Everybody have a good Halloween? Now, I want you to think about what your favorite Halloween memory from this year is. I've got a great one. I want to share it with you all this morning.
So it's many of y'all know Grant and Bridget Bauer and their son Grant got a picture of them. OK, so this year for Halloween, Grant was incredible Hulk. And I'm going to tell you, full disclosure, both my wife and I love it. When I was a kid, you wore your costume one time.
Does anybody remember that you wore your costume one time? Then I was like fourth or fifth grade. We started doing a fall festival at the schools to get to wear your costume two times. Y'all, my friends are younger.
My little friends in here. I bet y'all got to wear your costume for two weeks straight. And every day we wake up, I'd see what picture I would see of Grant and the crowd. Me and Bridget talk about it.
We're excited about the incredible Hulk. So yeah, that's my favorite. That's my favorite, Bridget. That is photogenic genius.
You need to sit with us in New York Times right now. And so we got our picture. We got our picture with the incredible Hulk at our house for Halloween. So this is what I love.
One of my favorite things about ministry is I get to see these kids grow up. Y'all, and this was cracking me up so much because Grant is my high five guy. I remember when the Bowers first started coming to Foundry, Grant would come in. I'm getting high five.
He's my high five guy. And I can see his personality coming up out of this. It's awesome. Remember the first time many of y'all know Angie and Ben Nicholson.
The first time I ever met Finn Nicholson. He was three years old. And he jumped off of the couch flying leap and punched me in the jaw. And we gave Finn a third grade Bible just a few weeks ago.
It's just cool. I get the pleasure. And us as a church, when we make these covenant promises with these kids, baptism, and a third grade Bible, and we do conformation with Jordan for the first time this year in the spring, we enter into a relationship with these kids to where we say we're going to provide the best environment possible that we can for you to encounter and accept Jesus when that time comes. And we get to see them grow into their life and grow into who they are and grow into their own personalities.
And the reason I thought the incredible hulk was so often this year is that it's completely grant power. But we get to see and see these kids growing into things and growing into themselves. And these pictures of what their personality was like when they're a little bitty person and they get to be like a medium sized person. And we see how that personality changes.
Sometimes it's worth it for us to just to let things grow into themselves. So let things just come alive. And those of you who were at Foundry the very beginning, three years ago, remember there's some stuff that we prayed about and talked about and kind of set and stone back in the day. There's also some things that we said, you know what, we're going to wait on that.
We're going to let that ride out. We're going to see what happens. And one of the questions that we kept coming up over the last couple of years was an idea of core, where the core values of our church. And I just kept putting that off because there were some things that I was like, I just don't want to sit down with like three people at Waffle House when we're going to write all of these, which I mean, it'd be great to sit down at Waffle House.
But we need to let this church get a little bit bigger. We need to let it grow into itself. We need to see what naturally arises, that Jesus is asking us to think about and to focus on. And so we think about our vision here at Foundry.
We want to say Jesus is big enough. And we take that statement really, really seriously. Somebody said one time that's not just something, we put on a plastic cup. And we think about our mission here as a church to create environments for people to experience a God big enough for all their needs.
And that's important. I'm going to talk more about why that vision, why that mission is important to us in a little bit. But when it came to the conversation about core values, and this has come up at our board several times, and we're going to talk about our board next week. And it's come up in other conversations about leadership.
And we want to take the time to see what comes to the top. We want to grow, let this grow into itself a little bit. Let's allow it to intentionally happen. And for us, intentionally listen to the Holy Spirit.
And for us to see what is it like to grow into this distinctive vision and mission and us as a church. What is going to help us be ourselves? Let's grow into this. And in the last few months, we felt like we've gotten to point, we've grown into some things enough to call them core values.
And this morning, I want to share the first of those three with you. And next week, we're going to share the other three. But at first, I was kind of hesitant. We do things a little bit differently here.
But there's a level of stuff that sometimes I'm even uncomfortable with. And there's a time that I was uncomfortable with idea of naming values like this as a church. But the thing is, in scripture, what we find is that the people of God that they always have had statements to draw boundaries around the most important cultural force that they're up against. We find these in scripture across the board.
One of the first ones is in Deuteronomy, chapter 6. I'm going to screen behind me. And this is when Moses and Israelites are spending their time in the desert. And so depending on your age or either thinking of Prince of Egypt or 10 commandments, both things.
