Father, I’m prayin for a friend, he and I are pretty close
And out of all my friends for this one I’m concerned the most
He says he’s readin daily, but he ain’t really learnin
He’s been in church but says that he ain’t moved by any sermon
His face is weak, he ain’t prayed in a week
He wake up and just weep with his face in his seat,
Lord, you gotta help my man, I’m prayin for him daily
He ain’t sinned but it just seems as if he’s goin crazy
He says he’s feelin trapped, can’t even hit up the mall
Cause every lady’s half dressed temptin’ him to lust and fall
He keeps the TV off, videos just make him feel that
He ain’t really nothin with out money girls and shiny wheels

The other day he told me that he felt less a man
cause he aint have a five year plan or a piece of land
And God it’s crazy cause his family thinks so much of him
plus he’s got a Godly wife who’s always showin love for him
But he’s strugglin, even though he talk to me
I tell him what to do but he don’t listen when he oughta be
I’m scared for him cause there’s people that look up to him
And he’s got some younger siblings who’ve been changed by what he’s done for them,
But is it done for him? Lord don’t let it be,
If he don’t wanna talk to you then Father hear from me…

His condition is worsened, since we was last conversin’
I’m with him now and he ain’t doin’ well, of this I’m certain
He says he’s tryin to trust you, doesn’t wanna disgust you,
But he was in the midst of sinners and did not discuss you.
And just today his anxiety’s got the best of him
He knows Christ but for hours refused to rest in Him.
He’s not the best of men but Lord I know he really loves you
And I can’t understand why lately he’s not thinkin of you.
People trust this dude, you could crush this dude,
Father he needs more of you, I pray you touch this dude.

What can I say to him? I’m determined to pray for him
Father empty and wake him, I pray that you just have your way with him.
Cause there’s a change in him, and the effects are strong,
I pray you’ll open up his heart before the next song,
and when he gets home,
I pray he’ll open up the 66 book love letter and soak it up.
Cause he ain’t hearin you,and he ain’t feelin’ me,
and God I know it’s killin you, because it’s killin me.
And matter fact there’s somethin else he’s concealin see,
the person that I’ve been praying about is really me…

-Song by Lecrae.

Back story: I have been living in Berkeley, CA for the last 6 moths doing an internship at Cafe Yesterday.  I hope to open a similar non-profit coffee shop within the next 2 years in Las Vegas to raise money for homeless ministry.  I move to Vegas in about a week.  

It’s almost impossible to put into words the impact the last six months has had on my life.  This is largely due to the fact that it will continue to impact me for the rest of my life.  Without a doubt the people I have been around have been the most important part of my experience.  No matter where you are or what you are doing the experience will only be as good as the people you are sharing it with.  The community I have been a part of here in Berkeley is the most inspiring, loving, energizing group of people I have been around, maybe ever.

My grandmother will tell you that I have wanted to do new things since I was born, whether that meant doing something in a new way (my way), or doing something never done before.  I’ve never had any interest whatsoever in doing something for the sake of “that’s just the way it’s supposed to be done.”  In fact I prefer you ask my grandmother instead of my mother about this trait.  My mother’s perspective is something more along the lines of “I have never had to deal with a more hard headed, stubborn boy in my whole life”; that from a woman who has 12 kids and has taught preschoolers for over 20 years.   Grammy’s take is much more flattering.

Here in California I have found a group of people who are living their life this way.  No one who started Café Yesterday had ever started or run any kind of a restaurant before – and that didn’t matter to any of them.  Being in a group of people like this has fueled my dream of starting a coffee shop in Vegas in an unquantifiable way.  I came to Berkeley with the dream that I might be able to start a coffee shop.  I am leaving California with a foregone conclusion that I will start a coffee shop in Vegas.  I thought that a coffee shop would probably be the kind of place that would allow me to enter into the lives of the people who lived in the neighborhood unlike any other venue.  I am leaving with six months experience in doing that.

