The Role of Knexions @Midpark Church

Knexions is church! After the Day of Pentecost thousands of people placed their faith in Jesus and a plan unfolded where God’s ideal began to take shape. The new believers gathered in two venues one being the Temple where large crowds could join to celebrate their new found faith and the other was going from house to house to participate in teaching, praying, taking communion, and building relationships with one another. 

The Temple meetings were for expression of worship and hearing motivating messages that encourage the heart. The house meetings were for fulfilling what Jesus came to accomplish which was to bring people together around faith. Along with the elements mentioned above the house meetings also became a place where faith was shared and expressed by good works. Good works were taking care of the poor, hurting, marginalized, sick, etc. 

So this is a small picture of what a biblically functioning and healthy church is. It is one that meets for Celebration and gathers in small groups to grow, build relationships, and share the Good News. Midpark through Knexions Groups (through you!) makes it possible for us to be that biblically functioning and healthy church. 

Your place in the big picture God has is vital. That weekly meeting you HOST whether it be an outdoor adventure group, prayer group, Bible study, support group, etc is God’s dream unfolding in you and for those who are part of your group. Midpark serves 65-70 Knexions Groups each semester.

Imagine one day hundreds of such groups with hundreds of HOSTs operating out of Midpark and thousands of people in those groups benefiting from the relationships, Bible teaching, prayer, and genuine community building. Also imagine people who do not know Jesus being befriended by others and coming into Knexions Groups where strong relationships are developed and opportunities to come to Jesus are created. We get to do this!

Join One-Start One! Today admin@midpark.ca or visit http://www.midpark.ca

Workplace Influence

By Michael Steward

30 Ways To Bless Your Workplace
A few weeks ago I posted some very practical ideas for engaging your neighborhood with the Gospel. To follow that up I have compiled 30 ideas for engaging people in your workplace. The workplace is an everyday context where many people spend the majority of their time. It is important for us to know what it looks like to bring gospel intentionality to our jobs. Hopefully this will help spark a few ideas for connecting with and blessing your coworkers.

1. Instead of eating lunch alone, intentionally eat with other co-workers and learn their story.

2. Get to work early so you can spend some time praying for your co-workers and the day ahead.

3. Make it a daily priority to speak or write encouragement when someone does good work.

4. Bring extra snacks when you make your lunch to give away to others.

5. Bring breakfast (donuts, burritos, cereal, etc.) once a month for everyone in your department.

6. Organize a running/walking group in the before or after work.

7. Have your missional community/small group bring lunch to your workplace once a month.

8. Create a regular time to invite coworkers over or out for drinks.

9. Make a list of your co-workers birthdays and find a way to bless everyone on their birthday.

10. Organize and throw office parties as appropriate to your job.

11. Make every effort to avoid gossip in the office. Be a voice of thanksgiving not complaining.

12. Find others that live near you and create a car pool.

13. Offer to throw a shower for a co-worker who is having a baby.

14. Offer to cover for a co-worker who needs off for something.

15. Start a regular lunch out with co-workers (don’t be selective on the invites).

16. Organize a weekly/monthly pot luck to make lunch a bit more exciting.

17. Ask someone who others typically ignore if you can grab them a soda/coffee while you’re out.

18. Be the first person to greet and welcome new people.

19. Make every effort to know the names of co-workers and clients along with their families.

20. Visit coworkers when they are in the hospital.

21. Bring sodas or work appropriate drinks to keep in your break room for coworkers to enjoy. Know what your co-workers like.

22. Go out of your way to talk to your janitors and cleaning people who most people overlook.

23. Find out your co-workers favorite music and make a playlist that includes as much as you can (if suitable for work).

24. Invite your co-workers in to the service projects you are already involved in.

25. Start/join a city league team with your co-workers.

26. Organize a weekly co-working group for local entrepreneurs at a local coffee shop.

27. Start a small business that will bless your community and create space for mission.

28. Work hard to reconcile co-workers who are fighting with one another.

29. Keep small candy, gum, or little snacks around to offer to others during a long day.

30. Lead the charge in organizing others to help co-workers in need.

Would love to hear other ways you have connected with the people you work with.

