I want to talk this morning about being different. And being different can go multiple ways. When I was a kid, you didn't want to be different, but you kind of wanted to be different. Can we be honest?
So I went to the summer program, the summer between fourth grade and fifth grade, it was at LSU A, and we studied anthropology and archeology and history. We made up our own cultures, and we made like false burial grounds, this kind of stuff, it was nerd camp, let's just be honest. Okay, it sounds like nerd camp, doesn't it? Okay, it was nerd camp.
But there was just one kid that wasn't, he didn't fit in. He didn't fit in, because he wasn't nerdy, he was pretty cool. It was Brett, he got a cool name, Brett. His haircut, he was in the Cobra Kai Dojo and Karate Kid.
And I'm talking about like, it's kind of like a mullet, but it's not in a spiked up front. So about halfway through the program, I went to school with Brett, and I don't know why he was there. He was smart, but he was also a lot cooler than the rest of us. And so about halfway through the program, he walks in one day, and he's wearing this pair of shoes that none of us had ever seen before.
There were 1988, 1989, there were black basketball high tops, and in the middle of the tongue, there was an orange basketball. And if you pumped up this orange basketball, there were air pockets and the shoes, and they made the shoes tight. It made you jump higher. And we had never, I mean, we went to like bumpkins from Alexandria.
Brett's mom was a fly to attend it, and she would get him shoes in California. And so we were just amazed at how cool Brett's shoes were. I was wearing like, pay less knock off converse all-stars. And I had to fight my mom to get those.
Here comes Brett with this Reebok pumps. And so school got in, we started school, and a couple more kids had pumps. And man, we were all just blown away. Like, this is what recess would look like for those.
I'm 36, 37. So those of you all might, I'll probably remember this happening. Like you go out to the playground and like the kid who has pumps, doesn't even like play during recess. All the amount that goes to the best square on four square doesn't wait in line because everybody gets the pump as soon as she'll just stand there.
There's like a lot of kids come up your shoes up and don't bust their pockets, man. Like you sit there, it's weird, huh? It's like a pump of your shoes. So later as the school year went on, like there was like more, they got cheaper, like there's more varieties that came out there.
And so, so kids were kind of used to the pumps. And they were like, oh yeah, like half the kids have pumps now. It's awesome. I still pay less converse all-stars.
I finally convinced my mom at the end of the year, these weren't reboxed, they were LA gears. But they had come out with a version of pumps, okay? We know the economy of the playground when you're eight and nine years old. No kid wants generic shoes.
I have a shoe, my mom also bought me a pair of reboxed princesses on clearance one time. I had to wear those for a year. So, they're on sale and make them fit. And so I show up and I kind of was excited because I thought these LA gear fake pumps were gonna like change my own standing on the playground.
But I realized that's not the case because they were different. They were so different. They weren't as exciting as Brett's different as it was a year beforehand. See, different does multiple things.
Different can be, there's unique. And it's something that's desirable and it's changing. And there's also like, man, that's you really miss the memo. It's exact opposite.
There's stuff in between, actually kind of made this chart this week to talk about difference. And the first part of it is something that's unique. There's only a handful of them. They're valuable.
Like the two or three kids that had the $100 sneakers back on everybody else's sneakers cost $10. And you kind of move to the middle where things are common. I said there was a variety of different kind of pumps about December of that year. There's a common who's expected, who's normalized.
It was a normal thing. But then you drift over to the far side where I was in my LA gears and you have knockoffs. Okay, you have imitation. They're irrelevant.
By this point in time, my friend Brett had moved over and he had the first pair of Air Jordans and he had the first pair of Air Jordans that he had ever seen before. And me and the three or four kids who managed the back side of the generic pumps thought we were finally gonna get changed. And it didn't. But see, difference is different.
And we don't wanna be that different. We kind of wanna be different. We still do it now. I was looking at, if you ever look at side by side, like everybody wants to just put as much junk on them as they can.
We all like the idea of something being a little bit customized for us now. And we live in a world where it's possible for just your everyday average person to get something that's customized for you. It's like Etsy. I hear things about that.