Before I came to California I would get very frustrated with people who chose to pursue their dreams instead of joining me on mine.  Now, nothing excites me more that hearing a friend tell me that they have found something that they want to chase with their who life.  I know now more than ever that I will need a team of people who are sold out to this dream in order to make Vegas work, but I also know that those people have to come to me naturally and the one’s I would have to convince are not the right ones for the team.  If you have a dream wait patiently for the right opportunity and then chase it like your life depends on it (it does).  Don’t force anything, but be ready to drop everything when you know that it’s time.

Love.  Above everything else I have learned is how to better love.  I’ve been able to learn through practice what I used to only understand in theory.  I’ve begun to learn how to love people for who they are and not for who they should be.  Love people for who they are right now, even if they are not even heading in the direction of who they should be, even if they are intentionally running 100 mph in the wrong direction.  Your investment in a person and their trust in you will always remain shallow and superficial if you cannot love them the way they are today.

I’ve been on vacation for the last week in sunny Florida. I’ve had all sorts of time to read and study and think, it’s been wonderful because I never take the time to do that at home. In the midst of all of this studying and thinking and reading I have found myself still needing something. It wasn’t until the conversation with my mother that it struck me what that was.

She and I were talking about experiencing growth in our relationships with Christ, or currently, a lack thereof. She began talking about how it was when she first became a Christian 30+ years ago and how she was entrenched in the Word and soaking up everything she heard at church. She was experiencing radical growth. She looks at her life now and realizes that she doesn’t experience that same feeling of growth like she once did 30 years ago. Her desire to spend time in the Word is fading, and she’s not experiencing the challenge to grow at church – she called it feeling like ”puddle ducks” I think (aka: shallow).

It dawned on me that I have experienced the same thing recently. I have a desire to grow, but I keep coming up short. I took this vacation right in the middle of one of the worst feelings of burnout I’ve experienced in ministry. I brought along lots of books thinking that I could find refreshment in a good book that would give me the answers for getting out of my funk. I read 6 (!) books on my 7 day vacation, but ironically none of them were the Bible. I maybe spent 10 minutes reading the Bible. Why is that?

I think the answer is simple. My mother talked about it in her story. She experienced lots of growth quickly early on in her Christian walk because she was growing in the knowledge of who God is. Everything was new and therefore everything she read or heard was radical and life-changing. But after a while of being around the Bible and the church, you start to plataeu because, frankly, you can know a lot about God but it starts getting to be recycled information (especially after 30 years). She was basing her spiritual growth on how much knowledge she gained about God.

I have done the same thing for most of my adult life. In high school I read my Bible daily. Learned a lot about who God was and what he wanted from me. I was learning so much that I decided to get a degree in learning how to study God. The thing is, I was furthest from God while I was learning to study him. My relationship with him deteriorated the more in depth I studied him…but all the while my depth of knowledge was growing.

The problem that I think I (and my mother) are dealing with is that when we feel distant from God we automatically run to a book (yes, it can even be the Bible) to help give us the answer. When our depth of knowledge about God begins to plataeu we look into getting a higher degree so we can feel closer to him…but therein lies the problem. Experiencing growth in your knowledge of God is an important part of maturing in your journey with Christ, but it’s not the only area of your life that needs growth. The other?

Faith.

Faith is different than knowledge. Faith is child-like in nature. Faith is believing in something unseen. It’s putting trust in God and allowing God to actually have an influence in our lives. It’s taking steps out of our comfort zones that don’t make sense to us logically. (ie: missionaries…what sense does it make as an American to give up our rights and privleges to serve and live with impoverished people?)

To experience growth in our faith requires action. It requires us to experience things that we sometimes don’t want to experience. Our faith is tested and tried and and experiences growth in the midst of hardship. Faith doesn’t always have to mean hardship and difficulty, but the Bible says our faith is grown when we trust God to bring us through difficult situations. Look at these verses as an example:

Psalm 23:4 (NLT)
Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me. Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me.

