A New Partnership

The vision for 2013 for Awaken is for us to be further invested in our community than ever before. We kicked the year off with a diaper drive for Hope Pregnancy Center, where we collected over 6,000 diapers! We also held our Easter service on the APSU campus and saw 14 people come to Christ over that weekend. We have more plans for the summer and later in the year, but our current venture is a new partnership.

Awaken will be partnering with the local chapter of Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF) to begin what they call a “Good News Club” at Rossview Elementary School, here in Clarksville!

Good News Clubs are an amazing way to take the Gospel to kids right where they are: at school. Once a week, kids will have the opportunity to attend this club, immediately following school, where they’ll learn about the Bible, missions, Jesus, and church.

There are currently 14 operating Good News Clubs in our local Tennessee area. Last year, over 700 kids attended the clubs, and over 100 kids prayed to receive Christ! That’s HUGE! Statistics show that if kids don’t accept Christ before age 12 or 13, the likelihood of ever doing so drastically decreases. Elementary age is a crucial time in every kid’s life, and we will now have an opportunity to take the Gospel to them!

I announced on Sunday that Awaken will be the sponsoring church behind the Rossview Good News Club. We need a team of at least 10 people who are ready to commit to the Club before we can start. We filled 7 of those 10 spots in our very first weekend! (I LOVE my church!)

I believe God has great plans for us as we partner with CEF. I love the thought of people serving throughout the week in locations around the city, taking the Gospel to the people. THAT is what the Church is all about!

If you want more info about getting involved, you can find it on the events page of our website.

Bible in, Bible out

About 2 1/2 years ago, as a youth pastor, I got the idea to challenge my middle school youth group to read the whole Bible in 90 days. It was a crazy challenge – I recognized that – but I saw the value in taking in such large portions of Scripture for an extended amount of time. Right in the middle of the “90 Day Challenge,” we had a big youth group winter retreat and I got a few days behind. Toward the end of the 90 days, there were a few days where I was reading 3 or 4 hours per day to catch up. It was A LOT of reading, but I loved it. Not everyone who started the challenge finished it, but there were a handful of middle-schoolers who did!

That was my first time through in 90 days. At the time, planting Awaken Church was on the horizon, and I was excited about one day challenging my church to read through the Bible in 90 days. 2 1/2 years later, that opportunity came and we rolled out NINETY: A Journey Through the Greatest Story Ever Told. It sure was a journey! Not only did I teach different portions of Scripture each Wednesday for 13 weeks, beginning in Genesis and ending in Revelation, but many of us were reading large portions of Scripture at the same time. As if that wasn’t challenging enough, I decided to write a blog about every book of the Bible as well (HERE is a link to all 66 blogs)!

One thing that I wanted to do was to figure out how much Bible we had taken in as a church, so I asked people to anonymously write down their reading times. 9 people (that I know of) made it all the way through the Bible in 90 days and 25 people wrote down how much time they spent reading. The 25 of us who recorded our time read our Bibles for a cumulative time of…

1,075.25 hours!

That’s a solid month and a half straight of Bible reading…with just 25 people (although we have a lot more people than that who actually read).

Part of the vision behind NINETY had been that as I sit down with people in counseling periodically, I can boil almost everyone’s issues down to one main problem: not enough Bible.

However, what I didn’t want to do was simply to gorge ourselves on Scripture and not do anything with it. So of course that is why we studied it and applied it, but that’s also why I issued a challenge at the end of our 90 days as well.

I reminded the church how accessible the Bible is to us here in America. Many of us have multiple Bibles and/or translations at home. I have 23 Bibles on my bookshelf and that doesn’t even count the 100+ versions in multiple languages that I have at my fingertips on my iPhone and iPad!

I reminded them of the many people around the world who don’t even have the Bible in their own language yet, and some of them that couldn’t even read it if they did. That’s why we partnered with a ministry based out of New Mexico called Faith Comes By Hearing. They specialize in reaching people groups around the world with audio versions of the Bible in their own language. As a church, we thanked God for His Word and its accessibility to us, then put our money where our mouth was and invested in this ministry.

