I am in Joplin, Missouri with a team of 40 volunteers from Cross Point, my church in Nashville. We came here on a mission to provide on-the-ground support and aid to the people of Joplin in the wake of the the single worst tornado to hit the United States in over 60 years, leaving at least 139 people dead and entire communities completely devastated.
Today our team split up and was able to serve a lot of people across the city, including knocking out many projects that were a huge help at the church where I grew up, as well as helping my brother and my aunt, whose home was completely destroyed. Here’s a video of my buddy Carlos trying to describe the scene at my aunt’s house when our team first arrived to help.
I was born in Tyler, Texas, but we moved to Joplin, Missouri before I was turned 1 and spent the next 26 years there. Make no mistake about it, I am from Joplin, Missouri.
I grew up in Joplin. I learned lots of ropes in Joplin. I got my foundation in Joplin. I went to 3 area schools there. I have a mother, brother, grandfather, aunts, uncles and cousins that live there. Some of my best friends live there.
The first several chapters of my story were written in Joplin. I didn’t start in Nashville. Much of how my life has evolved and the person I have become have strong ties to the 26 years I was a part of the local community of Joplin, Missouri.
One of my favorite things to do is create environments where people can connect with God, with each other and with something bigger than themselves. The opportunity to help engineer an experience that is a collision of all those things is so exciting to me!
This past Sunday night, Stretch, the young adult community I co-lead at Cross Point, hosted the first in what will be a series of ART & ACTION events. The vision of the ART & ACTION concept is to design experiences that engage a variety of artistic expressions to create awareness and action around a particular cause. I had been wanting the group to do something like this for awhile, but it just didn’t pan out until now.
For our first ART & ACTION event, we partnered with Atlanta-based Unthinkable, hosting a screening of their documentary, “My Concrete Mattress”, which captures and portrays the lives of four homeless people: John, Dwight, Deborah and Anthron. The goal of the film is to move beyond the stereotypes of homelessness to display the true stories of four people, and educate viewers of lives affected by poverty. We were joined by Unthinkable’s Johnathan Goode and Wes Peters, who created the film. Jonathan shared the vision and heart behind “My Concrete Mattress” and challenged us all to both see and serve the homeless and oppressed through the limitless love of God, not just our own compassion.
Check out the “My Concrete Mattress” trailer:
We were also joined by guests from four local organizations who serve Nashville’s homeless community in a number of unique ways. Representatives from Safe Haven Family Shelter, The Bridge Ministry, Room In The Inn and Nashville Rescue Mission were all on hand to speak after the documentary, sharing the heart and vision of their respective organizations, as well as presenting practical volunteer opportunities for people to immediately get involved in. To move hearts is one thing, to move feet is another.
Between the impactful documentary, the challenging words of Jonathan Goode and hearing the hearts of all our guests, it was indeed a powerful night. It was amazing to see God at work in the room, moving in people’s hearts as they took in all that was presented.
As Stretch is still relatively new, we’re still experimenting with lots of ideas, experiencing lots of firsts and constantly dreaming of unique ways to engage this group and consistently be moving outside our comfort zones together. As such, I was honestly unsure how many people would even show up for something like this. However, I was absolutely overwhelmed at the response of our group, and we had a new record attendance of 141 people on Sunday night. I was blown away, not only by the number of people who came, but by the level at which they engaged and responded. That night was like a spiritual Red Bull that fueled the vision of what we do at Stretch so much more! I believe we successfully executed a beautiful collision of ART & ACTION that is immediately impacting how and why people serve and do outreach. We’re already talking through details for our next ART & ACTION event in May!
It is such an honor to be able to serve, do life and pursue Christ with this amazing community of people we call Stretch.
Below are some pictures from the ART & ACTION event.
Jonathan and Wes are currently on The Unthinkable 2011 American Tour, screening My Concrete Mattress all across the country. For more information about My Concrete Mattress and hosting The Unthinkable Tour and a screening of “My Concrete Mattress” in your city, visit www.beunthinkable.org.
What is a unique way that you are engaging the community around you?
I read a Rick Warren quote a couple weeks ago that I haven’t been able to escape ever since.
The last thing many believers need to go to is another Bible study. They already know far more than they’re putting into practice.
Dang.
Reading that really challenged me. Its often easy for me to think that learning more about what Jesus said gets me off the hook for having to actually walk out and do what Jesus said do and be who Jesus said to be. Personally, I grew up in a church environment that knew all about “church” and all kinds of doctrine and could quote you half the Bible, but never really did anything with it but try hard to be “holy” and come back to church.
Often, people in the Gospels who got in the most trouble with Jesus were the ones thought they were working hardest on their spiritual life. They were trying so hard to be good that they could not stop thinking about how hard they were trying, and that got in the way of their loving other people.