These are very practical ideas for what to do but we also need to consider how and why we do it. Here is a helpful sermon from Jonathan Dodson on this subject - LINK: EXISTING TO WORK
1 week ago

Strategic Stopping

Want off the treadmill? Can't seem to get it quite right? Here are some strategic ways to really stop.

1. Remind yourself that in this stressed out world full of demands that are unrealistic rest is not a luxury! It's a necessity. If you want longevity, creativity, productivity and effectiveness to be sustained in your life you must STOP!

2. Reframe what stopping is. It's not an abandonment of our lot in life. It's not a quitting. And it's not an end. Stopping is the beginning of something! Stopping is loading up on recreation to be as prepared as you can be to enter the next leg of your race in life. You lose if you got into it without having stopped.

Stopping Killers: The Work of Stopping

1. That agitated feeling you get where you can't sit still. Your mind constantly goes to phone calls, to do lists, social media posts, etc.work it through. Invite those triggers to be a part of the shutting down to stopping process. Eventually they leave till it's time to get going again.

2. A 'landing bump'. This is where all your issues that have been suppressed surface or disciplines that have been ignored begin to become evident. The temptation is to get busy again to control, ignore or maintain them at a distance. This is a season to journey through! To resolve issues or to get back to some basics or to re-prioritize things in your life. Facing head on these things makes you better and stronger going into the next leg. To run mounts up the EQ work to be done then you are at a wall.

3. Extreme fatigue leading to a sense of laziness, unproductively, frustration, even builder generation guilt. Again this is both necessary and temporal! We need a re-charge! As my wife often challenges me with by saying, 'Get off the cross...we need the wood.' no matter how divinely empowered we think we are with boundless energy our created beings can only go so far and take so much.

'I would not take a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.'
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Jesus Chronicles#1

One of the biggest challenges followers of Jesus express on a constant basis is hearing God's voice. I can relate at times.

I cannot imagine the context and implications to passionate people of God who lived in the era of 400 years of God's silence. This was the period of history between the Old Testament and the emerging of John the Baptist in the New Testament.

Scholars have called this time when God did not speak to His people 'the echo of God'. Try as they may all that came back in response to their calls out to God was the sound of their own petitions. What replaced it was a sterile attempt to follow God's teachings or a flimsy hope that one day in the distant future God would 'show up'!

What was lost was the covering and protection of a loving, gracious, forgiving God whose sole aspiration was (and is) to restore broken relationships, heal broken people, reinstate His dream for His creation. The Old Testament reveals an active and involved God in His creation and people. When lost He directed, when disobedient He brought to our attention the self destructive inclination, when off the right path He called for a national turning around, when obstinate He disciplined, and when discouraged He reminded of His promises.

A far cry from the options we tend to default to! Religion that doesn't fulfill and idealism that doesn't bring resolution here and now. The Jesus Chronicles reveal another option. Jesus came that we might have life. He offers not a sterile teaching that with gut retching effort makes us 'o.k.' or a distance hope that doesn't address our present circumstances. But a presence that brings joy, peace, and place of rightness with him, others and ourselves.

With John the Baptist's emergence the Jesus Chronicles begin in the New Testament. His message was that God was taking action, His voice was once again fresh, that He was going go protect us, and our aspirations He placed in us can be realized.

The Volunteer Effect

Dave Hall, PAOC Alberta District Office, wrote the following article on an @Midpark Church area of service. In 2005 Randy Johnson, Sheila Muirhead and myself committed ourselves to address the need to, a) provide a truly effective support system in the local church, b) train volunteers to rise to the level of competency, and c) enmesh the ministry into @Midpark's Mission Statement.
After meetings and presentations to the @Midpark leadership, plans got under way. Today under the leadership of Danell McSween, Jacqueline Mueller, Susan Tam and Derek Sheahan @Midpark's CareNet ministry has benefitted countless people both inside and outside the congregation. CarNet has also make inroads to a host of various organizations and community resources creating true partnerships.

Much thanks goes to a movement of volunteers of 50 plus who have engaged in a Missional Christianity.

