Archive for the ‘Harvest Bible Chapel’ Category
Have the Funeral: I Choose to Forgive
Are you serious about sin? Because God is. And the people of Harvest Bible Chapel did some serious soul-searching and sin confession to put unforgiveness to death. Take a look at this video of the funeral we held at the Elgin Campus for those sins.
“Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” Ephesians 4:31-32
How Do Families Forgive?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about forgiveness. The past two weekends at Harvest, I preached a series on forgiveness that God used in a powerful way. Find below a summary of what we have been learning together. If you apply some of the things we have been teaching you can get your heart to a much better place very quickly.
Forgiveness comes in two parts. It begins with a decision, an act of my will. We call this the crisis of forgiveness. When I make the choice to release a person from the obligation that resulted when he or she injured me, I am completing the crisis of forgiveness. I am not looking for vengeance; I am not trying to get even; I am not wishing for bad things to happen to them; and I am not focused on their failure. In fact, I am not thinking about them at all. I’ve release them from all obligation that resulted when they hurt me.
Maybe you remember completing a crisis of forgiveness in the past, only to retract that act of grace and begin again to nurse and nurture the injury of someone else’s sin. Maybe you have responded publicly in a church service and committed yourself to forgiveness, or knelt alone and promised God that you would forgive but fell into your old patterns of hate or resentment when you crossed paths with the one you had chosen to forgive. If that is your experience, you need to understand the difference between the crisis and the process of forgiveness. Beyond the crisis is the process of forgiveness, without which you will never experience the healing that forgiveness can bring. In the crisis of forgiveness we say, “I choose to forgive,” but in the process we say, “I will treat you as though it never happened.” Here is how that process works:
1. I won’t bring the offense up to the person, except for his benefit;
2. I won’t bring the offense up to others; and (hardest of all)
3. I won’t bring the offense up to myself. I will not go over it and think about it and dwell upon it.
When you are doing that effectively, you are succeeding in the process of forgiveness. This is a lesson that I am learning little by little in my own life. I could share several acts of forgiveness that I have been working on for ten or fifteen years. I am still in the process. Praise God, I am doing a lot better than I was ten years ago. But here is the key: When I fail in the process, I have to go back to the crisis. If you do that faithfully, you will get free.
“Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” Ephesians 4:31-32
To listen to the whole message, please follow this link.
On the Road Again
After a great weekend of preaching through Revelation 14, we left Tuesday morning on the second (final!) leg of our Bus Tour with Walk in the Word. This week, I have 40-some pastors from Harvest Bible Chapel traveling with me and the Worship Team. Praise God for the lives that He is changing for eternity in every city on the tour.
What Should a Mother Church Consider When Planting Churches?
We just celebrated ten years of church planting at Harvest Bible Chapel. By God’s grace, we have planted 45 churches in the past ten years. So, I am often asked what should a church consider before it plants a church. Check this out.
He Is Risen!
Tomorrow we will take some time to remember the amazing sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross through some powerful, yet reflective services at our church. I trust that you will set some time aside do the same. Romans 5:8 says, “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
It will be Good Friday. But Sunday’s coming! Take a minute to watch this clip from the Easter 2009 service at Harvest Bible Chapel featuring our choir and Heather Headley.
Celebrate His resurrection at a church this weekend where the name of Jesus is lifted high in worship and God’s Word is proclaimed without apology! “He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.” Matthew 28:6
He is risen indeed!
James
Encouragement: Lives Changed by the Gospel
Hey:
Thanks for coming back to this blog again and again; our audience is really growing. One of the things I want to accomplish here is to encourage pastors to keep “preaching the Word.” Popular today is the notion that to really reach people you have to some how ‘get beyond the Bible.’ We have found the opposite to be true. Nothing will ever be as ‘culturally relevant’ as the Good News of the forgiveness of sin found in Jesus Christ. I don’t give a ‘public invitation’ every week, but we do periodically give folks a chance to profess the faith they have found in Christ in the biblical manner . . . baptism. Take six minutes and watch this . . . praising God every moment for power so at work in our world today . . .
Jesus Will Return
I am leading my church family through the New Testament book of Revelation this year called “The Revelation of Jesus Christ: Learning to Hope in the King and the Kingdom.” We started last fall and we’re going verse by verse, week by week through this final book in the book God wrote. Now that we are really into it, I see that the timing of this study could not be more perfect in light of the current events of our day.
Yesterday, I preached on Revelation 7: 1-17. And to set it up, we looked at the four most commonly held views about the Rapture of the church:
• Pre-Tribulation Rapture
• Mid-Tribulation Rapture
• Post-Tribulation Rapture
• Pre-Wrath Rapture
Please take a moment to read Matthew 24:29-31 and compare it Revelation 6:12-17. Wow!
I have friends that are students of God’s Word and followers of Jesus Christ, who hold to each of the views listed above. And scholars have debated for years over who is right and who is wrong. It is an issue that we will not solve on this side of the Rapture.
But listen, Loved Ones, what I want us to get right is that Jesus will return! I am not as concerned about when the moment will be as I am about the fact that the moment is coming. I want to encourage you to get off the “Planning” Committee and get on the “Welcoming” Committee.
Are you ready for Jesus’ return?
Here’s a chart of the End Times that I am going through with the church family at Harvest. I trust it will be helpful to you in your personal study of the book of Revelation. And if you want to hear the whole message, “The Rapture Question,” follow this link to the Harvest Bible Chapel Web site.
Multi-Site Churches: Part 2
Following up from Part 1…
In my ministry, it is the getting there that has been the great thing, not the arriving. In the same way multi-site is a vehicle; it is not the destination. So, be careful not to covet multi-site. It is extremely complex. It is very draining. It is a ton of work.