1 Peter 1:3-4 (NLT)
So be truly glad.There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you have to endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.

I want to illustrate what I mean to you: Think of a tree that has two roots growing into the ground. One root is the root of knowledge, the other is the root of faith. We can experience and see spiritual growth whenever either one of these roots grows deeper. Some of us (mainly me…and those of you like me) like to experience the growth of our knowledge root, but don’t spend much time working on growing our faith root. What happens after a while is that our knowledge root is very, very deep – so deep we are reaching soil that other Christians are jealous we are reaching. So picture your tree with one deep root and one shallow root. What happens when we find ourselves in the midst of a storm? We topple over. Have you ever walked through the woods and seen a tree that has tipped over with its roots exposed in the air? When you see it, it usually has 80% of its roots just hanging there, but you can see it still has roots planted in the ground. That’s like me, I’ve got these really deep roots of knowledge that are stuck way down deep in the ground, but when I experience difficulty I topple over because it’s not enough to keep me upright. I need to experience growth in both areas of my life. Knowledge AND faith.

I’ve come to realize that I’m not as firmly planted as I thought. I bet I can out-argue most Christians on doctrinal issues, but I have very shallow roots when it comes to faith. But without faith, what am I? Not much. I’m a scholar, I’m a know-it-all, I’m reading into a hobby. Because knowledge that doesn’t inform the way I live my life, knowledge that doesn’t change who I am, is just knowledge. It’s good for winning Bible categories on Jeopardy and not much else.

Yes, having a growing knowledge of God is important. But growing in faith, learning to trust God more than anyone or anything, that’s equally (if not more) important and vital to experiencing growth in my Christian journey.

I hope I was clear in stating in my last post that I do not believe the wrath of God is greater than the grace of God (or as Tyler puts it, the love of God). My point was simply to say that the wrath of God gives credence to the grace of God. As one commentator on Tyler’s post said, John 3:16 explains God’s love for the world in the midst of eternal punishment. If there was no punishment for sin, God’s grace wouldn’t really be grace at all. The love he shows toward humanity means so much more when understood in the context of how awful our sin is. Tyler argued in a comment that the fact that Almighty God loves any human is convincing enough in itself – but I would argue that it isn’t enough. Yes it is amazing to think that God would care about a small thing like a human being, but then take that human who is the center of God’s love and affection, and have them spit in God’s face, smack him, beat him, crucify him…and be able to say that God loves them in spite of all that. The weight of that kind of love is unbelievable.

My point was to say that too often we as Christians sugar coat who God really is. We too easily overlook the wrath of God and cling to the love of God. My thought is that when we do things like this, it actually impacts the way we live our lives. We somehow begin to believe that God won’t care about the sin we commit because he isn’t a vengeful God, he is a loving God. Just look at the way the Israelites acted throughout the OT, as Moses is on the mountain top receiving a word from God, they are down below worshipping idols. Every time something went wrong they immediately turned to the idols of the world around them. Yet God continually brought them back to himself – but it got to a point where eventually God allowed them to feel the fulness of his wrath and killed many of them and sent the rest into exile. God took their sin seriously – why would he not take our sin seriously?

Take a look at the story of Jonah. Jonah was an Israelite prophet called by God to take a message of repentance to the people of Ninevah – an Assyrian city. The Assyrians and the Israelites did not get along – in fact Jonah didn’t want to go because he wanted to see God’s wrath poured out on the Assyrians for their unrepentant hearts. But, in the end God wins out and Jonah goes and preaches to the Ninevites. What is his message?

Jonah 1:2 “Get up and go to the great city of Nineveh. Announce my judgment against it because I have seen how wicked its people are.”

Jonah’s message was one of God’s wrath against sin. But the people responded to the fact that there was sin in their lives that needed to be repented of – and subsequently God’s mercy and grace were made known to an entire city of people  because they responded to the rebuke from Jonah.