Together, on just 1 Wednesday night, we were able to donate enough funds to make the Bible available to 5 entire villages of people around the world! A group of about 40 people enabled over 400 people on 4 different continents to hear God’s Word in their own heart language!

God’s Word is alive and active and we believe that and live that at Awaken Church.

It’s far more than a history book. It changes lives, saves marriages, redirects our paths, points out our sin, and so much more. To God be the glory for His Word and for the many more who will now have a chance to hear it!

Great job, Awaken! You make me proud.

 

Divine Appointment

That phrase may sound a little cliché, but that’s the only way to describe what God did this week. You have to hear this story…

On Thursday, I was supposed to meet a friend at Waffle House for breakfast before he left town. I showed up right on time and stood around waiting for him to come. The only seat in the whole place was at the bar, so I finally sat down and figured I’d save a seat for my friend, Jason, once he showed up. 10 minutes went by, 15, 20 – he never showed. I started to think of all the things I needed to do and almost got up to leave. However, I noticed the guy sitting next to me wasn’t eating, and I was hungry, so I thought I’d buy him breakfast and see if I could share the Gospel with him. That’s exactly what I got to do! We ended up having a pretty intelligent conversation about religion, the Bible, and God for about 45 minutes as everyone around us pretended to not be listening. He sounded like an Agnostic who believed that if God existed, He hated him. He also believed that there is nothing after death (the very thing we’d be studying on Sunday at Awaken).

I invited him to church, but he didn’t sound like he could make it. He lives in a city that’s about 48 miles from Clarksville and was low on gas money as it was. I got his phone number and left, praying that somehow, God would arrange the circumstances to get him to church. I texted him on Saturday to see if he’d be able to make it, and he said he’d try but he didn’t know. Jenn and I kept praying that God would arrange all the circumstances to get Ryan to church on Sunday.

A group of us pray on Sunday mornings before church, and we specifically prayed for Ryan to be there. As I walked out of our prayer meeting, Ryan walked in the door! The Greeting Crew was on it! They had already introduced him to everyone, showed him around, and were bringing him to meet me. I shook his hand and told him I was amazed he had made it. He said, “I can’t explain it, but I shouldn’t have been able to make it here. Everything literally fell into place, and I had no reason not come!” I knew why that was. We grabbed a cup of coffee and he found a seat.

I watched him during worship – he hadn’t been to church in a long time and didn’t know any of the songs. I kept praying that God would speak to him through the teaching. Then it was my turn, so I went up to teach. It was week 2 of our series, Speak of the Devil, and we were studying Satan’s accusation of Job in Job 1-2. Many of the things we studied were the things Ryan and I had debated at the bar at Waffle House. One of the main points I was stressing was that one of Satan’s strategies is to make us believe he and hell are not real. If they’re not real then they’re not a threat.

At the end of my message, I gave an invitation to the Gospel. With everyone’s heads down, I asked people to raise their hands to respond to Jesus. At one point, Ryan looked up at me, we made eye contact, and his hand was the one hand that went up in the room! I waited another minute to see if there was anyone else, but Ryan was it. So I closed out in prayer and I asked him to come forward to publicly dedicate his life to the Lord. He was the only one that walked forward, tears streaming down his face. I couldn’t hold myself together. I broke down crying as I relayed his story to the church. There was barely a dry eye in the place! I led him in a prayer to receive Christ, and he cried through the whole thing.

I sat down with him after service in the prayer room and we talked about what is next for him. His hands were clasped so tight that his knuckles were white, and he was shaking all over. I prayed for him, and as I finished, a few people came into the room. At least 3 or 4 guys came in and gave him their phone numbers, offering their support. Another person, who had heard that he was low on gas money, gave him a $20 bill! THAT is the church! He was completely overwhelmed, and sat in the prayer room for a few minutes to just soak it all in.

It was amazing to hear a guy who used to doubt God’s existence share how he so evidently realized that God had orchestrated this event. We’ve seen quite a few people come forward to give their lives to Christ at Awaken, but these are one in a million. He was completely broken and overwhelmed as he experienced first-hand the love of Christ and the love of the Church!