But this is what it says, listen who Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is alone. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart and your soul and all your strength. And you must commit yourself wholeheartedly to these commandments I'm giving you today. Repeat them again and again to your children.
Talk about them when you're at home, when you're on the road, when you're going to bed, and when you're getting up, tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders. Write them on the door post of your house and on your gates. That first verse right there, listen to Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is alone. In Judaism, it's the same as called the Shemah.
And it's one of the most foundational principles in Judaism. In the Old Testament, 6,000, 8,000 years ago. And also now, if you ever, I watch a lot of law and order, and you know every about 10 or 11 episodes you're going to have when I said it Jews or Fox or Jews from New York. So you're going to pop up and you see the wooden things they wear on their heads are called the flactories.
Like that is this passage written in a little wooden box and they dance for prayer time. Like this is still one of the most foundational parts of Judaism. Listen to Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is one. And there's a cultural motivation when this was said that Jewish people were the only people who believed in one God in the whole world.
They're coming out of Egypt. Holotheistic society was multiple gods where people were saying, well, if this isn't working out that well, it's triad out of other God. And maybe these two gods can get together and fix this. They can combine their powers, like they're superheroes.
I saw it's Thor Ragnarok this weekend. So when you get Hulk and Thor together, they can kind of make the thing make sense. That's the way they stressed out. That was the framework that they lived in.
So for these people to come out and say, no, we don't, we're not believe in your gods at all. We just believe in one God. There's only one of them. And he's the Lord supreme.
Like that was a foundational shift in religious thought that this statement was a gigantic statement for them. The cultural boundary they were up against that point in time was this belief in multiple gods. If we go into the New Testament, Paul, there are tons of these statements. But the book of Colossians, there's one that I want to read to you this morning.
It's the first chapter of Colossians. And this is going to sound kind of complicated. But Paul is doing his exact same thing. This is a hemnic, fragment that's fancy complicated language that we find in New Testament.
But when people say, hey, we want to worship and the New Testament, well, there's pieces of it in there. Think about the songs that we just sang. I imagine this is a song that was sung 2,000 years ago. And this is what it says.
Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before anything was created. He's supreme over all creation. For through him God created everything.
And the heavenly realms and on earth, he made the things we can see and the things we can't see, such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, authorities, and the unseen world. Everything was created through him and for him. He existed before anything else. He holds all creation together.
Christ is also the head of the church, which is his body. And he is the beginning, supreme over all who rise from the dead. So he is first in everything. For God in his fullness was police to live in Christ.
And through him God was reconciled, everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ blood on the cross. From the first century, it's the Christian, the early Christian movement. And they're having to differentiate themselves from Judaism.
And they're having to have these conversations on what does it mean for Jesus to be Jesus? Who is Jesus? And they're talking about the biggest thing they felt they had to identify and stand behind and just kind of draw the boundary around was this idea of the pre-existence of Christ. That he was with God in the beginning, and he is God.
And so we see statements like this all throughout the New Testament that are drawing this line around they're differentiating themselves, saying this is who Jesus is. And this is what we stand behind. This is who we are. And there are statements like this outside of scripture.
Those of you who grew up in a more formal, a more liturgical church, maybe if you grew up Catholic, or you grew up Episcopal or Presbyterian or Lutheran, or you grew up in a more normal Methodist church and foundry, always with the weirdest one on the weirdest pastor. But you might remember saying the apostles creed every Sunday morning. I grew up Baptist. I didn't hear this until I was in college.
And it's a huge part of my own face store. Remember I was at Louisiana Tech University, taking a history of the Christian church class in a state school, which is interesting anyway. And I'm sitting here and I'm trying to memorize this thing. I can't memorize it.
I'm getting frustrated. And I get mad at it. I say words that you should not say when you're talking about the apostles creed. And I throw it into my fire.
I got a fireplace at this house. And I was like, nobody has said this thing out loud in thousands of years. And the friend of mine was on the couch. They turned to me and said, I believe in God, the Father, almighty.
And just rattled the whole thing out. This is a first century. First century, like Paul in disciples time. This is the baptismal creed of the early church.
This is the statement that the people were being baptized would make so that people knew they were making a profession of faith. If you grew up in more of like a come down to the altar, kind of church, you've heard that phrase, profession of faith. That comes from in the early church, when people who were being baptized would say this. And they dunk them three times.
Or if you're in an Eastern Orthodox church, and you see someone trying to drown them three times, like I even got the Father shake, shake, shake, shake. That's when it is, y'all. It's not like Big Fat Greek wedding in the kiddie pool. But just look at this.
