Not the Crowd, but the Few

Last weekend I was with the Anthem band leading worship at a statewide conference in Salina, Kansas. The primary speaker was Max Barnett, who had a vision to plant campus ministries on all the Big 8 campuses. One of his disciples, Jack Owens, came to Iowa State in 1972 and started what is now the Salt Company.

Brett (left) went to Lincoln, Max (middle) stayed in Oklahoma, and Bob (right) went to Kansas State.

I am a boy among giants.

Jenni Sabino and Teresa Dodge decorated my study. I'm changing the name from office to study. More on that in a future post. Here you see Jase, one of our rockstar students, getting intellectual by reading some C.S. Lewis.
I spoke on John 2 last night. I started the message by showing how John's main point is that Jesus isn't a mile marker, but a fork in the road. This picture was used to illustrate that...
I spent some time addressing the issue of alcohol. It's hard not to with Jesus changing the water to wine.

Here is a picture of worship last night. The atmosphere was electric.

In my discipleship group this afternoon in my basement, we had a little visit from Batman.
Batman died.
Our topic of conversation was, "How are you being a disciple and who are you discipling?"

I told the guys the day they stop passing on their faith to other people is the day I ask them to be off leadership. We also talked about the importance of memorizing the scriptures as a part of following Jesus.

I'm going to give them a list of passages that I think every Christian should have memorized.

Keep praying for us, as we seek to raise up the next generation of Christ followers. There is so much God is doing, and yet so much more we are asking him to do.

Finally, pray for our retreat coming up this weekend with guest speaker Ed Noble, the teaching pastor at Journey Community Church in San Diego, CA.

Sitting on a Gold Mine

Can this really be happening?

Thousands of the state's (and world's) best leaders converge on this town in the middle of these Iowa cornfields to study and pursue their dreams. Hundreds of them show up every Thursday night at Salt Company to seek God's dream for their lives.

Sometimes I feel like I'm being set up for some kind of cosmic punch line...

But there's a great stewardship that comes with this next generation of leaders. We have a vision to raise these students up to become leaders in the church- whether godly moms, elders, engineers, pastors, teachers, worship leaders...

So we've launched the Cornerstone School of Theology to equip those seeking to be trained for ministry.

Today was our first class: Church History with Professors Jeff Dodge and Tim Lubinus.

Stan (TSC Freshman Director) didn't fare so well on the first quiz (this wasn't for a grade since it was the first day of class)...

Stan turned to me after getting a whopping score of 3/14 and said, "I really need to take this class."

How many pastors, missionaries, worship leaders, youth pastors, and other full time ministry workers have already been birthed out of Cornerstone/TSC? I hope to see that number increased exponentially in the coming years.

Soli Deo Gloria.