It was no accident that Ryan and I ended up at Waffle House together on that Thursday. I was bummed out that I got stood up, but in reality, I didn’t get stood up at all – I was right on time for an appointment that God had set up for me. You never know how your boldness with the Gospel will impact someone’s life. There will be one more person in heaven because of what God set up at a bar at Waffle House in Clarksville, TN. Amazing.

LOVE Japan.

This Sunday, March 13, Awaken will be providing a few ways to meet the spiritual and practical needs of those devastated by the recent earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan.

PRAYING

Our normal Sunday time of prayer, The Refuge, will be dedicated to praying specifically for the needs of those impacted by the disaster in Japan. We will pray for individuals, families, churches, and the nation as a whole. The Refuge meets every Sunday at 9:15am in the prayer room at Awaken Church. Since you’re already losing an hour of sleep to Daylight Savings, what’s another half hour?! Come join us as we ask God to work in Japan!

GIVING

We’re a pretty new church and we do some things a little differently at Awaken. Instead of passing an offering plate, we have boxes around the building where you can give financially. This Sunday will be different though. When you arrive at Awaken on Sunday, you’ll find a “LOVE JAPAN” envelope in your bulletin. All cash or checks collected on Sunday in these envelopes will go directly to the disaster relief efforts of Samaritan’s Purse. If you’d like to make a donation by credit card, you can do so through our website. Make sure to put “JAPAN” in the comments section. This will be the first time at Awaken that we’ve ever specifically asked people to give financially, so I’m excited to see how God works through this!

If you’d like more info about Samaritan’s Purse, click here.

Many of us have already been praying for Japan, but these are two ways that we can come together to have an even greater impact.

WHY?

As a church, we know the devastation of a natural disaster first-hand. Thankfully, our disaster was nowhere close to the magnitude of the recent disasters in Japan. However, by coming together not only to pray, but also to give, we enable organizations such as Samaritan’s Purse to meet very practical needs in Japan, while also opening doors for them to share the Gospel! God is honored when His people unite and I believe this is a great way for us to unite and allow God to not only use our prayers, but also our finances.

Oh yeah – bring a friend on Sunday too. There will be some great worship and a message from 1 Peter 4. Hope to see you there!

PSALM 29:10 [NIV] – The LORD sat enthroned at the Flood, and the Lord sits as King forever.

Top 10 posts of 2010

As 2011 nears, it’s interesting to look back at 2010 as we close it out. Looking back on my most-viewed blog posts of 2010 actually sums up the year quite well. So, here they are in reverse order…

#10: This Isn’t “Goodbye,” It’s “Seeya Later!”

My good friend and last-name-sharer, Denver Miller, moved to TN with us in July of 2009, but headed back to NM in July 2010 to pursue further ministry there. It was sad to see him go, but ministry goes on!

#9: Awaken Church is Moving.

Not surprising that this blog post made the top 10 list. Our current remodeled building is our 4th in 16 months!

#8: Unity Amidst Destruction

Although 2010 presented us with many hurdles and reasons for division, we saw unity come from it all. We made life-long friends through some of the hardest circumstances! The very events that Satan intended to use to destroy the Church, God used to built it up!

#7: Turkey and Porn

2010 presented me with a humbling opportunity to post monthly blogs for HeartSupport.com, a ministry that helps people overcome addiction. They call me a “sex blogger,” and although that may sound a bit vulgar, that’s the topic I blog about. I’m a pastor; and I use my past with porn to help others put porn in their past.

#6: I Married My Best Friend

Jenn and I hit the 7-year milestone this year in our marriage. I wouldn’t be where I am today without her!

#5: Happy Digital Christmas

I love technology and I love Christmas. I also love how the 2 were combined in this very creative video.

#4: After the Water Comes the Mud

We were blown away by the support that poured in (pun intended) after the flood that rocked the church in May. We received donations from California to New Jersey and from Montana to New Mexico – literally from coast to coast to coast to coast! Thanks to all of you who kept up with the progress of the church post-flood!