I mean, we wanna be a little bit mildly different, but we don't wanna be too different. Different can get us in trouble. We wanna find this healthy medium of different that's close enough to unique, but it's also close enough to normal to where we feel safe. So we're talking about being different this morning.
And we're going into John chapter one, because last few weeks we talked about who you are, we talked about who we are, we talked about what God wants us to do. And I told you all this Sunday, we're talking about Foundry. We're talking about Foundry in 2016 and Foundry in 2017. And significantly beyond that.
So the most appropriate place for us to go to is the pastor's scripture where we have our greatest understanding of this vision that God has gave us when we say Jesus is big enough. It's a John chapter one, you've been around Foundry for very long and all you might be saying Chad, we've heard this verse plenty of times. Don't read it again, but I'm gonna read it again this morning. John one, 14 through 18.
So the word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have seen his glory, the glory of Father's One and only Son. John testified about him when he shouted at the crowds.
This is the one I was talking about when I said, someone is coming after me who was far greater than I am, where he existed long before me. And from his abundance, we have received grace. We've received one gracious blessing after another for the law was given through Moses, but God's unfailing love and faithfulness came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God with the unique one who's himself God is near to the Father's heart.
And he has revealed God to us. So where's the John? He was a disciple of Jesus. He followed him around in ministry.
He was the only disciple to actually live into old age. And 40 or 50 years after the other Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke were written, John decided that he needed to write down his version of the story, his way to he saw things, and the way that he experienced Jesus. And John's a little bit different from the rest of the Gospels, because instead of writing this as a middle-aged person, scared that this was about to be their last day, he wrote as a man who was able to live significantly into older age than most people lived back then. He was in his 90s when he died, reflecting on seeing the church grow and move across from just Jerusalem into the Mediterranean.
So he writes different words. He says, the word became flesh and made his home among us. We've said this before, in the original languages, he used his word, he said, he tabernacled among us. Another translation that we like to use a lot says, word became flesh and he moved into the neighborhood.
This tabernacle, it echoes back to this place of meeting that God's people had when they were in the Exodus. I think about 10th in folds, it wraps over, it's protecting, it's mobile though. This place moved with them from place to place that followed a pillar of fire and a pillar of smoke, it was God's presence in the middle of his people. There's also a subtle difference, I've thought about that this week, I've never thought about this before, but God's saying he is with us, not weird with him.
Think about that, God's saying I am with you. He doesn't say you were with me. There's an intentional move of him knowing where his presence is and where he's going to be with us. We can say Jesus is big enough because he's willing to come and sit down right next to us in the middle of whatever we have going on.
In the good times and the bad times, he's not escaping, he's providing. Very, very just different shifts there. The scripture says, we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father's one and only sons, glorious transcendent, like our word majesty or majestic. The scripture sometimes describes the glory of God being his ever-present light earlier.
And this chapter, John says the light goes to the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it. The light is completely overriding the darkness. We've seen his glory. Glory also speaks to the permanence, so it speaks to the world this much bigger than ours.
As we sang earlier today, let heaven come. We're talking about seeing his glory. To see glory means it's future focus. We're moving into a place beyond our own time right now into the next life.
It also talks about truth though, to see his glory for us to see and experience God for all that he is. And when we see and experience God, we begin to walk alongside of that. What we're gonna find out is we start seeing ourselves. We find the truth and honesty of our own hearts in a healthy way, also in a convicting way.
But we realize that how sometimes we are fighting God's vision. We're trying to overstep his vision for us and have our vision stand out in front. To say that I am big enough, you are not big enough. See God's glory is an amazing thing.
And also twice in John, right here in four verses that start speaking about his being full of unfailing love and faithfulness. I think that we've seen your glory. You're full of unfailing love and faithfulness. That speaks to a pretty heavy experience.
To understand that, to know that, to be able to trust in that means that you've experienced the depth of God. And that's not a light thing. It's full of unfailing love and faithfulness is love. It's not an after effect.
It's not a behavior. It's not a decision that God made. But no, it's who he is. It's the primary attribute of his character.
It says love. So when we read about judgment, we read about judgment in the context of love. When we read about the prophecies, we read about these in a context of love. When we read about people making bad decisions, we read about those in the context of love that's unfailing.
