to go to or a separate place for me to "do work" causes my home to lessen it's  appeal.  I feel like I never leave work (even though I don't have a job) and I am always "on."

So, this week I am going to pursue the opportunities to disconnect.  Even if it is for a little while, it will allow my mind to re-orient itself.  If you live in Central Florida and know about places to do this, please let me know.  I'm gonna stop writing now so I can look for ways to disconnect.  You go do the same!