#3: Interview with an Ex-Prostitute

This was another in my series of HeartSupport blogs. I had the privilege of designing the layout of a CD for the Hope Foundation, headed by Bronwen Healy, out of Australia. She gave me permission to post a brief interview with her about her past in prostitution and drugs and how God pulled her out. Powerful stuff!

#2: Mission Trip to Tennessee

We had teams from different churches drive for hours (one from a different state) to help us (and others) clean up after the flood. What they may not have been able to do financially, they did energetically!

And of course the #1 viewed blog post of 2010: The Flood: Update, Pics, & Ways to Help

This blog post got almost 10x the amount of views of any other blog I’ve ever posted. Support poured in, prayers went up, and the Church was expanded through a catastrophe that God used for the best! We can’t say it enough, but here it goes again: THANK YOU!

How Water United Us

Good try, Satan. That whole “wreck the church with a bunch of water” thing was a good one. You gave it a sporting try. Unfortunately for you, I’ve been daily watching it backfire on you…and I love it!

I am blown away by how this tragic turn of events has brought the body of Christ together like no other event I’ve ever been a part of. Here’s an idea of what I’m talking about…

- We had church at the Edlers’ house on Wednesday since we didn’t have a building.

- 5 churches offered to let us meet in their buildings or offices for church. We got to choose! 5 days after the flood hit, we’ll hold our first meeting in our new temporary location (beginning tomorrow night at 6:30pm on the 2nd floor of the Bank of America building)!

- A couple from the church assembled a “Mobile Kids Minstry” box for us with all the supplies that we need to continue to minister to our kids wherever we end up meeting!

- One lady from the church filled her Suburban with cleaning supplies and is dropping it off for our clean-up day tomorrow.

- I know of at least 2 churches that are joining us tomorrow to help us clean up our building and our community.

- One girl from the church is making 100 sack lunches for us tomorrow to feed us, all our volunteers, and quite a few of our neighbors!

- We have a team of 13 people from a ministry in Chattanooga that will arrive Sunday night and stay through Wednesday night. They’re coming just to help and serve any way they can.

- One girl from the church is organizing all the host homes for the incoming groups. She already has homes, meals, and rides figured out!

- We have multiple people in the church housing these complete (Christian) strangers in their homes for 4 nights this week!

- A church in New Jersey who wanted to send a team to help but couldn’t with such short notice is funding the trip for the group from Chattanooga!

- The middle school group from that church is selling flowers this Sunday for Mother’s Day as a fundraiser for our church!

- We have teams assembling from Indiana and New Mexico, ready to come out here and light this place up for Christ.

- A church in Indiana is printing 200 t-shirts for us to sell to raise money to bless our community and get back on our feet after the loss of the flood (pre-orders begin soon)!

- Everywhere I go I have to charge my phone because of the endless amounts of calls, emails, and texts I get every day from people who are there to encourage. By 6pm on Monday, the day of the flood, I had 141 emails!

- Through Facebook, I met a guy who is setting up a concert for us that we will use to draw people in and share the Gospel with them.

- We have hundreds (maybe thousands) of people praying in many states as well as Afghanistan and Sydney, Australia.

I could go on, but I just don’t have time or room. What Satan meant for evil, God used for good! I can honestly say we have bigger vision and more excitement now than ever! God has used this tragedy to realign our priorities, reunite our vision as Christians, and revive our passion for sharing the Gospel with those who need it the most! May God be glorified through what Satan tried to use to destroy!

After the water comes the mud

For the first time since Sunday, we took a drive down Riverside Dr. today. We had to drive through a few shallow ponds and past a flopping 16-inch catfish in the middle of the road (no joke) to get to the church parking lot, but we made it. Here are a few pictures of our journey…

If it looks like someone vandalized our church, that’s because someone did. His name is The Cumberland River. He left mud everywhere. We’ll just call it “mud” because it just sounds better than what it really is (a mixture of dirt, gasoline, oil, trash, and raw sewage).

