Well, week four of BE is over.  It's still going well, better than I expected in fact, but I'm also starting to see some people slip into the typical, "Oh well something came up and I'm doing something else instead" that runs rampant in small churches.  It drives me nuts, but what's nice is that the majority of participants are still very active, make sure they make up missed study-groups, and are going above and beyond in their work-outs.  This makes me happy.  Here's some thoughts...

• This week's video, corresponding to "Insurmountable Perseverance," can be downloaded here .  I went to Stockton college on the day after the State of the Union Address to ask university students what they thought when people said, "This is a Christian nation."  This was an enjoyable time - the youth group will be back next week.
• I was impressed with the CrossPoint's devotion to what we're attempting to do with BE and insisted on keeping the normal time rather than moving to have a Super Bowl party.  Now, there's times where expanding worship to include extended fellowship is a good thing, and Super Bowl Sunday is a good time to practice that, but this was the first time as a Pastor where I had people refuse to jump at an opportunity to get "out" of worship.  To any pastors out there who read this, miracles do happen.
• I need to rework some of the questions in BE, and the work out that we went over this week is one of those questions.  People had to ask if they appeared "different" than other people.  What I learned in this was, despite all of our rhetoric on "tolerance," people still link "different" to "bad."  Participants did a good job trying to re-phrase that question, though, so we still managed to have some good responses.
• Quite a number of people got very positive responses from people regarding how they live their lives.  We'll have to keep working on this positive impact - taking it as encouragement and translating it to more deliberate mission (but no "selling" the Gospel).
• My non-Church friends don't see me as different - but since I'm a pastor this was a plus.  They'd never met a pastor who didn't whack them with a ruler (bad Catholic School experience, unfortunately) or who actually had a sense of humor.  So, that was a good thing.
• It was neat to see people affirm, during the "Insurmountable Perseverance" study, that perseverance is not the path of "happiness."  It's the path of suffering, the path that doesn't require God to promise to step in and make things, "alright."  Americans don't tend to resonate with this but most people didn't flinch at this.
• We talked about Shadrach, Mesach, and Abednego not using their perseverant faith as an offensive faith.  They weren't marching around condemning  Babylon for building idols or shouting about their moral superiority - they simply obeyed the Lord, faithfully discharged their duties in Babylon, and told the truth when pressed to bow to a false God.  These guys resonate with Jesus in my mind.

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