Country Club Church

I’m currently watching a 30 minute interview/sermon and of course the reason I watched it because it was Aaron Gillespie talking. But in his message he talked about sub cultures in churches but he referred to them as a country club church. He’s talking about the $50 dollar country club that doesn’t have the best 18 hole course but the people there just love you for you you give Hi-fives (inappropriately) when you get there but in the end you just hang with your buddies and have a good time. Compared to the $500 dollar country club that has the greatest 18 hole course but before you can play there you have to meet standards and how you have to dress this way wear this hat wear these socks meet the vernacular intellect with the workers and people, he says your not going to go there….your going to go to the $50 dollar one because the people care about you and thats it, they don’t care about what you drove and stuff they just care about you. Thats the big problem is that we have turned Christianity into a country club. You want to meet with Jesus on a level where it’s your own terms. He also says earlier in the video that people do not want to come to church and see us they want God and thats it. As soon as you give up yourself and just let God be God and be there and run the show people will show up to your church because it is real. Its not big smoke mirrors light music while all those things can be used to help, you cant phase God out because he is the reason for being there in the first place. When asked how he gets close to God he said just jump…just jump into Jesus. You need to be transparent for it to work, he goes on to talk about relational. 

I don’t go to church to be a church person in the negative light. I go to church to worship God and thats it just because he is and will always be. So I really want to be a part of a family and not have to fit in. I have been very lucky to not have to fit in, the church I have been gong to has accepted me very well for who I am, but I know its not perfect and there is stuff that needs to change and God is moving in that church and things are starting to change…so I guess thats all I have. I will post the link for this video..its solid and powerful watch the whole 30 minutes.

Bye for now :D

P.S. Check out Jesus Culture...They are really good!!

Drumming

I love drumming…its one of my favorite things to do in this world I’m not the best at it there are a lot of people that are better than me on this gigantic rock of a world but I myself I’m not to shabby. I can hit these drums as hard and as fast as I can and vent out any frustration or any other emotions that are built up inside me. But that’s not why I do it…When I started playing the drums in middle school it was because of Travis Barker and how cool he was and what he represented which was money, cars, girls, and just living the life. I never really had a purpose to play I just did and I didn’t get better I just kinda stayed the same with it. So I thought ehh its not for me and I quit for along time. One day while at Church years later David asked me to play the drums for a Sunday because he heard that I could play from Eli and Eli who was the drummer at the time was leaving that summer for school. So I reluctantly said yes and was really regretting my decision on saying yes after because I was pretty mediocre and I didnt want to embarrass myself in front of everyone. Long story short watching David lead worship like he did and how he lets you know its about leading people to a place with God and how its not about you made me change my perspective on why I should be drumming the weeks after I made that decision I had this burning desire to drum everyday it wouldn't go away even if I played for massive amounts of time. What I realized was because God has blessed me with this gift and he lets me use it that means its not really mine and its his. For the past few months I have kinda drifted away from that idea…I have still been improving and getting more and more solid but its not as rewarding as when I first started. Today in Chapel Dave Williams was talking about taking what you hold in your hands and giving it to God. It hit me bad, and today I made the decision if the day I don’t play for God I’m done drumming because there is no point. So I gave my gift to God and told him I’m drumming for no other reason but to help people find him and relate in a way that listening to a person speak might not have the same effect.. Whether that be in worship teams and band or whatever I just want to use my gift to glorify him. Psalms 150: 5-6 says praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD. I wrote that on my snare head and it reminds me of why I play and Who I should always play for.

Short and Sweet

Pardon my stealing this but it really has made me think. I was watching Aaron Gillespie's I Am Living video and he was talking about when he went to Africa. To the readers who don't know who Aaron Gillespie is he is the ex-drummer of Underoath my favorite Christian Rock Band and the Current Front man for The Almost. But what he was talking about in this video was that he didn't understand why God didn't work through him as he did for the Ugandans that were at the church he was attending in Africa and when he asked that question he heard this They Worship Me For One Reason and that reason was because the worship Jesus because He is, No More, No Less, Just because He exists. Thats heavy stuff for me at least....what I have put this down in my blog for is so that i can come back a re-read it and remember I don't need a reason to worship Jesus I just need to worship Jesus because he is. Feel free to apply it to your life if you want....Jesus is the gift to the world His love is unconditional, its everlasting and it's free. 


He also quotes and summarizes Hosea 6:6 "Saying that more than our sacrifice and in more that in our I'm sorry more than our promise God wants to know us and be in communion with us."