The bottom 4 1/2 feet of all the walls and doors in our building are ruined, but I gotta admit, they look pretty sweet.

Kids toys and business cards decided to defy gravity and hang all over our church walls. It made for some pretty cool art. Very modern…or something.

The Bibles are a bit muddy. I saved one as a flood memento. I don’t think we’ll be passing them out at church for visitors any more – we’ll go ahead and pull out the non-muddy ones.

We thought about adopting a new “reclining” method with the chairs during service. I’m afraid “Awaken” church might turn into “A-sleepin’” church, though, so probably not.

Thanks for the prayers and DONATIONS! We’re excited about the huge ministry opportunities in front of us and blown away at how things are lining up for God to do something big. We begin cleaning the church on Saturday at 8am. We have teams coming in from New Mexico, Chattanooga, TN, and Indiana! God is good!

Mission Trip to Tennessee

It’s surreal to think that we live in the part of the country where emergency responders are being dispatched to. Our county is one of 6 (that I know of) in Tennessee that has been declared a state of emergency by President Obama.

We’re tentatively planning on a clean-up day this Saturday at the church from 8am-2pm, but we know that’s just the beginning. Besides our building, there are hundreds of other businesses, organizations, and families that need help cleaning up and moving on with life. We want to help facilitate that and while we’re at it, share the love of Christ!

We just received word tonight that a team of 12 from U-Turn for Christ in Chattanooga will be heading our way on Saturday to help with the clean-up. We’ll be finalizing details with them in the morning. We’re also working with a church in Indiana and some individuals in New Mexico to possibly organize not only a huge clean-up effort, but also a community event with a band and a Gospel message. There are many hurting people around here and I figure we need to seize the opportunity while people are really feeling their emptiness!

There are a few ways that you can be a part of this:

Prayerfully, of course. Wherever you are, you can pray for our church and for our community. Pray that God would use us powerfully as we reach out and offer a helping hand to hurting people.

Financially. You can give financially by clicking HERE. We need money not only to replace thousands of dollars worth of lost stuff, but also to help the community and hopefully put on an event that will draw people in and provide an opportunity for a large-scale Gospel message! Events like this cost money, but no amount is too small to be a part of reaching Clarksville for Christ!

Hands-on. If you’d like to get your hands dirty (literally), do we have a job for you! Clean-up will begin this Saturday, but our community will be cleaning for weeks (possibly longer). Digging through a bunch of ruined possessions really puts things in perspective and opens up huge doors for ministry! We want to use a tragic event like this to change eternity for many. We can’t guarantee housing, transportation, or anything, but we’re willing to try to work out whatever details we can. Leave a comment or drop me an email if you’re interested in joining the front lines for a few days!

Again, we have so many people to thank for their help through prayer and online donations. We’ve had 4 churches offer their buildings for us to meet in as well as at least 3 different states working on bringing teams out here to help us clean up and reach out. We have people praying for us in Costa Rica, Afghanistan, New Mexico, Colorado, New Jersey, California, Montana, and many more places. Thanks so much!

Starting over

July 29, 2009. We had 4 couples show up to our very first in-home Bible study (pictured) on a Wednesday night. We met at Jeremy & Julie Edler’s house. We were stoked. Awaken Church was off to a start!

A little over 9 months later, we’re back to square one. We met tonight for a Wednesday night Bible study at the Edler’s house. It’s interesting to think that the church owned more at our first Bible study than we do now. We don’t even have a banner to put outside like we did at our first Bible study!

We’re ok with that, though. We’re excited to see where God takes us from here.

We emailed our insurance company today about the flooding, knowing that there may not be much they would do considering that we didn’t have flood coverage. Their response: “We’re sorry for your loss. There’s nothing we can do.”

God offers great flood coverage, though. As unbelievable as seeing our church standing in feet of water was, what is even more unbelievable is the outpouring (that’s a slightly sensitive word right now) of support – prayerful and financial – that we’ve seen so far. Literally from coast to coast as well as in Afghanistan, we have people praying and asking how they can help. We’re humbled. We also just found out about a team of 12 coming out here on Saturday to aid in the clean-up (more on that in another blog)!

