Grace and GroupLink

Last night at GroupLink was another moment which left us amazed at the grace of God. For a couple hours Sunday evening, approximately 300 individuals had the opportunity to get connected in small groups at Clear Creek Community Church! It was a beautiful sight witnessing a line form outside the building because so many people desired to "declare their unity by getting in community!" In addition to the Egret Bay campus, the Clear Springs campus had great numbers of people enter the GroupLink process earlier that morning. Needless to say, the response at both campuses was simply overwhelming.

In addition to the scores of people getting connected in small group, we also distributed over 1500 Membership Studies. Imagine that! Over the next six weeks, literally hundreds upon hundreds of those who call CCCC their home, will be walking through what it means to be connected to Jesus, his church and the leadership. We cannot wait to see what God will do in the lives of those in group over the next six weeks leading up to GroupUp, where we will celebrate any and all commitments made!

Indeed, this is a special season in the life of CCCC and we are most grateful to God for the grace he has shed upon us.

Important Information about the Midweek Service

I’m writing to inform you of a shift in the programming and weekly schedule of Clear Creek Community Church.

The elders of CCCC have determined that transitioning our Sunday services to be our weekly worship experience is the best way to fulfill our mission. Beginning immediately, Sundays will become more like The Gathering (the Wednesday night service), and we will continue to have The Gathering on the first Wednesday of each month, instead of meeting weekly.

Here’s why. When Clear Creek began 16 years ago we believed that (1) reaching an unchurched person and (2) practicing corporate worship required two separate services. However, we have seen generational changes that make a more authentic, participatory worship experience (similar to The Gathering) not only acceptable, but preferable to the generation of unchurched people emerging into adulthood. In light of this we have decided it is more effective to do both in the same Sunday service.

With a First Wednesday Gathering schedule, we add opportunities (1) for small groups (2) for people to engage with our community to reach our unchurched friends, and (3) to serve our community through Go Ops. A First Wednesday Gathering service will allow us to continue to share an extended time together in praise, prayer, the Lord's Supper, and to address church matters.

The elders realize that the weekly Gathering has served as a source of great strength and encouragement for you and others. We hope you’ll join our excitement that so many more of Clear Creekers and our unchurched friends will get to experience a similar worship experience on Sundays. Most importantly we believe these decisions allow us to better fulfill our mission of leading unchurched people to become fully devoted followers of Jesus.

I invite you to two occasions to address these changes. First, please join me at C4 Training this Sunday night (Aug 30) at 6:15 PM in the main auditorium for a 20 minute presentation. Second, after the First Wednesday Gathering on September 2, Yancey and I will meet with you so we can answer your questions and more fully explain why this change is important to make at this time.

Grace and Peace,

The Subtler Side of Serving at Egret Bay

I used to be an accountant so I appreciate a chance every now and then to analyze some numbers. Take a look at these numbers from the Egret Bay Campus:

If you've been coming to CCCC for long, you know that the annual attendance increase happens every year at this time. Looks pretty tight at 10:00 and 11:30!

Now consider one more key factor. You know that you are never able to fill every seat in an auditorium. Our ushers do a great job, but there are always spaces and holes, and no one (especially visitors and guests) wants to climb over half a row of people to fill two empty seats, or sit apart from their family to fill in seats. In fact, experts insist a room is "full" or at "practical capacity" when 80% of the seats are occupied. So, look at these numbers again when compared to "practical capacity":

You get the idea. I won't even bother to explain that the attendance continues to increase for several weeks into September. I won't try to quantify the additional increase the new Creek Kids building will drive. You already see we are out of seats and parking spaces at 10:00 and 11:30, and the problem is going to be worse than these numbers reflect.

Here is the subtler side of serving at Egret Bay: You at the 8:30 service.

You are the only leverage we have today to create an empty seat for someone in our community who will start attending CCCC's Egret Bay Campus in the next few weeks - maybe one of the Top 5 people you are praying for. Your choice to get up an hour earlier on Sunday and make room at 10:00 and 11:30 is essential for us to be on mission this fall.

I urge you and I plead with you to move to the 8:30 service if you attend the Egret Bay Campus. Carefully consider, in light of the mission of our church, any reason you wouldn't, and then ask God to change your mind and your habits! My goal is to increase the 8:30 service attendance to 850 people. If we do that, we just added about 460 seats to the 10:00 and 11:30 services along with the associated parking space! We go forward together on mission, and all it costs us is an earlier trip to the coffee area.

Iron Mike's Baptism

I met Iron Mike through my friend Dave. Mike told me that he was interested in studying the Bible, even though he had not read the Bible before. Dave had known Mike for a long while and prayed for Mike regularly because Mike is one of Dave’s “Top Five”. So Dave and I asked Mike to join us for breakfast each week. We read a few chapters of the Bible over and over during the week and discussed what we were reading at breakfast.

Breakfast around the Bible has become one of my favorite hours of the week. From the beginning I could see that Mike was an earnest believer in God, but he did not have a personal relationship with Jesus. He was not sure what he believed about Jesus. We read and discussed the gospel of John, verse by verse and chapter by chapter. By the time we discussed Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection, Mike’s faith grew to the point of trusting in Jesus as the God-man who came to do for us what we could not do for ourselves. Mike came to believe that Jesus died to pay the price for our sins and was resurrected to prove who He is and to promise us eternal life. I asked Mike if he was ready to let the whole world know that he is a follower of Jesus. Without hesitation he said, “Yes, I am.” So we planned for Mike to be baptized on July 19.