Thats all I got

Thanksgiving is pretty cool

Today was a good day. I woke up to go play in the Turkey Football League with a bunch of people from church and in times like that I really miss playing sports. I like being competitive, do some friendly trash talking, and exposing to everyone how EXTREMELY athletic I am.......not. I'm really not super unathletic but as for being a super sports player I show up on the EHHHHHHHH hes alright part of the athleticism scale. But what it came down to was we beat Davids team by a huge amount and had a lot of fun. I watched a documentary on NWA the rap group from the early 90's and as I was watching I just kept thinking to myself why did I think this stuff was so cool.. I mean I was listening to that garbage like two years ago and up until a few months ago I listned to Lil' Wayne and stuff like that and I recently deleted it all off of my iTunes because I feel like where I am at and where I'm going with my major that stuff cant come with me and in fact right now I'm listening to a Dr. Dre record from the early 2000's aaaaaaaannnnnnnd its not good. Its horrible and filthy and really does not have any talent in it at all. In fact I'm gonna turn it off right now. Hold on a second........................................................................................................................................................... Okay its turned off. But I mostly get on here to ramble about my life and as you can tell by reading the past paragraph its pretty uneventful. OHHHH Bedlam is this week WOOOOOOOOO I cant wait as far as my plans go right now I am gonna try to go to Stillwater Oklahoma and go hangout for the Saturday which would be pretty fun. OU always beats OSU and this year OSU has a good chance of winning so keep those fingers crossed that OSU does win. If they do win they get to go to the Big 12 Championship for the first time ever!!! Probably to play Nebraska....bummer. I just looked up at my T.V. thats muted and Undercover Brother is on YUCK!! Ummmmm I got to go to the Youth group on Wednesday at Miami Friends and they do this thing called Connect groups which is a bunch of small groups,we played duck duck goose and then David talked about a lesson and then we split up into the small groups to chat about what we thought that the message meant to us and to the people that it was first said to in the Bible. It was very interesting and I enjoyed it a lot, it made me really miss youth group and stuff. David was doing this series on the Seven parables Jesus talked about in Matthew and they were wrapping it up last Wednesday so I caught the last one of the series which was

Matthew 13: 47-50: The Parable of the Net
Its about how the Kingdom is like a net full of fish and when it is pulled up to the surface all the good fish will be separated from the bad fish it goes on to say that that's the way the end times will be the righteous will be separated from the wicked the righteous staying in Heaven and the wicked being cast into the blazing furnace where there will be weeping and the gnashing of teeth.

I don't know about you but I think that that's some heavy stuff. I really don't want to be tossed into a blazing furnace I'm not real big on weeping and I really don't know what gnashing is but it involves teeth and sounds like it would be very unpleasant. It means to grind or strike together (I looked it up :) )...that makes me cringe grinding your teeth together no thanks. So what we talked about was why did Jesus tell this to his Disciples and not to everyone like he did with the rest of the parables. I with the help of others in Davids small group kind of collectively had the same idea and that was because those 12 dudes were Jesus's bros and he knew that he was going to get crucified he wanted to tell them that you need to be righteous and not wicked and to set an example for all of the other people to look to after He was gone. Also I thought he told him that stuff because no one wants to go to Hell and that they needed to go out into the net and try to show as many people as they can the Love and Compassion Jesus has for them and to help them walk a path to righteousness and not wickedness. Also later on in Matthew 28 Jesus gives the Great Commission and says to go out and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 


I walked away with the challenge that I need to talk to people about Jesus and thats really it. That may be uncomfortable and weird to talk to random people about a very personal subject like that but in the long run it  will be well worth it.


Thats it
See You Later

A Blog About Many Things...

It's Thanksgiving break and I am sitting at home not doing anything so I decided to write about how my life has been the past few weeks. Well to start off Barclay College is a paper happy College I have wrote so many papers this semester it's nuts. I think I have had to do more papers this semester than any semester of college before which is crazy to me. That alone just hung over me in a daunting fashion, I mean I felt like I had and endless amount of papers to write and there was no way they were going to get done. Just as I felt like my life was evening out and it was cool my flippin car broke down about a mile outside of Haviland it was overheating and leaking fluid everywhere. So that got sent off to Pratt to get fixed and they found the problem and fixed it...I thought. I was on my way to OKC about 60 miles from where I was going and the car started to get hot again so I pulled over in Perry OK. Its a awful little town and I didn't like it I haven't been frustrated to the point of wanting to break down and give up ever but I was there in Perry I sat and prayed just telling God that whatever the reason all of this was happening that I will try to find the good and learn from it and that I knew everything would work out because I trusted him. Then my phone rang and one of my bros from Miami told me that one of our friends that was going to the show lived 20 minutes from Perry and was going to come get me so I could still go to the show, so again I thanked God for having someone close to me at that point in time. I ended up leaving my car in Perry and going to OKC to watch the show...which was AWESOME!!!! The bands were so good and it was what I needed to do after my past few weeks.

