Now the Cross as Jesus bore it,
Has become for us who share it,
The jeweled Cross of Victory.

“It was the day of Preparation of the Passover; it was about noon. ‘Here is your king,’ Pilate said to the Jews.

“But they shouted, ‘Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!’

“‘Shall I crucify your king?’ Pilate asked.

“‘We have no king but Caesar,’ the chief priests answered.

“Finally Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified. So the soldiers took charge of Jesus. Carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull (which in Aramaic is called Golgotha).” (John 19:14-17 NIV)

“Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.” (Isaiah 53:1-3)

Jesus, Lord, condemned, defiled,
May we too be meek and mild
As we tread your holy Way

May we feel no bitter hatred
When we too are persecuted,
Left alone to walk with You.

“Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, ‘Are you not going to answer? What is this testimony that these men are bringing against you?’ But Jesus remained silent and gave no answer. Again the high priest asked him, ‘Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?’

“‘I am,’ said Jesus. ‘And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.’

“The high priest tore his clothes. ‘Why do we need any more witnesses?’ he asked. ‘You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?’ They all condemned him as worthy of death.” (Mark 14:60-64 NIV)

“The kings of the earth rise up
and the rulers band together
against the Lord and against his anointed, saying,

“I will proclaim the Lord’s decree:
He said to me, “You are my son;
today I have become your father.

“Ask me,
and I will make the nations your inheritance,
the ends of the earth your possession.” (Psalm 2:2, 7-8)

*Based on The Way of the Cross with text from the Scriptures published by Barton-Cotton Inc.

Yesterday after opening all her Christmas presents my six-year daughter Brenda, paused by the Christmas tree to pray. When she was done I asked what she said. She told me she wished Jesus a Happy Birthday. This beautiful moment actually started a couple of weeks ago. We were hanging out in the living room looking at the Christmas decorations. She asked me, “Daddy, on Christmas Day after breakfast, can I come out here and worship God?”

A couple of months ago, I was eating lunch with someone I used to attend church with. He asked me what I do to “train up my children in the ways of the Lord.” Yes that’s a very churchy way to ask that question but I still got the point.

That was a really hard question for me to answer. I immediately started thinking about specific times where I sit down with my kids and talk about God and how to live like Jesus. There aren’t any. We don’t have a set rhythm where we all sit down and talk about living like Jesus. Yet Brenda, of her own volition, regularly talks to her baby brother about Jesus. She regularly talks about God with me and Jen. She applies biblical teaching to life situations. God is working in Brenda’s life and I can see her responding by the way she acts and talks about God.

We don’t have a “family devotional time” (although every night Jen reads a Bible story to Brenda and I pray with her before she goes to sleep). We simply live out our faith and talk to Brenda about what we’re doing and why we do it. We talk about living like Jesus when we sit at home and when we walk along the road, when we lie down and when we get up (Deut. 6:7).

In my opinion, that’s what the “missional/incarnational” life is all about. It’s about living like Jesus and then when the time is right, explaining why we do what we do. It starts at home. The first people to whom God has sent us is our family. We share the Jesus life with them and then together we share it with our neighbors, our city, and the world.

What about you? What are you doing to be missional at home?

Does Ann Arbor really need another church in it? There are already more than 70 churches in the City of Ann Arbor. At least five of those churches are new plants that started within the past three years. In some ways it seems like adding another church into the mix is just muddying the waters.

Yet, in spite of all the churches in Ann Arbor almost 70% of the population is not part of any faith group. This includes non-Christian expressions of faith. Nearly 70% of the people living in Ann Arbor are atheist or agnostic. Moreover, there are 98,000 people living in Ann Arbor that do not know Jesus.

Yes, Ann Arbor needs another church. I believe that it is only through trusting in Jesus death and resurrection to overcome our sin that we can have a relationship with God now and forever. I believe that only through that relationship are we able to be the people that God created us to be. If I truly believe that then I need to do something about it. If I truly believe that Jesus fulfills our deepest desires and enables us to be who we’re truly meant to be then I need to do everything I can to connect people around me to Him. I need to show the people of Ann Arbor that I love them, God loves them, and Jesus died for them. The way I’m going to do that is by planting Agape Ann Arbor; a community experiencing and expressing God’s love.

Agape Ann Arbor is different from many other church plants. Many church plants focus on launching worship services. They focus first on getting a lot of people to gather together on Sunday mornings to hear the gospel. While I celebrate the influence those churches have on their communities, I feel like they’re focusing more on doing church on Sundays than being the church. That’s why we’re not launching Agape Ann Arbor as a worship service. We are launching a community.

We will worship together. We will have weekend worship services where we can celebrate God together and hear God’s word preached. That, however, is secondary. Our focus is to connect people in community to each other and to connect them to the God who loves them and died for them. We will build small communities where people experience and express God’s love.

You can help. You can join the movement: Like us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitter,
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, or contact me for more information.