Where Is the Land of Joy?

In a rather Piper-esque fashion, I want to ask myself today, “Where is the land of joy? Where can I find pleasure and happiness?”

Today I start a new chapter in my life. Today is my first official day as Director for Small Group Discipleship at WRPC. It is my job to recruit and train small group leaders; get people connected to small groups; disciple leaders as they disciple others; and help set vision, direction and give shape to our ministry of dicsipleship through small groups. That is a daunting and thrilling task!

It’s exciting to be once again devoting all of my work time to the task of shepherding and discipling. Right now, it is a job filled with joy. But I have to ask myself honestly if I will always find joy in the task. The answer of course is that I will not. I’ve been on staff at a church before. It’s difficult at times. The blissful ignorance of the average church member is wiped away once your on staff. You see the troubles that people are in, the heart aches that people are dealing with, the physical suffering that people are enduring, and even the frustrations of deadlines and personal failures.

So as I begin this job today, I was graciously reminded by God in my reading of the Psalms that there is a land of joy, and it does not exist in any particular vocation. David writes in Psalm 16, “Lord, you are my portion and my cup of blessing; you hold my future…. I keep the Lord in my mind always. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad, and my spirit rejoices; my body also rests securly…. you reveal the path of life to  me; in your presence is abundant joy; in your right hand are eternal pleasures.”

From The Valley of Vision: “O Christ, all thy ways of mercy tend to and end in my delight…. Bring me speedily to the land of joy.”

May God help me to always seek my greatest joy and delight and pleasure in him. Even when I enjoy the gifts he has given me–be it family, fortune, health or vocation–may I enjoy them in such a way that my enjoying of them is an enjoying of the one who has so freely given them to me.

Home from Austria

So, I didn’t really get a chance to post updates on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, so I’ll try to summarize now.

Friday

Friday morning we had our final school performance in Innsbruck. Being able to perform in the public schools is an amazing testimony to God’s providence. We did not go and ask if we could sing and play in various schools. The schools contacted us and asked us to come. We were able to teach some music history and sing and play for the schools. The one in Innsbruck on Friday was a middle school, and the children were all very excited.

Saturday

Saturday evening was our big concert in Fulpmes. Before the concert, we invited the Fulpmes church choir to an American-style barbecue. It was a lot of fun spending time with them and talking to them. It was fun to treat them to a little bit of our culture as we had enjoyed so much experiencing their culture.

We performed at the Fulpmes church Saturday evening and hundreds of people from the town came to the concert, including the vice-mayor of Fulpmes. The Fulpmes church choir sang as well as the youth choir. The youth choir even sang a song in English for us; that was very special! Our choir sang several pieces, and our jazz combo played several songs as well. It was a great time!

After the concert, the choir invited us across the street for a party…Austrian-style. It was wonderful getting to know all the people and spend time building relationships with them. That is exactly what this trip was all about.

Sunday

We spent Sunday morning with an Evangelical Free church in Innsbruck. Our choir sang and the jazz combo played as well. We enjoyed meeting and getting to know the believers in that church. That evening we played and sang with a Baptist church in Innsbruck. In both of those services we were able to a blessing and an encouragment to the believers who are trying to be a kingdom-spreading influence in Innsbruck. But they were also a blessing and encouragement to us. It was definitely a life-changing trip!

Monday

We left early Monday morning to travel back to the U.S. Everything went great…until we got to Atlanta. Our flight from Atlanta to Norfolk was delayed due to mechanical problems. Once they found us a new plane, we had been waiting about 6 hours in the airport instead of the short 2 and a half hours it was supposed to be. Oh well. We still made it home, and it’s great to be back with my family again.

Thank you so much for your prayers and support. Please continue to pray for us as we raise the rest of the funds to pay for this trip. Please click here to donate.

I’ll post pictures as soon as I can.

It’s Thursday Evening in Austria

Yesterday was a busy day. We had a performance at the middle school in Fulpmes. There were LOTS of kids there, and they really seemed to enjoy the music. Kelly taught Jazz history to two of the classes with demonstrations from the jazz combo of various types of jazz.

After the main performance, which included the choir, we gave gifts to the children. It was a mob! We ran out of gifts before we ran out of children.

Last night our worship team met with the worship team from one of the churches in Innsbruck and had a workshop with them. They taught us some of their songs, and we taught them some of ours, then we had a great time talking about worship in general and some specifics of leading in worship. It was a great time together!

Today has been busy, too. We performed at a trade school in Fulpmes for high school boys. The weather is finally nice today. I was able to see the tops of some mountains, and it’s absolutely breathtaking!

Tonight we have a rehearsal at the Fulpmes church. I don’t have a camera, so I can’t really take pictures, but I hope to post some of other people’s pictures soon.

Please continue to pray for us.