Just to clarify – I really dislike those guys on the streets wearing sandwich boards and shouting through a bullhorn that God’s judgement is upon sinners. I think Jesus came and spoke the truth in love – he knelt down next to prositutes caught in the act and told them that he loved them despite there sin, but to go and sin no more. He met with sinners and tax collectors for dinner and gave them hope in the midst of judgement placed upon them by others in their culture. But Jesus still told people that unrepentant hearts would suffer God’s wrath – but it was the way in which he approached it that left a lasting impression and changed the hearts of men and women for 2000 years.

My hope is that we can come to the realization that God’s wrath is real – and just because we say we are Christians doesn’t mean that God’s wrath won’t or doesn’t apply to us. Jesus said “Not everyone who calls out to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter.” (Matt 7:21)

“But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.” (Rom 5:8)
While we were still sinning – under the wrath of God – God’s great love comes shining through and saves us from our sin. What a great message of hope!

I love you.  You know that.  You also know that we disagree about a lot of things.  This is one of those things, specifically your point about it being hard to communicate God’s love without referencing His wrath.  If that is so essential, then why is it that so often in scripture when things seem to be boiled down to just the essentials we are never instructed to bring up God’s wrath? The great commandment, the great commission, Paul says “And now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love”.  He also said “the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself in love.”  The power of God’s grace and love does not need to be added to in order to increase its effectiveness, it stands on its own and wrath does not raise its potency.  God’s plan of salvation was predicated on His love, not His wrath; “For God so loved the world . . . “.

I don’t believe that you have to convince people that there are things wrong with the world and things wrong in their own life.  It is also common knowledge that almost every action, good or bad, will set in motion consequences – its just the way the world works.  However, when you tell someone about a perfect God that prevents convicted criminals from being stoned, or who sits down to have a conversation with an adulteress in order to inform her that her Messiah has arrived, when you can bring awareness to a kind of love that operates outside the reality with which we are most familiar – you don’t have to talk about wrath.  Don’t discount the fact that something significant changed in the way that God relates to the world when Jesus came. 

I have. And I think it stinks.

Here’s where I’m coming from: I have grown up in the church for my entire life. I know all of the lingo, the jargon, the catch phrases – i can spit out memory verses to shut down an arguement and so on…I’ve been around plenty of people, especially people from my generation, who think of themselves as NT believers, whether they call themselves that or not. This really sucks, mostly because when you try to tell someone who doesn’t know God how much God loves them you can’t build a very good argument. There is no ground to stand on.
So I was recently reading a history book and came across a quote by Martin Luther which I will paraphrase that was something along these lines: “The Old Testament validates the New Testament. If you don’t understand the wrath of God then the grace of God doesn’t mean much.” Again…I probably paraphrased the crap out of that, but that was the gist of it. That really struck me as super relevant for all that is being talked about in Christian circles these days. I think many believers are guilty of choosing a portion of God that they really like, namely the love and grace of God that is revealed in the NT, and write off the rest of what the Bible says about God.

So then it becomes a big mess when you try to tell someone about God’s love for them. Seriously, try telling someone about God’s love without referencing his wrath and see how that works out for you. Because in all honesty, God’s love is so meaningful because his wrath is so vengeful. God literally hates sin. A lot. If you were ever curious about how much he hates sin then go read the story of when he destroyed Sodom and Gommorah. He just lays ‘em out flat – no mercy.

How can Christians be so naive as to think that God doesn’t take sin seriously? Yes, God loves us very much and showed that through the ultimate sacrifice, but seriously how can we say that sin is in any way acceptable? How can we tell people that God loves them without first telling them how much God hates their sin? To be a NT believer is essentially saying, “well God is love, and because God loves everybody equally, there is no way God would send someone to hell.” And if all your arguments come from the fact that you see God as merciful and graceful and loving without also seeing him as wrathful and just than you will lose everytime.