It doesn't go away. It won't stop. Unfailing love is outward focused. It's not inward focused.
It's always directed at other people. It's not directed at the self. The depths of what we are capable of. What God is capable of is unfailing love.
And it's not gonna go away. And if he has unfailing love, the natural after effect of unfailing love is faithfulness. That he is going to be faithful to us. That we know what he is going to do.
But faithfulness is interesting, but faithfulness is a two-way street, right? For us to really understand the impact of it, to understand the life-changing dynamics of faithfulness, we realize it involves two parties in this mutual relationship. Says awesome things, big things. And finally, this is the passage that I want us to think about this morning in John 1 18.
Says no one has ever seen God, but the unique one who is himself God is near to the Father's heart. And he has revealed God to us. So we've talked about this light that grows and overcomes and encompasses and fixes darkness. Light always shows truth, shows that reality.
But a God whose glory we can experience and see and the truthfulness that glory brings to situations. And that God is always full of unfailing love and faithfulness. The relationship he wants us to have us to understand and comprehend and work and live inside of that unfailing love. And then to realize what faithfulness looks like between us and God.
And when we get worried about our faithfulness where we can find comfort in is the fact that he has unfailing love. Our lack of faithfulness will not cause his love to fail. But he's unfailing love. So the last verse says, and he has revealed God to us.
Jesus has shown us all the things. He's cut a path through sin and through death. And through every single thing else we deal with in life, he's cut that path and he's brought us to the Father. He's marked away for us.
He's a trailblazer. Where we do not know where to go, he came to show us the way and introduce us to the person. Couple verses down in chapter one, John. There's a different John, not the writer of John, but John the Baptist who is Jesus's cousin said this.
That I am a voice shouting in the wilderness. Clear the way for the Lord's coming. John's echoing a prophet who lived thousands of years before them named Isaiah. In multiple places, Isaiah's prophecy, he speaks about this highway or this road for God's people.
And John is literally lifting out a single verse out of Isaiah 40. And to help people to understand what's going on so it says Isaiah 40, three through five. Listen, it's the voice of someone shouting. And John the best saying, I'm the person, clear the way through the wilderness for the Lord.
Make it straight highway through the wasteland for our God. Fill in the valleys, level the mountains in the hills. Straighten the curves and smooth out the rough places. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed.
And all the people will see it together for the Lord has spoken. He said, I'm gonna fix this road for you. Part of the trailblazer, I've also, a couple of the people in the church got me to start watching Hell on Wheels, it's about like Cowboys and Indians in the Wild West. And one of the jobs are the surveyors, they gotta find a way to get through the mountains.
Trailblazers have this role of going and finding the most direct way, the way that can be made the easiest for people to follow. They'll say, I'm gonna go find a way through this mountain. And Jesus says, I'm going to flatten down those roads. I'm gonna pull up the potholes.
I'm going to straight, I'm gonna make it as easy as you can to see where we are going. I'm going to blaze this trail. Jesus marks a path for us to come to God. He blazes a trail through everything in our lives, it's hurtful.
So we can see and experience God as clearly as possible. And he's called us to go be trailblazers for other people, to be part of this role, to be part of this life that he is living. So I told you that today that we would talk about Foundry. And I wanted us to hear this story, to hear this vision that has been such a big, big part of who we are and to talk about why it's so big.
I don't want to tell you a little bit of why we began to say Jesus is big enough. We've been meeting weekly for a year and a half, but people have been praying for this place for a long time. About almost four years ago is when I accepted the fact that this might happen. So I need to figure out what to do because it scares me a little bit.
And so we started having, we were praying about it, we were having conversations and I was talking with a lot of folks that were around my age that I knew weren't in church and I just flat out asked them, what's the deal, why aren't you? Is it something you don't believe, is something you do believe, what's going on? And this is the story that I heard more and more from people and the more I looked back, I realized this was also the story of the people that I grew up with and the experiences that we had. Was that we grew up around church.
We did that thing, but at some point in time and laid out a lesson or early adulthood, life got real. And when life got real, we didn't know how to handle it. And so we started handling it in our own power. I've said this before, that a second-grade vacation Bible school father Abraham had made sons, that that that vision of who God is is about this big and when you're about 20, 21 years old and your best friend commit suicide, or when you have a substance abuse problem or when you fail out of college or when a myriad of other things happens in your world is this big?