Wednesday Morning in Austria

Yesterday was filled with rehearsals. And it’s a good thing, too. Bringing together a group of people from several states and countries and continents can be quite challenging, but the choir and the jazz groups really cliked yesterday. We’re ready for our first performance!

It’s a little before 6:00 a.m. The luxurious hot water we had the first two days is gone, so I guess that officially makes it a mission trip. Not sure why there was no hot water this morning, but having no heat in the building and no hot water and unseasonably cold weather here reminded me this morning of all the creature comforts that I take for granted. I am here, after all, not for a vacation, but to work for the kingdom.

The jazz combo is heading off to the Fulpmes school in about 45 minutes. Kelly Dehnert has been teaching in the schools since last week. He is a missionary to Africa and a Yale-trained musician–an amazingly talented Yale-trained musician! Kelly will be teaching some jazz history, and the combo will be playing to go along with that.

The choir will arrive at the school around 9:00 a.m. for our first performance at 9:30.

Please continue to pray for us. We’d love to have a day with some sunny weather if God will allow it. The Alps are beautiful even when covered in clouds, but it would be nice to see them in the sun once as well.

Again, if you would like to contribute to the work here, please CLICK HERE and make a donation of any amount.

Tuesday Morning in Austria–Why We’re Here

I’m much more awake now than I was last night when I wrote my first Austria post, so let me see if I can fill in some details. There are about 30 of us here. Most of us arrived Monday morning Austria time. We flew from Norfolk, met several people in Atlanta, then flew to Munich, drove to Telfes (about 45 minutes from Innsbruck), then picked up a couple more people at the train station in Innsbruck.

We’re staying at the Freizeithaus Alpin in Telfes. The accomodations are very nice. Don’t tell anyone, but I even have a room all to myself! It’s more like a hostel than a hotel. We have the whole place to ourselves. We do our own laundry, make our own food, etc. The view from every room in the lodge is just breathtaking. I woke up this morning to the cloud-covered Alps you see in the picture. Yes, that is what I see from the balcony in my room. I could get used to this!

So, you’re probably thinking, “How is this a mission trip? It sounds more like a vacation!” I’m glad you asked. The face of missions looks very different in various parts of the world. In some countries it takes the form of building buildings or doing relief work. In other countries it takes the form of open air preaching services or children’s Bible clubs. Well, in a place like Austria the face of missions has to be very different from any of those things. Austria is a wealthy nation with a long religious heritage. They don’t need Americans to come build things or bring food or clothing. They don’t want Americans to come preach to them or try to convert their children. Roman Catholicism is a way of life even more than it is a religion in Austria.

As a result we are bringing something to the town of Telfes that the Austrian people really enjoy and care about. Music. We’re here in the country Mozart was born in bringing rich, wonderful music with us. And the Austrian people love it. Our choir will be singing in the Telfes church that you can see in the picture. We will also be singing in the public schools as well as hosting a community concert on Saturday.

We also have a jazz combo from our group that will be playing in several places, including the schools. We have a team member who is helping to lead this trip who is a highly trained jazz musician. He will be teaching jazz history in the public schools, and the jazz combo will play there. He is also a missionary to Africa, so he will be teaching about African music as well, and the choir will sing some African songs. The schools are very excited about having us here, and we’re excited about having this opportunity.

Our goals this week include building relationships and opening up opportunities for the gospel to be set loose in Telfes, Austria. The believers here and in Innsbruck can find this a difficult mission field, and anything we can do to encourage them and help build bridges to the local people here will be a blessing for sure.

Please continue to pray for us for these things:

1. Health and safety — We’re not a huge group, so it can be dificult to lose one or two people to sickness.
2. Good weather — I know this might be a little selfish, but it’s supposed to be cold and rainy all week. If we could get just a day or two of warm sunshine, it would be an added bonus.
3. Open hearts — We need our own hearts to be open and willing to serve the Austrian people. We want the hearts of the people of Telfes to be open to what we sing about so that the gospel may start to take hold in their lives.
4. Money — I still owe about $1000 for this trip. Many other participants are in the same situation. Our church was so committed to our being here that they footed the bill for us to come even though we were only about half funded. Please pray that God will provide the rest of the money for the trip. If you would like to help out, you can click here.

Austria Trip, Day 1…or is it 2?

For those of you who don’t know, I’m in Austria right now with a musical mission team from Westminster Reformed Presbyterian Church. We also have some people from Trinity Church in Norfolk, Christ Church in Chattanooga and Perimeter Church in Atlanta.

We left Norfolk yesterday and flew to Atlanta, then on to Munich. We arrived in Munich around 8:00 this morning. That would be about 2:00 a.m. EST on Monday. So I’m not sure if it’s day one or day two, but we’re here either way!