I was bummed when I heard that Iron Mike had pneumonia, not just because he was sick, but because I knew he would not be able to share his story on video for his baptism. But Mike was determined to be baptized in spite of being sick, and he was willing to share his story live.

On Sunday, July 19, we experienced a moment together in the 10:00 AM service at Egret Bay. Others were baptized and their stories were powerful. Then I held my microphone in front of Mike while he sat in the waters of baptism and he started talking. And you had to have been there to fully appreciate what happened in the room, but the attached video of Mike’s baptism will give you a taste. Before you watch it, I want you to know, I am so grateful to be part of a church that acts like this.

Forgive and Forget

The question I am asked most often after I teach on forgiveness is, “Are we supposed to forgive and forget?” In other words, if I forgive someone who hurt me, must I, also, get close to them again and risk being hurt by them again?

When we forgive, we don’t forget. Here’s why. Forgiveness is not acting like the offense never happened. To forgive someone is to acknowledge that the offense did happen, and to, then, release them from the consequences of their offense. It is to no longer hold them in contempt for their treatment of you. To forgive them is to absorb the pain of their offense without insisting that they must pay. To forgive, you let the matter end with you instead of perpetuating the hurt by constantly telling the story of their offense, wishing them harm or bringing them harm.

Forgiveness is given freely. We forgive because we were forgiven. (Colossians 2:13-14 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.) Jesus cancelled the debt by taking the consequences of our offense on himself. We forgive because this is God’s command to us. (Ephesians 4:32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.) We are to forgive as we have been forgiven.

While forgiveness is given freely, trust is earned. To trust someone is to open up to them. Each person determines how closely they allow people to get to them. We all have differing emotional boundaries and personal space. As trust builds, people are allowed to be closer, both physically and emotionally. Once a person is hurt, their “generally allowed, personal space” is adjusted. The rules change about their “generally allowed, personal space”. The offender is no longer trusted, so he is not allowed to be as close as before. Jesus practiced boundaries with people by withdrawing from them. He withdrew from those who would make him king. He withdrew from the religious people who threatened to kill him. He withdrew from the crowds who made unrealistic demands on him.

I can forgive and still have boundaries. I can forgive my brother for hitting me and still not stand so close to him that he can hit me again. I can really forgive him. I might have no thoughts of revenge or hate for him. But forgiving does not mean I must stand closer to him. Trust, which is earned, is what gives me the faith to stand closer to him.

We must learn to disassociate forgiving someone from trusting them. Forgiving does not require that you trust them again. It’s only wise to forgive. It’s not always wise to trust.

We forgive, but we don’t forget. Healthy people live with boundaries.

Connecting to the Kingdom

Jesus never calls people to come to church, he invites them to enter the Kingdom of God – a relationship that begins today through faith in Jesus and lasts forever in a community of people where God is glorified and his will is done. People who live in the Kingdom of God have undergone a radical transformation because the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection has changed their hearts. Jesus teaches that the Kingdom of God is a radical place where people would rather serve than be served. It is a radical place where people would rather live together celebrating redemption in Jesus than to live alone, just coping with everyday life.

So, sometimes I wonder what people think when they hear us talking on Sunday mornings about the most practical expressions of doing life together as the body of Christ – we call it living in community. We talk about being in a small group and finding a place to serve at CCCC as basic expressions of living in this community of God’s people. I wonder what people are thinking because I know that only about half the people who attend CCCC are in a small group and much less than that, maybe one fourth, are regularly serving.

Why is that? Is it because we aren’t inspiring speakers? Is it because people are still new to church and they are just trying to figure out what they believe about God before they jump into the “community”? Maybe.
I think both of those reasons are true for a few people, but not very many.

I think the real bottom line for people who regularly attend CCCC who aren’t in group and don’t serve is that they just don’t really understand what Jesus is talking about when he describes what it’s like to live in the Kingdom of God. I think people see church as just a part of living in this world – like going to work or to the grocery or to a baseball game. I think people think that they can “know” God without being intimate with his people and intimately involved with his mission. I just don’t think that’s true.

Jesus’ description of the Kingdom of Heaven is one of mutual submission, sacrifice, service, and interdependence among the people who live there.

Matthew 20:26-28 But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

The next time you hear us challenge you to fulfill your CC2.0 commitments to give, serve, go to small group, and invite people to church; or the next time we invite you to GroupLink or First Serve; or the next time we invite you to come to The Gathering and share the Lord’s Supper with this community of faith, I hope you’ll come. Not because I asked you to, but because you decide to risk a greater exposure to the transformational power of the gospel of Jesus and because you’re ready to trade life in the suburbs for life in the Kingdom of God.

The Blessings of CHLTB

I was inspired yesterday watching over a thousand people putting others’ interests before their own as they gave up their Sunday afternoon and served the community by performing landscaping, painting and cleaning projects for Clear View Education Center and McWhirter Elementary School. The first Church Has Left The Building effort by Clear Creek Community Church was a huge success! We not only accomplished a great deal of work in about 2 ½ hours but had FUN doing it. The servant attitude of each person was contagious. As I walked around thanking those participating, a common response was “No, thanks for the opportunity.” God has blessed CCCC with hundreds of people who are interested in sharing the Gospel with our community by serving in our community. May our good deeds open up doors for the Good News!

We lived these scriptures yesterday:

1 Peter 4:10

As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace

Philippians 2:3-5
Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,

Way to go, CCCC!

Here are some photos from yesterday.
Click on the image for a higher resolution.