I never quit believing in Jesus, they quit looking to Jesus. And it was literally a phone conversation. I know right where I was, I'd just pat, I'd just eight, let's be honest here, I'd just eight in Manchak and got some thin and crispy fillets. I was on my way into New Orleans for a week and a half to talk about all of this that you see in this room right now.
And I was freaking out, I still didn't know how to articulate what I felt God was calling all of us to do. And I was on the phone with a friend of mine, kept telling me, I just, we just need to have a bigger idea for who Jesus is. And he said, you keep saying the right word over and over and right there, I was over the bridge, where you see, where you can have to dodge the guy's fishing, oh wait, Pontchartrain, I remember the first time I said, Jesus is big enough. There's a story that's impacted everybody here in this room.
Jesus is big enough. And I believe in that statement with all of my heart, it's something a lot bigger than a phrase that looks just great on coffee cup. I will lean into that phrase for the rest of my life. Jesus is big enough.
I'm telling you all this, and we're thinking all this because I want to talk to you about, I said on Facebook yesterday, I've got a big announcement. And we'll talk to you this morning about a major shift that we have in the life of our church right now. And a lot of people are going to be excited about this, especially our church that shows up at seven o'clock in the morning to set up everything. So the last few months, I, and some of our leaders at Foundry, I mean, having conversations with the pastor and with the leadership of St.
Andrew's not a Methodist church. St. Andrew's is two miles up the road. It's right behind the Waffle House, it's easy to find.
And they're a small existing Methodist congregation. And we have been given a green light by the denomination. To be having conversations then about what life together would look like. And true to Foundry form, where anything that looks normal and typical fails miserably.
But if anything just seems so outrageous, it would never work. And that appears to be the path that Jesus smooths out for us to go along. These conversations these last couple months have been of us praying and asking questions about what would it look like to be two churches that meet and share the same facility? That there's a very real possibility in two or three, four months down the road, we will not be in this gym anymore.
Now, there are some people that want to throw their hands in the air and rejoice when I say that. Because there's benefits to it. There's benefits that the 2016 survey, there's a lot of stuff on there that people are like, this would be a fantastic idea, but we just can't do it in a high school gym. There's a lot of great, great ministry.
They'd be there. Our office is already there. Our youth already meet at St. Andrews.
We had vacation Bible school this summer at St. Andrews. Molly Masteries, who does all of our media and that kind of stuff, she rents their parsonage out. And her and Whitney Plunkett, who work in Foundry Kids, live in St.
Andrews, parsonage. We already have so much stuff going on there. It'd be easy. But it's also risky.
And it's risky for a couple reasons. Number one, only half of our church lives in St. Another half of the church. Five from all over Kingdom come to get here.
I'm looking at people right now who come from Columbia, come from Rustin, come from Raven. Like, there are some folks that drive a big distance to get here. And it's two miles up the road, but those two miles can be very, very long, two miles. It's risky right there.
It's risky because it's already inadequate for us space wise. Us making this decision, we would immediately have to launch into a capital campaign and raise a pretty big amount of money and either do heavy remodeling or take advantage of almost five acres they have that's undeveloped right now and just build from scratch. That's risky. That's a big thing for us.
But all of those things, I can sleep at night with those. I want us to finish up and talk about this morning. It has to do with us. In so many ways, us being a church around for 18 months, some of this is just natural conversations.
We also have to have the leadership. And the word that we've used so much in the last couple of months is it's just time to grow up a little bit. What worked for 30 people is not working for probably around 215 people called Foundry Home right now. Some stuff just has to scale.
Those of you in business, you all about scalability. Some things just have to scale. But there is one thing that makes me lose a little bit of sleep about this at night. Is that in our hearts, we might feel that we are done now.
I have people, thankfully none of them actually come to Foundry. And there are a lot of times they get very well-meaning questions and statements. But at least once or twice a week, I'll come to somebody. They're like, oh, well, what are you going to get a real church?
I will echo the prayer of Saint Ephraim of 3rd century Syria. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God have mercy on me as sinner. Because I just want to sometimes. It's like, let me tell you about what our not real church looks like right now.