And so if you've never been this, like I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. And Jesus Christ is only Son of the Lord, who's conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary. Some from under Pochis Pilate was crucified, dead and buried. The third day he rose from the dead.
And he ascended into heaven, and said it's the right hand of God the Father almighty. From this, he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. We've been the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic church, Little Sea, which means worldwide, not big sea. There's a difference, people normally get really nervous when they read that, but Little Sea, worldwide, the universal church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, amen.
This was used to define, to make sure someone knew what they were getting themselves into 2000 years ago. This was back when after you said this, you could get killed. They wanted to make sure people knew what they were saying against themselves into. The church has always had statements that they surround themselves with, to not to oppose, but to define themselves against the cultural forces or cultural issues at the time.
And so I'm comfortable with us having something that we call values and things we stand behind, because the church has done it. God's people have done it since the beginning of a thing called God's people. So, foundry we say, Jesus is big enough. And we say this because we realize that many of us have a little bit too small of a picture of who Jesus is.
We run up into life situations to where we simply can't handle it anymore. We're gonna talk about that in a little bit. But what we know that in our culture, is we were starting this church. We did so much demographic work that I saw it spreadsheets might close my eyes.
But we realized that 96% of Washtop Parish will self-identify as a Christian. And only 20% roughly are in church on a Sunday morning. And what we found out was people did not have a problem with Jesus, they had a problem with church. And that we didn't have to convince people about the existence of Jesus.
But people needed to understand what the validity of Jesus was. Why do we need to be engaged in a church community? So, we had conversations with our leaders and in small groups and I sat down with people, had lunches with them. We've had a lot of fantastic conversations in Foundry 101.
We have those every month with folks who are new to Foundry. We just had asked a lot of questions and say, hey, what do you love about Foundry? Or what made you come to Foundry? Or what would you like to say?
And we just listen to people for the last year. They've talked about that a lot. And so, I wanna share with you the first three of these values that we believe that we have. And the three that I share with you today, they're about our relationship between God and this mission that we're given.
I'm just a distinguished. This is about our relationship between God and this mission. And a lot of these are gonna be familiar to you if you've been around Foundry for a long time. Because you're gonna realize these have been rising up for a long time.
The first one is this that we believe Jesus is in our neighborhood. We said this a bunch. John 1, 14, the word became flesh and he moved into the neighborhood. Eugene Peterson wrote this beautifully, his translation and he says he saw the glory with our own eyes, the one of a kind glory, like Father, like Son, generous from inside and out, true from start to finish.
And Eugene Peterson, I've been reading his message translation this year devotionally. He's just fascinated with this idea of neighbor and neighborhood. So I'm like running searches this week and trying to figure out all these places and why he's using this language. And I came across this verse which did even more kind of dig into this idea.
But it's from the book of Exodus. It says in God spoke with Moses. Face to face is neighbor speak to one another. When he would return from the camp, as a tenant, the young man Josh would stay, but he didn't lead the tent.
That first part, God spoke with Moses. Face to face is neighbor speak with one another. Y'all, that just tells you something about the character of God, that this deep relationality that he has. This idea of face is important in scripture because when we see in someone's face, we're seeing their completeness, we're seeing the fullness of their being, we're seeing their inner feelings.
Also this idea of face is a word for battle. When you're standing face to face that you're both, in the same time you're showing your power, but you're also showing your vulnerability. You're talking about your struggle and you're standing there, but this character of God, this is a God that we believe in a God who desires an intimate transformational relationship and he comes to us. We don't have to search him out and find him and see if he's hidden.
No, this is a God who threw out scripture we have seen is coming to us. If anything, we can say this is a God who comes to us. This is the primary description of what he is. Because for far too long, we have been told in order for us to come to God that we need to get our own stuff in order first.
I remember those times when I heard those things in my life in the way that had stopped me and it held me up and frustrated me for a long time. But what we see in scripture is that God who's consistently coming to us. Since God has the ability and the willingness to inhabit our world, to protect us where we are and to transform us in the exact space where we are. This is the character of this God.
And this is the character of the God that we follow. If this is the Jesus we need, then this is also just the map of the church that we need to be. If Jesus is in our neighborhood, that means that we are fully living in our neighborhood as well. The second value is this, and this will be familiar to those of you who have been around for a long time is that we will assume four things about Jesus.
