David Kenney

1 Kings 8:17

My father David had it in his heart to build a temple for the Name of the LORD, the God of Israel.

The Church is a beautiful thing, it is a force a family and a body.

1 Chronicles 22

⁵ David said, “My son Solomon is young and inexperienced, and the house to be built for the LORD should be of great magnificence and fame and splendor in the sight of all the nations. Therefore I will make preparations for it.” So David made extensive preparations before his death.  ⁶ Then he called for his son Solomon and charged him to build a house for the LORD, the God of Israel. ⁷ David said to Solomon: “My son, I had it in my heart to build a house for the Name of the LORD my God.

What is in your heart?

Is it to build an Old Testament Church?

1 Kings 9:3-4

The LORD said to him:
“I have heard the prayer and plea you have made before me; I have consecrated this temple, which you have built, by putting my Name there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there. ⁴ “As for you, if you walk before me faithfully with integrity of heart and uprightness, as David your father did, and do all I command and observe my decrees and laws,

Be passionate for the house of God…. because God loves his church.

Psalm 42:5

Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

In the story of the Exodus, people gave their materials and their hearts willingly for the construction of the temple.

How do we allow critics to limit what we believe?

What is in your heat?

Is it to be build a New Testament church?

Ephesians 5:27

To present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.

Do you love the church?  Because Jesus loves his church.

Acts 11:26

For a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.

If we don’t love the church, how can we expect a critical world to?

Church is NONE OF US on our own.

The worship of a church is the reflection of a healthy house.

Those planted in the house of God flourish and when you are planted and when you mature in a body of believers…

• Your arms get longer
• One person adds to the next
• And suddently we can do a whole lot more together

“I was Taught and I thought….” By Craig Groeschel

We believe and what we believe….we do. Here are some things that I was taught, some things that I always “thought…”

Church should be a safe place [but] it should be dangerous again.

are we really trying to make people’s lives “better?”

the gospel message is dangerous and counter cultural

preach the word

preach Christ

Christians live as though Christ does not exist

We are practical atheists

lukewarm pastors build lukewarm churches

Jesus said “when you lose your life, you find it.”

Church should be a safe place WITH an dangerous message.

Build your church [but] we should be building his kingdom

build your church on what you are about, not what your not about

don’t put other churches down, work alongside them  -we can do more together

Success is only found in the BIG numbers [but] the score card is changing.

It usually is we rate our success though

giving

numbers / attendance

baptize

membership

We can grow numbers, but the BIG win should be “committed people.”

Don’t blame yourself for the decline of your church, because then you will also congratulate yourself when things go well.

Re-define the WIN.

get a MEGA-vision

for a small church

Become a “Line-free” believer.

do you believe in the gospel enough to benefit from it?

To contribute to it

To give your life to it

“Uncertain Times” are not going to go away

1. Uncertainty is job security
   1. uncertainty is why we need leaders
   2. leadership is a gift and God wants you to use it
   3. life is uncertain, always – but God is not uncertain

1. Uncertainty is not an indicator of poor leadership
   1. uncertainty is the arena of leadership
   2. uncertainty is uncovered in the everyday stories of the people and your church

1. The cross was the epicenter of uncertainty
   1. God got maximum mileage out of the most uncertain event in human history
   2. You don’t learn anything when things are going well.
      1. when something goes wrong, I ask my staff, “what did we learn?”
      2. surely this is all going somewhere

1. Practically speaking:
   1. You need to be Clear
   2. You need to be flexible.

1. Clarity
   1. it’s ok to be uncertain – but it’s never ok to be unclear
   2. When uncertainty strikes – pull back to the start.
      1. why do we exist
      2. what is the bottom line
      3. what is our purpose
      4. what is the vision

1. Moses trained Joshua to wander, but when Moses left…Joshua’s marching orders changed.

Joshua 1

¹⁰ So Joshua ordered the officers of the people: ¹¹ “Go through the camp and tell the people, ‘Get your provisions ready. Three days from now you will cross the Jordan here to go in and take possession of the land the LORD your God is giving you for your own.’ “

Joshua wasn’t trained to take a land, or to fight a war, but he was trained to get people to pack their gear, trained to get them in line, trained to get them to follow, so that was the “fall back” position.

How are we going to fight a war Joshua?

            I don’t know, but we need to trust God to take the part we don’t know about.

• What can you do?
• What has God trained you to do?