Let me tell you these stories. Y'all, Foundry's not a building. It's not a gym. It's not a seat.
It's not a travert. It's us. And it says four words. Jesus is big enough.
But there is a temptation to settle because we're like, oh, my goodness, don't you tell anymore. If you've never come at 7 AM on Sunday morning, we would like your help. But I was like, how about you just come and watch and see what this place looks like or help Jamie and the guys tear down after church. Y'all, they put all this.
I think our record 33 minutes. Is that our record? Yeah. From dropping the trailer door to what you see right now, 33 minutes.
That's awesome. But it'd be nice to not have to do that. It'd be nice to do other things. This was a phrase that kept running through the head that I think is the most important thing for us to hear today.
So please don't get mad at me when I repeat it several times. There are things that only we can do. And that means us leaving aside things that everyone can do. Let's say three times.
There are things that only we can do. And that means us leaving aside things that everyone can do. There are things that only we can do. And that means us leaving aside things that everyone can do.
Because when you have Monday through Sunday facilities, that temptation is there easily to begin just doing tons and tons and tons of stuff because it sounds good. It might not be right, but we can argue into good proverbs. 29, 18, it says where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained. Other translations say where there's no vision, the people perish.
When we started founding somebody asking, they said we don't need any more churches, do we? And I said we don't need any more churches that don't know what they're doing. It's like, I mean, it's like, try to, I'm not gonna go there. When I filter myself, you know it had to be pretty wild.
But there's tons of things that sound good. We don't know if they're right for us. It's hard to see another church doing something. You think it's kinda cool to go to, and you wanna do it yourself, so how about we start doing that?
I gotta tell you right now that Wednesday night, people ask about Wednesday night kids ministry. If we get a space we're gonna do Wednesday night kids ministry. This is what I tell them. Surge at first Fairbanks is fantastic.
We've already got a lot of Foundry kids that go there on Wednesday nights. And Chad Merrell and the first Fairbanks crew are some of my best friends, and they know who our folks are. The pastors of Surlington, we are friends. We eat together, we hang out together, we care about each other, and we realize that us having distinctive ministries has a greater chance of reaching this area for Jesus than us all trying to do the exact same thing at the exact same time.
It's very easy for us to fall into that trap. There are things that only we can do, and that means leaving aside things that everyone else can do, because the temptation to become normal will lead us to normalization and effectiveness. Normal is just simply not good enough. When we started Foundry, we realized that in the United States, 60% of people will respond to traditional evangelism.
That means 40% of the population. No matter what you try to do, they have been marketed, evangelized, invited, emailed, direct bulk mailing to their house, and they still have not made the decision to be part of church. And Washtop Parish, over 92% of people self-described as Christians, but only around 30% are active in a church. We were just a handful of folks meeting at that office next to Fiesta Linda.
We thought about that, we prayed about that, and we realized that for us to reach people who have never been reached before, we have to do things that have never been done before. And y'all, we decided that didn't end there. Let's go after the 40%. Let's go after these folks that just have never really wanted to be part of church.
For some reason or not, y'all are pretty good at it. I love that. I'm proud of it. The fact that last year we had an Ashwin service outside of Cigar Shop, and nobody got mad at me for it.
And if I can pull off what I think we're gonna pull off for Ashwin's day this year, it's even wilder than that. Because we're a church that wants to be in the neighborhood because Jesus is in the neighborhood. This is a church that gets what it means to go to where people are, because where Jesus went to where people are. This is not a church that says we just wanna stay at home.
We wanna go to where folks are. Y'all know what the problem with home is? And begin thinking too much of church like home? Because home's where you take your pants off.
Think about it, the first thing you do when you get home is you wanna get comfortable. And if somebody comes and knocks on your door, you're gonna be like, I can't see me like this. I have had these wet pants, it's all 18 years old. If you come to my house, I'm just gonna tell you right out.
If you ever come to my house and knock on door, I'm just gonna put a shirt on. I got this old nasty blue, shabby button and I'm sure to my grandfathers. I keep this just there to put it on because it might come over the house. Home is where we're comfortable.