So here’s why this blog post means something: for a while now i’ve been trying to be a NT believer. And ya know what? It cheapens my experience of God’s grace. It really does. Martin Luther took the power of God’s wrath to an extreme for much of his life…he was so afraid that God would just smite him one day for an unconfessed sin  that he spent hours every day trying to remember if he had sinned at all so he could confess it. But when he finally realized that it wasn’t through works that God’s grace applied to him it freed him and gave him a completely new life. God’s grace is transformative to the person who understands the weight of sin. But it is cheap when God’s grace means just that God loves you and doesn’t want bad things for you. When I experience cheap grace it doesn’t honestly make me want to change at all. It doesn’t really impact who I am or the way I live my life – but when I understand that grace carries the weight of my sin – it changes something inside of me and causes me to live gratefully and earnestly for the cause of Christ.

Around the end of November last year God placed on my heart a desire to lead my youth group/church toward being a missionally minded group. So during that process I began praying and researching what kind of things we could get involved in that would have an impact globally. I sent out a tweet asking for suggestions and the guy that responded suggested I check out livingwater.cc which helped build clean water wells all around the world. This got me researching about the global problem of a lack of clean water. Over a billion people are without access to clean water – and millions die every year from complications related to lack of clean drinking water. It’s a super fixable problem I found out – clean water wells can be (and are being) dug in the most remote villages to provide clean water for up to 50 years. After praying for like 30 seconds…because I mean really, God laid it on my heart as soon as I saw the staggering numbers…I felt like God was telling me to go for it.

I found an organization called Children Relief International (CRI) who also dug water wells in places like India and Mozambique. I had been to India in 2007 and after reading some more stats about India being the poorest country in the world knew that God wanted us making a difference there. I contacted a missionary from CRI who happened to be on furlough and who lived in North Syracuse and met with him. Told him we were going to start raising money and wanted to build a well in India – he came alongside of us and helped cast the vision at my church for the need and we began raising money.

My youth group had actually already started collecting money in the form of spare change for this project before we decided on the organization and destination for our well. At the end of three weeks the youth group had raised over $500.00… in spare change. Unbelievable. We opened up the project to the entire church and got off to a fast start. We filled a 5 gallon jug full of change (around $1500.00 worth of change) and started accepting other forms of money to raise money even faster. We raised $4000.00 in just about 8 months and were able to give the money to CRI about 2 months ago. I received an email from Todd yesterday with this video:

It is so amazing what God started through a youth group of 15 kids, then through a church of 30 to impact this small village in the Deep Forest section of India. The well was built on the property of the local church and is a place where people from every caste will come together to get water and to praise the God who provided it.

I am so blessed to serve a God who uses small people in small churches like mine to do a greater work all for his glory.

You can check out more videos of the well being built on Todd’s blog here: http://leavingournetsbehind.com/
You can check out my church’s website here: www.newhopebville.com

Here’s the water!

One of the things that Bell brings up in the first chapter is that there are periods in Israel’s history where God can not stand their worship.  I’ve read these passages before – they are haunting.  A few years ago I began writing down a list of all of these passages when I would come across them – its a lot longer of a list than I expected to end up with.  I’ll track down that list and share it in my next post.

Here is the scenario; God’s chosen people are participating in the festivals and other forms of worship which have been established by Moses and other leaders and God’s response is: Isaiah 1:11 – 23 (NIV)

“¹¹ “The multitude of your sacrifices—
what are they to me?” says the LORD.
“I have more than enough of burnt offerings,
of rams and the fat of fattened animals;
I have no pleasure
in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.
¹² When you come to appear before me,
who has asked this of you,
this trampling of my courts?
¹³ Stop bringing meaningless offerings!
Your incense is detestable to me.
New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations—
I cannot bear your worthless assemblies.
¹⁴ Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals
I hate with all my being.
They have become a burden to me;
I am weary of bearing them.
¹⁵ When you spread out your hands in prayer,
I hide my eyes from you;
even when you offer many prayers,
I am not listening.”

Why is God so upset? What has Israel done that would cause God to stop listening?