Personally it has been a struggle to adjust to the diminishment of my role in shepherding a flock. I love the people that I am preaching to and frankly there is just something unsatisfying and not authentic about rushing away from the people that you just poured your heart out to so you can make it to another service at another site. It is also a challenge to feel like a pastor in a church that you never see and that only sees you on video.
Multi-site as a focus has a lot of merit and we have done it, but it is also important that it does not diminish the hard work of reproducing ourselves in the lives of others. Some people are uniquely gifted to preach, but I really believe that the principles of communicating God’s Word are transferable to other gifted people. We have to be careful that when we are perpetuating satellites that we are not really saying, “It is all reproducible except me.” That would be an abdication of our responsibility to do the harder work of raising up others.
Theologically I have no hesitation with multi-site. In fact, when I am up preaching, I will often say, “I’m glad that you are here today wherever you are worshiping. It doesn’t matter where I am. All that matters is where you are and where God is, and He is right with you now as we open God’s Word together.” The manifest presence of God in the corporate gathering of His people is significant, not the physical location of the mouthpiece, so to speak.
There is definitely a multi-location dynamic to the church in Acts. And I don’t see anything in Scripture that forbids it. And technology allows it and abundant fruitfulness tends to force it and church planting doesn’t protect us from it. We arrived at it reluctantly because we can’t discount it from Scripture.
As churches consider becoming multi-site, they must first be drawn into multi-site through an abundant fruitfulness at your single location. There should be evidence that there is demand for your ministry that exceeds the capacity of your current geographical location or facilities. If there isn’t enough demand for your ministry to fill one building, who are you kidding? There won’t be more demand on the other side of town either.
Second, if you are experiencing some kind of abundance by God’s grace, then you must consider the best way to steward that abundance. For Harvest, that stewardship meant doing several other things before we utilized multi-site. We had reached the limitation of a facility that was really full four times each Sunday, and we were planting churches and it still did not solve the growth of our church. Only then, when an opportunity came to continue to grow the fruitfulness that we were experiencing, did we become multi-site.
Without the experience of seeing the abundance and stewarding the abundance at your single site, just going into adding sites because everyone else is doing it could be a really bad decision.
Multi-Site Churches: Part 1
The following post is James’ contribution to Scott McConnell’s Multi-Site Churches: Guidance for the Movement’s Next Generation (B&H Publishing, 2008) 19-23.
It may come as some surprise, but Harvest Bible Chapel didn’t have any big plans or strategy or even desire to go multi-site. God was blessing our church with growth, and we were completely overloaded. We were meeting in a big old warehouse and were running six shuttle buses for four services.
Our response to our growth problem was to start planting churches. We had a vision to plant ten churches in ten years starting in 2000.
And so we started sending people out to plant churches. The first year we sent out two groups of three hundred people, and then we continued to send people out for each new church plant. The Lord has really exceeded all of our expectations, and here in 2008 we hope to have launched our thirtieth church.
We would send three hundred of our best leaders out. These wonderful people would go, and then new people would come in kind of on the first floor. Then we helped these new people grow as leaders, and we would send them out. Then even more would come in. Church planting is a wonderful, biblical thing to do that Harvest Bible Chapel is very committed to do. Yet as wonderful and as fruitful as it was to these people going out and establishing new churches, we found out that church planting did not solve our growth problems.
So, we sought to relocate our church to a larger location. Here in the northwest suburbs of Chicago the population is very dense. As we looked, we found that there were really no properties or locations available to us. Ultimately we ended our search. This was a dark time for our church as we honestly did not know what we were going to do.
Then out of nowhere the Lord provided for us a campus that was outside of our search area. Through the generosity of the Green family that owns the Hobby Lobby stores, we were given an eighty-acre campus with a 280,000 square foot building and a nine hundred-car parking garage. It was built in the mid 1990s for about $53 million, and they gave it to us for a dollar.
At first, we thought, “Wow! We’ll just move our whole church out there.” But the problem was it was too far away. We couldn’t move our whole church a half an hour away. As the reality of this development sunk in, we realized we were forced to become a two-campus church.
Similar to our church plants, more than seven hundred people left the original campus in Rolling Meadows and went to launch the new campus in Elgin. Since then, their spaces have been filled at the original campus while the new campus has grown to more than thirty-five hundred people in attendance.
This all seems overwhelming looking back, but in the midst of all this a little church down in Niles, about a half an hour in the other direction, came to us. They only had about thirty-five people attending in a three hundred fifty-seat worship center. They hadn’t had water in the baptistery in three years, nobody was getting saved, and really nothing was happening. And they said, “Can you help us?”
They agreed to disband their former church government. They voted to never vote again, and they accepted our elder form of government. We set them up as a video site, and we called it Harvest Bible Chapel Niles. Within about three years, this campus became packed out in four services with about eleven hundred people attending there every week.
Since that time one of the churches we planted ran into financial difficulty, and their elders agreed to come back into partnership with us. The church had dropped from eight hundred to five hundred in attendance and was facing bankruptcy. By providing leadership and Harvest’s video teaching, they have rebounded to more than one thousand in attendance and have gotten into a new facility.
In addition, we had a number of people who had moved to Phoenix for retirement or semi-retirement who couldn’t find a similar church. This base of leadership was ready to plant a church and Harvest was willing to help. Initially the right pastor could not be found, so they utilized video teaching just like the other video services Harvest has. Now that the church has grown to more than two hundred fifty and has a pastor in place, it has become an autonomous church.
When we stared to go into multi-site, our attendance was between five thousand and six thousand. And while we have continued to plant churches we have almost eleven thousand in weekly attendance.
With such a tremendous story of God’s provision, you may expect us to be outspoken proponents of multi-site. The truth is that we are reluctant participants in multi-site.
(part two coming soon…)