Home is where we don't want to engage with people. The neighborhood is where people are. The neighborhood is where Jesus is calling us to do. So just like all the questions that we, and if this is resonating with you, you weren't here last week, I encourage you to go to the podcast and listen to some of the questions we asked ourself.
And this is the kind of the quick version of it. What does it mean for us to continually be developing an outward posture to our community? What does it mean for us to want to develop disciples and not programs? Y'all, I went to the best church programs in the world until I was 18 years old.
I was a preacher's kid. And I raised holy hell and all the programs in the world are not doing a darn thing for me. I was in the environment that should have sent every single one of us off in the mission field immediately. And it didn't take very well.
I wanted to create disciples, not start programs. A preacher friend of mine said one time, he said the church of Satan can hold a coat drive, developed disciples, not programs, and developed disciples that lean into this understanding of creating environments for people to experience a God big enough for all their needs. And I'll tell you the secret of this. This can sound frightening, this can sound scary, but the secret is this, that you're the best person to reach the people that you know.
You are. There are people that you can reach significantly better than I can ever reach. I want us to learn how to do that better. I want us to learn no matter where we are on Sunday morning to know that Jesus is a neighborhood and that we are in the neighborhood.
It's as we have seen his glory, the glory of fathers, only sons, his transmission of experience. I mean, Sunday is gonna matter to us. Worship matters, worship is big. Worship is huge.
Sunday is going to matter, but Monday through Saturday also matter. And thus finding a way to divert some of our energy from Sunday morning will allow us, as the church, to focus more and better on Monday through Saturday. To start some of the program stuff that we actually need to start to help develop these disciples. I'm excited in February, the well is kicking off again.
The well is our women's ministry at Foundry. And we've had problems with the well because we've not had space to have it in. And you have more than 15 people there, it gets tight. And if you can't do something to wrangle your kids in that moment, it's gonna be even harder for you to go to the well.
We found a new location for the well. It's gonna offer childcare. That's fantastic. That means this group of 10 to 20, and I checked in our database last night, we have 280 women in our database that have come to Foundry.
The well can scale now. And the well can be the place for justice ministries and for mission opportunities and tons of other things that well can scale. That means that I'm excited about us finding the guys version of that this year. And my wife said we can't call it the fort.
You come on, who do you want a fort? We'll figure that out. But those are programs that develop disciples to realize that you were the best person to reach the people that you know that go out in these neighborhoods and these places. Y'all, if you've been on Facebook this last week, you think our whole world's going catty-wampist.
And one of the things I love about Foundry is that we've got a lot of different kinds of folks in this room and it makes me smile. Because what we can affect is our area. What we can affect is our neighborhood. What we can affect are the relationships that we have with people.
And I want to leverage that. I want to leverage us being trailblazers that show people how different it's done differently. Foundry we have four assumptions. That Jesus here, that Jesus is doing things, that Jesus wants us to be part of that, and that our greatest fulfillment in life will be found by how we participate in that.
Y'all, this year is number four. And I believe that with all my heart. So there are three things that we can do. We can easily become knock-offs.
We don't set this up. We can leave stuff set up every Sunday morning. And we can be like every single church that takes the exact same picture on Instagram every Sunday morning. We can be generic.
We can settle for being normal. We can do a couple of things that are different. You know, OK. Not exactly trailblazers, but we're not like building permanent camps.
OK, we can handle that. We can be normal, normal, safe. But Jesus needs us to be unique. Our communities need us to be unique.
Your neighborhoods need you to be unique. Unique is us being willing to say, Jesus is big enough when we know it and when we don't know it. Unique is us saying, we believe wholeheartedly in the power of those four words and we're willing to live that out in the good times and the bad times that Jesus is big enough. Let's pray.
Father, you're big enough. In the middle of times it seems a little nerve-racking or unending or figuring out what's going on, you're big enough. And we pray as we look into 2017 and beyond that we don't forget the power of that vision. The power of that story.
Help us to dig deeper and to go faster and go further into that because we know there are people that need to hear about you. Jesus, we need to hear about you. We know you're not done with us yet and we know that you're not done with Northeast Louisiana yet. And we want to go to the places that you need us to go to.
And we pray. Amen.