“Your hands are full of blood!

¹⁶ Wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds out of my sight;
stop doing wrong.
¹⁷ Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow.

¹⁸ “Come now, let us settle the matter,”
says the LORD.
“Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,
they shall be like wool.
¹⁹ If you are willing and obedient,
you will eat the good things of the land;
²⁰ but if you resist and rebel,
you will be devoured by the sword.”
For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

²¹ See how the faithful city
has become a prostitute!
She once was full of justice;
righteousness used to dwell in her—
but now murderers!
²² Your silver has become dross,
your choice wine is diluted with water.
²³ Your rulers are rebels,
partners with thieves;
they all love bribes
and chase after gifts.
They do not defend the cause of the fatherless;
the widow’s case does not come before them.”

Bell puts it this way; “When God is on a mission, what is God to do with a religion that legitimizes indifference and worship what inspires indulgence?

What is God to do when the time, money, and energy of his people are spent on ceremonies and institutions that neglect the needy?” – Jesus Wants to Save Christians pg 46

It would do us well to stop and think about the way our churches operate and the way that our resources are used so that we can be clear representations to the world of a God who is deeply concerned about the poor and the oppressed. Otherwise we end up in a place where the noise we make is only for ourselves – the world isn’t listening and neither is God.

As a side note to those of you who might dismiss some of what I am saying because its associated with Rob Bell, I was a part of a small group of people in San Francisco a few weeks ago who heard these same warnings from Francis Chan.  Bell and Chan might disagree on some things, but they both teach and believe that the church’s current indifference for the poor and oppressed and unsatisfied desire for well equipped performance venues are contributing to its demise.

A friend of mine posted this on FB the other day, its a quote from Chris Voss.

“When you blame others you give up your power to change. Take responsibility for your future!”

Our goal since Ryan and I started this blog has never been to whine about the church – in fact it might be our only rule. We are both motivated by a deep, sincere love for the church.  Our goal isn’t even to talk about the way that church should be or what a christian life should look like.  Our desire is to simply invite you on our journey of discovering for ourselves how to best live according to the example of Jesus.

More to come.

also from @realrobbell

Rob Bell doesn’t really understand the concept of micro blogging.  His tweets usually come in several parts.  This morning’s series was particularly long, but also particularly good.

Picture Galileo, standing there on top of the Tower of Pisa, about to drop two weights off the top.
     The weights are the same shape, but one is heavier than the other. Which will land first?

     Obviously the heavier one, because that’s what people had been taught for 2000 years. How could it be any other way?

     And so Galileo drops them, and they land at the same time, because that’s how the world actually works.

     This kind of thinking was, of course, radical and revolutionary and it got Galileo into all sorts of trouble.

     The mind blowing part? No one before Galileo had bothered to actually do the experiment. They just believed what they’d been taught…

 @realrobbell

Over the past six years I have been dreaming and praying about what it might look like to have a café that exists for the primary purpose of bringing the kingdom of God to a community.  About a month ago I arrived at that café.  I am now a month into my internship at Café Yesterday in Berkeley, California and almost on a daily basis I have encountered specific ways of ministering to people that I used to lay in bed and dream about.  Because a café is fundamentally different from a local church the opportunities to minister to and love a community from this context are unlike those I experienced in the typical church setting.  The encouragement and hope that I have received over the past month for my coffee shop ministry in Las Vegas is unparalleled to any other time in my life.  Not only have I seen a thriving new coffee shop impacting a community for the kingdom of God, I have also participated.  My dreams for what coffee shop ministry looks like are no longer based on theories that bounce around in my head keeping me from sleep.  My hopes for ministering to Las Vegas by way of a coffee shop are now based on concrete experiences that have exceeded anything for which I was ever foolish enough to dream.  I would love to share a sampling of these experiences with you.

