Good Times in Bakersfield!

Yes! Our trip to Bakersfield has come and gone. For those who didn't hear, we headed up there Sunday afternoon to facilitate a seminar entitled 'What Is Organic Church?' I cannot expess how long we worked on the Spanish Translations for these materials, but as I was standing up there - they had me on a stage - I was looking at these notes, thinking, 'Don't read to them; speak with them.'

So that's what I did.

we kept coming back to this question: What is the DNA of Jesus' church? I was worried I had repeated myself on that focus. But the next day at breakfast, I spoke with Pastor Joel and as his wife, Ophelia, translated he expressed that, basically, they needed this discussion of DNA. He said there is a big sense of 'What's next?' among his people...many of whom are in active discipleship (58 groups, actually!). So we shared about the effects of having strong D and N but weak A in these groups. I have learned from Pastor Joel and it was encouraging to help with a fresh perspective on th great things God is doing in Bakersfield.

Love you all! Men's retreat this weekend. Then Greenhouse Sunday night. Can't wait!

Launching This Thing...

Alright, blessings to you all. My name is John, and I'm a pastor with Westchester Church of the Nazarene. This is an old church that, as it says, was near death - who knows, maybe we did die. Let me tell you, God can do some AMAZING things with the dead. A recent study puts 80% of all traditional churches in the U.S. at 'maintaining' or 'dying' - so we were not alone. But even two years ago, we had hope that God was going to do something brand new....so why fear death?

And God has indeed done something death-defying. He has brought brand-new, organic, abudant life to our church community. We are seeing the natural development of an organic church network, and right now - first week of June - that burst of growth is, uh, speeding up!

Anyway, we are always using list emails to communicate, and someone had a brilliant idea - stick it on a blog, yo.

So that's what this is. You can check this blog for general news about the network. And soon we will be liking this blog to individual blogs which represent each church.

So, yeah. If you are googling organic church Los Angeles and this page comes up, email me. I'll contact you and we'll hook up for coffee or something.

For the rest of ya'll, this is the new place to stay on top of things.

He didn't come to make bad people good; he came to make dead, flatlining people live!