God gave us safe travel, and we are thankful that all of the different groups were able to meet up together with no problems. We met several people in Atlanta and some other people in Innsbruck.

Today we had our first rehearsal in the Catholic church here in Telfes. I hope to put some pictures of that building up soon–it’s beautiful! The acoustics are so amazing in there that you just don’t ever want to stop singing!

I hope to write daily with pictures and updates as the week goes on. Please continue to pray for us.

By the way, these two pictures are what I will see every morning when I wake up right outside my room!

HCSB Release Delayed

Okay, so I’m probably way behind the times here on this announcement, but for those of you who still don’t know yet, it looks like the HCSB second edition study Bible will not be released for a while:

http://collegeblog.midbible.ac.uk/2009/04/hcsb-2009-status/

HT: Jonas

I’m Writing the Final Page of this Chapter in My Life Today

Today I go to work at FedEx Office for the last time. Next week it’s off to Austria for a week with a mission team. The week after that I begin my new job as Director of Small Group Discipleship at WRPC.

It’s kind of a strange feeling. I’m excited about the new position, but at the same time, I’m a little sad to leave behind the dark world that God has made me shine as a light in for these last several years. I hope that as I leave FXO I will leave behind a good opinion of Jesus Christ with the people I worked with.

Today as I start this last day, these phrases from a prayer in The Valley of Vision seem most appropriate:

May I speak each word as if my last word,
And walk each step as my final one.
If my life should end today,
Let this be my best day.

Why N.T. Wright and John Piper Simply May Not Be Speaking the Same Language

So I’ve been reading N.T. Wright’s book, Justification, and though I’m not ready to offer many comments yet, I did have one observation I wanted to get some feedback on. I’m about halfway through the book, having just finished the section on the exegesis of Galatians. I then stopped and picked up Piper’s book, The Future of Justification. I skimmed back through his book looking specifically for how Piper interacts with Wright’s exegesis. I’m not sure if what I found is really representative of two different approaches to exegesis or not, but that’s the sense I came away with. Here’s what I noticed.

When Wright deals with Galatians exegetically, he walks through the storyline of the book, attempting to show Paul’s train of thought. He shows how each verse or phrase fits into that train of thought, and consequently, how it does not fit into the “old perspective” views.

When Piper deals with Wright’s ideas, he goes to specific verses in Galatians (for example) and takes one or two verses apart piece by piece, eventually concluding that Wright must therefore be wrong as this or that particular verse “clearly” demonstrates.

And now, at the risk of over-generalizing, I present what I see as two very different approaches to the very task of exegesis. Wright on the one hand takes an approach of macro-exegesis first, trying to see the big picture so that it can inform his understanding of the details of the passage.

Piper, on the other hand, seems to do the hard work of micro-exegesis first, then moving on to develop what he believes is a big picture that fits his understanding of the parts.

I am not at this point arguing for or against either approach or either conclusion. I am merely right now trying to note that Wright and Piper may simply be talking past each other without entirely engaging the other because of this different approach. Wright clearly feels as though Piper has not heard what he has to say. Maybe there are some assumptions about the very nature of exegesis and the hermeneutical spiral that have yet to be exposed. Maybe that’s where some of the confusion lies. Wright and Piper are certainly coming to different conclusions, but they can’t even engage each other well in the discussion at times because they are beginning with very different approaches to the exegetical process. They are speaking different languages with different assumptions about the way to approach Scripture.

So my question is this: Without trying to take sides with either personality (Piper or Wright), which should come first, macro-exegesis or micro-exegesis? Of course each will inform and shape the other, but do you think that this may be part of the problem with the new/old perspective debates? I’m fully aware that the disagreements between the old perspective and the new perspective are much bigger than this, but this may at least help explain some of the confusion. What do you think?

A Celebration of Exquisite Ordinariness

Yesterday Carrie and I celebrated our 7th anniversary.

We didn’t go on an extraordinary trip. We didn’t take an extraordinary cruise. We didn’t go to an extraordinary restaurant. What we did do was have a fairly ordinary day which we wrapped up by eating at one of our favorite ordinary restaurants, Jason’s Deli. But it was exactly the ordinariness of the day that reminds me how absolutely exquisite every day is with my wife.

I could never have guessed when Carrie and I were first married 7 years ago the path that our journey together would take–it has been far from ordinary. But neither could I have guessed that the ordinary life we would live would be so exquisite simply for being able to share it together.

My wife is more beautiful a woman than I deserve in so many ways. Her humility is extraordinary. Her love and care for me and our children is extraordinary. The fact that she is delighted to be my wife I find extremely extraordinary.

Carrie, I love you with all my heart! Every ordinary day with you is more exquisite, more charming, more absolutely breath-taking than you know. I cherish every day we spend together and look forward to a long life of exquisite ordinariness with such a truly extraordinary woman!