1. Flexibility
   1. plans change, but the vision stays the same
   2. don’t confuse the “plans” with the “vision”
      1. we love our plans
      2. but we need to abandon the bad plans
      3. where do plans and vision conflict?
      4. no plan is ever sacred

Best line:

“A good leader does not make plans on their own, but he owns them once they are made.”

VII. Pray like crazy

Guy Kawasaki

http://www.guykawasaki.com/

http://www.garage.com/

Innovation

To pitch something, present a new idea, cast vision or if you just want to get information across, Guy Kawasaki offers this tips.

1. Make Meaning – your product/idea should either
   1. make the world better
   2. perpetuate good things

1. Make Mantra
   1. mission statements suck – they say too much and they don’t effectively communicate what it is you do, or what you stand for effectively.
   2. Just use 2 or 3 words that define what it is

1. Jump to the Next Curve
   1. don’t wait for everything to be in place before you jump to the next idea
   2. create the “next” stage in development.
   3. For instance: be apart of the “next big thing” or you will fade into obsoletion

1. Roll the Dice-E
   1. Deep – your product should have power – features – extras
   2. Intelligent
   3. Complete – it should be a total experience
   4. Elegant
   5. Emotion – it should generate it. You want people to love it or hate it

1. Don’t worry be crappy
   1. don’t wait to get innovation out there
   2. sell first, fix later.
   3. It will never be perfect

1. Polarize People
   1. great things are controversial
   2. don’t create indifference
   3. love it or
   4. hate it

1. Let 100 flowers blossom
   1. What happens if people ‘not your target audience’ are attracted to it?
   2. There is no wrong target audience
   3. Just accept it and nurture it

1. Churn baby Churn
   1. Evolve the product
   2. Be apart of the next stages 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5 etc.
   3. Listen to your customers

1. Niche Thyself
   1. Your product should be unique, there is nothing else out there quite like it
   2. Your product should be valuable, we can’t live without it
   3. The worst thing would be to have something not unique and not valuable

1. Follow the 10 -20 – 30 rule
   1. Your presentation should have 10 slides
   2. You should be able to communicate it in 20 minutes
   3. You should use at least 30 pt font
   4. If you can’t narrow the focus to this rule, you can’t do it at all. More often your audience won’t remember anything beyond 10-20-30 anyway.

1. Don’t let the Bozos get you down
   1. there will always be naysayers
   2. listen to them, but believe in your vision

Keywords: Culture; Restoration; Sin

Illustration: There is an Irish Proverb that starts with a man approaching a cottage in Ireland and asking the owner of the house for directions. ‘Well where are you trying to go?’ the owner asked and when the lost man said where he wanted to go, the man giving directions said, ‘if that’s where you’re going, then this is not where I would begin.”

Meaning, if that is the place where you want to end up, then I would actually back up a bit before I began.

“Give me a light that I might walk safely into the unknown” ~ King George VI

We are thrust into a humanistic world view, and we wonder how it happened.

A cultural revolution is under way, and we must respond.

As we come unhinged from our Creator, our culture’s foundations are being destroyed.

The antagonism against things spiritual is real.

The revolution strikes at the jugular of every institution in the land.

Illustration: I was taken to what I was told was the first ever “Postmodern building.” I asked, “What makes this a postmodern building?” And I was told that within the building, staircases go nowhere, pillars go up with no structural support. In short, the building has no purpose. So I pondered out loud. “I wonder if the architect carried that philosophy into the foundation as well?”

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that 20th century man has decided to abolish himself, tired of the struggle to be himself, he has created boredom out of his own affluence, impotence out of his own erotomania and vulnerability out of his own strength. He himself blows the trumpet that brings the walls of his own cities crashing down, until at last having educated himself into imbecility, having drugged and polluted himself into stupefaction he keels over a weary old brontosaurus and becomes extinct… ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

So where do you begin?

What is the bottom line of culture?

“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.” ~Aldous Huxley

Is there a point of reference for culture?

King Solomon writes, Ecclesiastes 3

¹⁰ I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. ¹¹ He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

God has put eternity into the hearts of man

Psalm 11:3

If the foundations be destroyed, what shall the righteous do?

So let us look at 2 different dimensions:

1. The Dimension of Eternity

Illustration: When Apollo 8 circled the dark side of the moon and the Earth came into view, the astronauts cited Genesis: “In the beginning, God created …” What they saw was beyond mortal words; eternity was in their hearts.

These astronauts had trained for this moment, and with the sheer immensity of the Universe – only God is big enough to contain it.

Illustration: C. S. Lewis described (in Surprised by Joy) a “sensation” he felt as a boy that reminded him of Milton’s “enormous bliss” of Eden, that made everything else seem insignificant in comparison. He had a “burst of eternity.”