One of the first café regulars I met was a man who is homeless, he goes by the name 300. He has lived on the streets of Berkeley for four years, he is 43 years old.  300 visits the coffee shop almost daily.  He has lived in Berkeley his whole life.  The church that he had attended since he was a child asked him to stop coming a couple of years ago (something he gets really upset about whenever he talks about it),according to him they even had someone assigned to the door to make sure he couldn’t enter.  Most of the time 300 likes to keep conversations centered on Berkeley politics and gossip.  I have never known someone more informed about the “goings on” of their city. Anyone in Berkeley that 300 thinks might be willing to have a conversation with him – he talks to – regularly.

While I was working behind the counter the other day 300 was sitting at his table (he always sits in the same chair, at the same table) we were talking about the latest conspiracy being hatched by local “powers that be” and he said something that stopped me cold.  300 said that at any other business in Berkeley he is not welcome to hang out – forcing him and his shopping cart to stay on the move.  “But Café Yesterday is a haven for me” he said.  I froze for what felt like minutes as his words echoed like scoreboard buzzer in my head.  I have never been a part of church that a person who is homeless considered to be their haven.  In that moment I felt more a part of the kingdom of God than almost any other time in my life.

300 knows fully why Café Yesterday exists in Berkeley – he knows more about our motivation and intentions than probably any other regular.  He knows that two of us on staff are ordained ministers and despite his awful experience with his old church and former pastor – he calls this place his haven.  300 even told me that he wants to help me raise half a million dollars for For Good. Coffee. –  truly one of the most humbling moments of my life.

Okay, enough about 300 for now – I’m getting emotional.  One of the most shocking experiences I have had since being here (a big statement considering I’m in Berkeley) is that in the past week I have been invited to church on two separate occasions by two different regulars at the shop – who don’t attend church anymore.  Both of these regulars used to attend church and for very different reasons each made a conscious decision to walk away.  I have shared my story with them – they both know why I am in Berkeley and that I was recently on staff at a church.  They both told me that they had wanted to check out some of the local churches in Berkeley and asked me if I would go with them.  Have you ever been invited to church by an unchurched person? I certainly haven’t.  I was usually in the position of trying to figure out how to do the inviting.  I jumped at both invitations – I can’t wait.

Ryan, who runs the coffee shop, has clearly established for the shop that our primary purpose is to love people.  Its not about making money – although money is really tight – its not even about being the coolest coffee shop in town (although we think we are) – priority number one is loving people.  Ryan leads by example and full empowers everyone who works here to do the same.  I have personally served more meals to people who are homeless, completely free of charge over the past month than in my previous 24 years of church membership combined.  My favorite is when I invited beggars off the street inside for a meal – Ryan just smiled and said “good job man” while he helped me fix their plates.

I cannot wait to get to Vegas and share love with a neighborhood in the same way that I am here in Berkeley.  I have never been more excited and encouraged than I am right now!  Thank you so much for your prayers and encouragement, it has helped to propel me to this point.  I will be in Berkeley for another three months before I make the move to Las Vegas.

At this point the next hurdle is financial. The grand total for a coffee shop start up will be between two -hundred fifty and three-hundred thousand dollars.  This seems like a relatively simple thing when I compare it to the ways that God has worked in my life over the past few years to get me to this point.  I am so incredibly thankful to those who have already donated generously to For Good Coffee.  I hope that these stories have given you a clearer picture of what you are supporting and involving yourself with.  I hope that you would all please pray about making a financial contribution.  Recently a few families have committed to making monthly contributions, joining a couple churches who are doing the same thing.  Every amount of support is helpful and it will all contribute to stories like the ones I mentioned above.  Thank you so much for considering joining me in this adventure! Feel free to pass this onto anyone who you think would be interested – or send them to www.forgoodcoffee.com 

Donations  are tax deductible and can be mailed to:

2081 Land End Loop, Roseville, CA 95747.

Please CLEARLY identify them TYLER HUDGINS CHURCH PLANTING FUND.

Here are some pictures from my CA adventures.

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http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.540304254784.2036661.100300022&l=689e46b611&type=1