We've talked about this four-laught that's been several sermons I've preached on this. We will have seen four things. Number one, that Jesus is here. Number two, that Jesus is doing things.
Number three, that Jesus invites us to be part of his mission. And the fourth one is that our greatest fulfillment is found as we participate alongside of Jesus and his mission. You know, this is the kind of tough one, because here's the thing, those first two, Jesus here in Jesus is doing things. I would hope that anybody as a Christian would be able to say, oh, absolutely.
Yes, that's true. Yes, here. But there's a little line after that second one, I think. And I hesitate to use this word.
But if our Christian life is only defined by those first two assumptions, our Christian life is gonna be rather boring, then we believe in the fullness of Jesus' mission and his invitation to us to be part of his mission that we find excitement, that we find bold audacity. And these third and fourth assumptions are not optional. They're that last bit that so many of us never take that's gonna leave us spiritually frustrated. One of the verses that I've just had over and over in my head and has just been sitting there for ages, these last year is from John 1412, and it says this, very true, I tell you, however, whoever believes in me will do the words I have been doing and they will do even greater things than these because I'm going to the Father.
Just a bit of the bolt on that, Jesus is saying, you will do better things than me. I think in the 21st century, Chadwick, you will do cooler stuff than I can do. You will do even greater things than me. And this has been promised to us.
And as I think about it in my own life and I think about what are the things that are stopping me from this and what are the things that are stopping my friends and the conversations I have, what's stopping, I really think it's the fact that we don't truly act like we've been invited alongside of this mission. That when we come alongside of Jesus and what he is doing, that we will see tremendous personal release, then we will see communities be released, that we will see amazing, gigantic moves of God, but it's about us realizing that we're not in charge. This is that level of saying, we can't forget this mission of Jesus, it's integral. The Christian life, it isn't passive, and it isn't sedentary.
There's a book by a guy named James Fowler, it was written in the 1970s, it was called Stages of Faith, and it was really important. When people ask where does Jesus as big enough come from? I tell them it comes from this book because what the study was that Americans, no matter what they believe, if they're Christian, if they're Muslim, if they're Buddhist, if they're atheist, no matter what they believe, and the study was done in the late 1970s, I can't imagine what it's like now, but no matter what Americans believe, no matter where they've been, where they've gone, what their educational level is, what their ethnic makeup is, no matter what, the average American has never progressed past the second stage of faith in life and there's six stages that Fowler outlined. And that second stage of faith is an elementary school understanding about God.
So what's happened to so many of us in life and so many of my friends and so many of your friends and so many of you, and it's happened to me, is we get in that late adolescence early adulthood, and something goes crazy in our life, and we feel like we're losing all of our foundation, and we're trying to come to terms with this, and we're trying to distort this out, because we know about this Jesus, but all we really have in our pocket is like second grade viguation Bible school, Father Abraham had many sons. In our elementary school understanding of Jesus is simply not enough for when our best friend commit suicide, or when we discover that we have an addiction problem or we have a nervous breakdown or a good friend of ours dies, or we see something hurt, like Father Abraham had many sons, it can hold up a lot of stuff, it can't hold that up. And we realize that our view of Jesus simply, it isn't big enough in that situation. That's why this matters, and this leads into this third value, and you've heard me say this a lot too, but is that we believe that God's vision for this world is bigger than our vision for this world.
Y'all, if I think of the train wrecks that have happened in my life, and I've got some good ones, if I think about the train wrecks that have happened in my life, the more I think about it, they happen because of my own attempts to create a perfect world, and the perfect world I tried to create blew up right in front of me. It's like I saw a video on YouTube last night at somebody trying to mess with chain fireworks together on their own, and I already knew what was gonna happen. And I think that the times I've tried to create my own perfect world, I have a tendency more than not to think my world could be bigger than God's world. But we can't imagine this first Corinthians to not says this, it's beautiful, and it's a truth that we understand that to us such amazing things for us.
It says, no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind, it's imagined what God has prepared for those who love him. We can't even put it together, it's so big, and I can imagine some pretty crazy stuff. I've been called a dreamer and an optimist one too many times, but to think that even I don't have the ability to construct this in my head. When we say God's vision for this world is bigger than our vision for that world, is when we willingly say, I'm going to let somebody else be in charge.
And I realize the best thing that I can have to do is to follow that person, that I'm going to let be in charge. I'm going to be aware of my own capabilities, and I'm going to be prayerfully opening myself up to Jesus' capabilities.