Although we’re starting from scratch with less now than we’ve had, we’re reminded of what’s really important: people. It’s all about reaching people with the love of Christ and His Gospel. Whether my pulpit is rusting in an abandoned, flooded church building or not, I’ll keep preaching the Word. That’s what God called us here to do and that’s what we’ll keep doing.

Thanks again for all the prayers and support! Click HERE if you’d like to donate to the cause. Click HERE for more pictures and a list of some of the things we lost in the flood.

Isaiah 43:2 – When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; And through the rivers, they shall not overflow you….

Here’s a video recap of some of the sights outside the church (sorry for the wind)…

Help Us Help Them

We are moving full-steam ahead in our calling to reach the city of Clarksville and we want you to be a part of it! Reaching this generation for Christ is a challenge and full of risks, but we won’t let that slow us down. We have lots of vision for reaching Clarksville in 2010 and I thought a good place to start would be to let you know about it and how you could be involved.

What will happen when you collide with eternity?
That’s the question that supplies the vision for this event. People get so caught up with the here and now that they forget about eternity. Every person has a collision with eternity that is quickly approaching. It’s time for people to do something about that.

When we went to Heritage Park in the summer as part of our Unight outreaches, it was a HUGE success! Heritage Park has the only skate park in town and it seems to be a bit overlooked by the city and most others who don’t skate. Those kids need Jesus just like anyone else, though, and they were very open when they met people who went out of their way to reach out to them. When we mentioned the idea of putting on a skate comp, we had their undivided attention. It’s never been done here, from what they told us. They normally have to drive to Nashville for something like that. We want to change that. We want the Nashville kids to drive to Clarksville for once. We want the kids here in Clarksville to understand that we care and most of all, that Jesus loves them.

That’s where Collide Skate Comp comes in.

Coming from a church with a skate park and skate ministry and having run mission trips centering on skate park ministry, we have a pretty good idea of what we’re doing. We’ve seen the power of reaching a crowd that is normally looked down on and kicked to the side.

Collide Skate Comp is tentatively scheduled (waiting on the city’s approval and also some funding) for either the Friday right before Spring Break (Friday, March 19) or the Friday of Spring Break, March 26. We want to have a band, food, drinks, loud music, tons of skaters, daily giveaways leading up to the event, and of course a Gospel message where we pray many people commit their lives to Jesus Christ.

That’s all cool, but besides the Gospel and love of Jesus, none of it’s free. So, here’s how you can get involved. I see 3 main ways:


1. PRAYING
This is the only logical place to start. Even if we had all the funding and felt pretty confident about pulling this event off, this would be the place to start. The power of people praying for us and this event around the city and around the nation is priceless. Join us as we seek the Lord about this event. If you are praying, leave a comment on this blog and let us know, or email us at info@awakenchurch.org. We love it!

 2. GIVING
We’ve set up a dedicated secure giving page for those who want their financial gifts to go directly to this event. We still have to pay our bills to keep the church doors open, but if you want to give above and beyond that, this giving page is for you. Any gift helps and 100% of it goes toward Collide. It’s also tax-deductible, as are any of your gifts to Awaken.

3. COMING
Ministry is hands-on and we’ll need lots of help to bring this thing to life.
Are you a Christian skater? Come grind for God’s glory.
Do you make a mean burger? Come grill for God’s glory.
Do you love to share your faith? Come share God’s love.
Whatever church or city or background you’re from is beside the point. If you want to get involved, let us know. Leave a comment or drop us an email: info@awakenchurch.org.

Here are some specific needs for this event:
- a Christian band and stage
- lighting
- food and drinks
- giveaways (shirts, CDs, skateboards and accessories, iTunes cards, etc.)
- money for printing and advertising (radio, billboard, flyers…)

Thanks for prayerfully considering being a part of this event. We feel called to reach this generation and understand that our time is extremely limited. We can’t wait around till everything is just right – that will never happen. We will forge ahead and trust that God will provide for the vision He has given us.