So on the brighter side of things I went to David and Megan's house yesterday to chat with David about things and catch up a little bit and he was putting up Christmas lights so I helped him with stuff while we talked and then Blake came outside and me and Blake kicked it for awhile. I like hanging out with that little guy hes so cool and fun to hang out with. Now the funniest thing that happened was when Cadence came out to tell David something she didn't know I was there and when David said hey look Cadence Ethan is here she turned and looked and smiled and gave me a big hug and even something as minuscule as that made what was a very stressful week seem not so bad. Then they were going to decorate Christmas trees in their home and Cadence has a pink tree for her room and she was so pumped to show me it was funny.

At Church tonight we had our Thanksgiving dinner thing and afterwards I hung around to help put some stuff up and ended up playing with Blake and Cadence again...It makes me pumped for the future and makes me like the idea of having kids even though I know that they will be stressful and sometimes you don't know what you are going to do with them because they are acting crazy. But kids like to have fun and I like to run around and act crazy and moronical to an extent and kids do that better than anyone so when I get to hang with Blake and Cadence it's always a fun time but they aren't morons at all sometimes Cadence looks at me like I'm a dummy and that always makes me laugh.

Oh and I met Eli's girlyfriend today and she seemed like she was really nice, I hope he keeps her around he needs someone to hangout with besides me for when I'm at school.

If I Could Become Servant of All With No Lower Place to Fall.

I'm sitting here doing a powerpoint on and off for a presentation for Intro To YM tomorrow and listening to mewithoutYou like I have been all day while I've been in my room. But I really wasn't paying to terribly good of attention to the music playing but I noticed that January 1979 was playing and let me tell you a little secret...It's one of my favorite songs by them!! But a one little sentence stuck out to me as I was listening and doing my powerpoint and it was "If I Could Become Servant of All With No Lower Place to Fall." I have heard that lyric several times it probably wouldn't be a stretch to say over 200 times. But today it stuck out to me above all the other stuff in the song. I have really felt for the past month like I need to go and be a servant to people but I have no call to Missions work so its kind of confusing so I have just kind of buried this feeling down and moved on with school and my life. But that sentence brought it right back up. So I am sitting here trying to figure out why that is so relevant in my life right now. I feel as a person that is looking to major in Youth Ministry that I will have a level of servant hood that comes with the job description I mean I'm going to have to serve at a church and what not but I still feel like that is not the reason that it was pointed out to me. Aaron Weiss the man that wrote that song's Theology and beliefs about Jesus and Christianity blow my mind his thought process is just so different. But I feel like when he says that lyric "If I Could Become Servant of All With No Lower Place to Fall" he is looking at the bigger picture....I want to be apart of that bigger picture. Not only serving as a Youth Minister but serving as a Son to my parents and a brother to my sisters when I am home serving as a friend to Eli, Bama, and Grant....flippin Grant Bigby Holy Buckets thats going to be a tough one because I know he has been reaching out to things that aren't good and I feel like in trying to have everyones attention hes kind of pushing everybody away. I just would like to be helping whoever I can whenever I can. I'm not entirely sure by what this means or entails yet but I feel like I need to do it. Serve all selflessly without and praise for what I do. I'm excited for the future and all I can do is wait to see what God has in store for me in the future.

Bye.

Playin' It Cool

I'm being forced to blog by Andreia so I don't really have anything clever to say or worth reading. Barry is messing with my phone and talking to people on facebook. I hurt Eliot Hinshaws feelings litte El has a BIG heart and its really easy to break. He just said the sleep over is of NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! Barry just told me that a blog is not just a bunch of random stuff. Andreia just made a horse sound when she laughed. Barry's theme song is playin' it cool by The Aquabats. Matt wants to be a Unicorn.  Barry just grabbed my phone and then immediately sat it back down and said no. My computer is about to die so I think I'll finish now.

Wait an anonymous writer wants to say something
the anonymous source decided not to comment.

well until next time!!
BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!