“We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. “How he’s grown!” we exclaim, “How time flies!”, as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined, one day, to become a dry animal.” ~ C.S. Lewis

Is time a novelty?

Eternity is where you should stand.

1. The Dimension of Morality

What is the basis of goodness? Because naturalism doesn’t offer answers of morality. God gave us a moral law [with the 10 commandments], but our culture has turned its back on it. Those laws hinge on the God of redemption.

Illustration: I was at a graduation ceremony at a public high school in New Jersey. It was 1971 or 1972. One by one a stream of black-robed students walked across the stage and received their diplomas. And a pretty young girl with red hair, big under her graduation gown, walked up to receive hers. The auditorium stood up and applauded. I looked at my sister: “She’s going to have a baby.” The girl was eight months pregnant and had had the courage to go through with her pregnancy and take her finals and finish school despite society’s disapproval. But: Society wasn’t disapproving. It was applauding. Applause is a right and generous response for a young girl with grit and heart. And yet, in the sound of that applause I heard a wall falling, a thousand-year wall, a wall of sanctions that said: We as a society do not approve of teenaged unwed motherhood because it is not good for the child, not good for the mother and not good for us. Message to society: What you applaud, you encourage, but watch out what you celebrate.~ Peggy Noonan

“Ours is an age where ethics has become obsolete.” ~ Robert Fitch

By losing accountability, we’ve eradicated conscience.

God gave us charity, but that has been lost. We have lost the idea of beneficence.

Even though our culture’s foundations are in jeopardy, God has called us into it.

Let us put our hands into the hand of God as we walk into the darkness.

Remember Star Trek? Remember how it started with the Captain’s log? These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise, its continuing mission to explore strange new worlds and to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Let me ask you a question, if all of your programs and efforts were producing at 100% of their capacity, would you be changing the world? Are we still “boldly going?” Who are we closest to? Or are we really just light years apart from even those sitting closest to us?

Acts 17

¹⁶ While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. ¹⁷ So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks,

Here we see humanity crying out for God, a city so disconnected with God that they have idols for every human thought just to cover their bases, this disturbs Paul…..so? If that’s the case why does Paul go to the local synagogue? Doesn’t that seem disconnected, doesn’t that seem unrelated?

Let me ask you a question, does ‘doing church’ change the world? Because it is what I would call, our FIRST SPACE. It’s where we feel comfortable.

1. We feel comfortable in our first space.
   1. we like people who are like us
   2. but shouldn’t we like people who are different than us?
2. Do atheists feel comfortable in our first space?
   1. even if it is YOUR community, everyone needs to feel like they belong to something

Acts 17

¹⁷ So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there.

1. Our SECOND SPACE is the world
   1. We tell Christians to become relevant and to get back into the world but that should be the most natural thing….
   2. if church isn’t a place that the world feels comfortable in, what did we do to disengage them?
   3. What do we do to keep ourselves relevant to the world?
   4. I know people think as a pastor I am not a relevant person, when I tell people I am a pastor it’s like telling people, “hey, I’m a cannibal want to have lunch?” I come up with creative things instead, I tell people “I am a futurist.”
   5. Seekers are not looking for the next best apologetical sermon or great debaters – they are looking for presence.
   6. “Tell me all your thoughts on God.”

1. We are afraid of the SECOND SPACE
   1. because here we have no fans, we have to earn the right to be heard

Acts 17

¹⁸ A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.

And look at these next verses….

¹⁹ Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? ²⁰ You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.”

Four words…. THEN THEY TOOK HIM

It’s here in this last space that Paul is able to say….

²² Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. ²³ For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

1. The THIRD SPACE is a place you can only go to when you are taken.

a.       here, you have to earn your right to be present

³⁴ Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.

b.      and at first people will begin to follow YOU

c.       because YOU are the only Christ they know, and you then lead them to Christ.

How does this happen? If you stay in your first space, you are only going to reach people like Mary and Martha and Thomas – but out in the third space, you get to reach Dionysius, a guy named after the pagan God of drunkenness. How does that happen?

How do you take your ministries from reaching Thomas to Dionysius?

Do we really only want to be popular in the first space?

Jesus said in John 3:17

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

And then a little later in John 10:10

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

We need to boldly go into these new spaces and begin to change the world. People all around us are thirsting for this gospel, and although they are next to us on buses, sit next to us in coffee houses, on airplanes, in class – we act as if they are light years apart.

Boldly go