That Jesus just spent time with the oppressed, dejected and broken isn’t what set Him apart. It was that He LOVED them. To be honest, anyone can serve a meal to a homeless person. You don’t have to believe in Jesus to serve the oppressed. But as followers of Christ, what should make us different than everyone else doing what we’re doing is who we are and how that filters how and why we do what we do.
Last night at Stretch, we talked about how as much as we love how the group has grown and we’ve been able to mobilize a lot of people to service and action, ultimately we’re doing a disservice if we only get people to serve a meal to a homeless person but don’t challenge them to LOVE that homeless person, look them in the eye, remember their name and dignify their humanity the way Jesus would have.
We’re about to dig into David Platt’s book “Radical” together and challenge each other to go deeper into community and service, and allow ourselves to be uncomfortable to a degree that we begin to understand what it means to live like Jesus tells us to.
Josh Wilson has a great new song called “I Refuse”. In this video, he talks about how he was praying for the people affected by the Nashville flood earlier this year, and praying for people to step up and come help. But then he wondered if it was possible for him to be hiding behind his prayer and using it as a defense and a cop-out to actually doing something himself. I was really moved by that and thought it was a perfect compliment to how all this fits together. We showed the video at Stretch last night and begin to challenge people with the awareness of the great needs that exist all around them and ask the hard question…
In the fall of 2009, after reading Richard Stearns’ “The Hole In Our Gospel”, my friends Wes Howard and Ben Turner felt compelled to gather a group of 20/30-somethings together around the idea of being intentionally missional and living out the Gospel by actively serving the needs of others. That group started with 3 people last fall and currently stands at just over 140 who are regular/semi-regular attenders. I’ve skipped a lot of details for the sake of brevity, but suffice it to say something very unique has been happening in what we have affectionately called our “not so small” community group at Cross Point Church here in Nashville. Essentially, people keep coming and keep getting connected.
The mission statement the group adopted earlier this year is:
“We are imperfect people, living inside our design, building enduring relationships with each other,actively serving the needs of others, and committing to grow deeper in love and faith with Christ.”
Within those 140+ people, there are 8 small groups that are made up of folks in their early-20′s to mid-30′s looking for an opportunity to connect and serve and to experience community in a whole new way. It is nothing short of amazing. This particular model is quite the anomaly as far as “small groups” go and was NOT by design, but very much just “happened” somewhere along the last several months.
For the past 7-8 months, our group has been officially called the “young professionals”, a somewhat nebulous name that wasn’t very clear as to exactly who we are as a group. Several weeks ago, Wes, Ben and I began talking about the idea of giving the group an actual name that would help to define its actual identity and point to who we were. We landed on the name “Stretch”. Here’s why…
A few of the definitions of the word ‘stretch’ are:
make great demands on the capacity or resources of
cause to make maximum use of talents or abilities
straighten or extend one’s body or a part of one’s body to it’s full length
The cool thing is, those things are happening within our group in a variety of ways, and it’s incredible to see.
Here’s what Stretch means to us as a group:
It speaks to our age group being very much in the “stretch” between life phases.
It points to the opportunity for your life be stretched and changed through service and community like never before.
It speaks to the growth that happens in the space between moving FROM one thing, TO another.
It says our group is not just the cool Sunday night hang, but something that will deepen your life and put new demands on your capacity for community, faith and service.
It speaks to creating capacity for your life in the “space between”
So last night marked a milestone and the beginning of a new chapter for our “not so small” community group as we officially renamed the group “Stretch”, cast the vision for what it meant, unveiled our new logo and showed this video we put together to communicate the concept even more.
It is such an honor to do life and serve next to Wes and Ben in co-leading this incredible group of people. God has done amazing things through us and every single bit of it has been in spite of us and not because of any of us, but because He has a greater purpose and agenda than any of us could accomplish on our own. The folks in the group are incredible and are so hungry to build deep community and be the hands and feet of Christ.
In his message yesterday, Pete Wilson talked about how the Gospel challenges us to be not just recipients of grace, but agents of grace, and that the Gospel does not call for reflection, but rather action. I was so excited to hear him say those things yesterday because they are so essential to the core of our DNA as “Stretch”, and should also be to the core DNA of the heart of everyone who calls themselves a follower of Christ.
I will be talking more about Stretch in the coming weeks and months, but I wanted to take a moment to share this with you all here on my blog. I hope the “Stretch” concept resonates with you and challenges you to consider ways in your own life that you could stretch and create capacity for God to work in new and greater ways in your life. You’ll never be the same.
How does the Stretch concept apply to your life right now?