By Dave Hall

As I meet with our District Credential Holders and go to the places they minister, I often hear some great ideas for ministry in local churches and their communities. After hearing some of these ideas, I have often thought, “I wish I’d heard of that when I was pastoring. That’s a great ministry plan!” Over the past 3 plus years of hearing about great ministries that our District churches and ministries are doing, I have decided to share some of them in our District Update as a regular feature. As you read them, you might just catch something that you can do in your sphere of God’s Kingdom. It may not be exactly what is being reported but you may begin to see something you had never thought of before. So in this regular feature, if a seed gets planted in your mind, my prayer is that it will grow to be a blessing wherever you minister.

In this first feature, here is an idea for providing care in the local Church and community. Derek Sheahan is on the Pastoral team at Midpark Christian Assembly in Calgary with Lee Primeau. Here is a brief description from Derek on “CareNet”…

CareNet
CareNet is a support ministry aimed at meeting practical and spiritual needs of people at Midpark and beyond. It is a network that links one person’s gifting to another’s need. In its most basic definition, CareNet facilitates CARE.

CareNet is a community of people who demonstrate compassion, caring and serving. There are two main roles -- the first is the practical response to and care of those in need. We commit to provide an unconditional caring response to the emotionally distraught, the struggling, the lonely, the shut-ins, the sick and the dying. The second is to establish partnerships with external resources to more efficiently and productively care for those in need.

As CareNet has grown, we have implemented different teams to accommodate the regular patterns of need we have seen. The teams are:
PrayerNet: they are the prayer chain team and also are the ones we call upon in church services if prayer is needed for individuals.
MMM-Midpark Meals Ministry: this team regularly meets to cook and stock our freezer so we can give food to families in need for all occasions.
Emergency Meals Team: this team is called if we have funerals or last minute food needs
Transportation Team: this team is called if people are needing rides to church, hospital, doctors, etc....
Moving Team: this team is called upon if someone in the community is moving and needs helpers or trucks.
Miscellaneous Team: this team covers all the rest of the requests from helping someone fix a household item, to donating furniture, to whatever comes our way...no need is rejected.

In addition to these teams, CareNet oversees our support groups which are now GriefShare, Divorce Care, Surviving the Holidays, Anger Management, Dealing with Depression, Caregivers of Alzheimer/Dementia, A Trusted Friend (a facilitators course), Financial Management. Benevolence, HomeStart, and OIL (operating in love) are also under our CareNet umbrella.

Not every need can be met in-house, and so CareNet has endeavored to partner with other ministries and resources outside our church. We have a vast array of resources that we can direct for individuals from counselors, to financial aid, to shelters, to medical assistance. No need is refused.

We believe CareNet represents what the church is already supposed to be doing... making an impact in people’s lives for the kingdom of God and His glory.

Do You 'latreia'?

The biblical foundation of the church has always been rooted in and best understood as a movement. Implied in the term 'movement' is action. As history shows terms begin to take on other meanings and tradition sets in re-defining the word. 

For example the word 'worship' has taken on the idea of meeting in a building with a steeple to congregate and follow a liturgy. While each of these words and actions are not bad in themselves, nor should they necessarily be eliminated, they have defined how a follower of Jesus is to worship Him. Get up on Sunday morning, meet in a building, follow an order of service (another word that has historically been re-defined) and leave complete! Even the most feeble attempt to 'mess' with this concept is met with resistance, opposition, anger, and either a church battle or exodus of parishioners. 

As someone has said, "Christians are like cement...thoroughly mixed and permanently set". 

The danger of course is that for efficiency sake we pick up definitions, traditions, and habits 'on the fly'. There is just too much information coming our way to really explore 'high ideals'. This is especially true in our 21st century information explosion. In a sense we trust those who have dedicated their lives to areas of specialization to be accurate and competent in that specialized area. Every time I drive my car out of the shop after paying good money for it to be fixed I'm counting on the mechanic to have done the job right with the right parts. The principle applies across the board! 

As we gloss over the Bible and read the word 'worship', hear the preaching on Sunday and hear the word 'worship', or are encouraged to 'worship' in a Sunday service (no matter the style of liturgy we enjoy) a picture and definition is summoned. The unfortunate thing about the word 'worship' is that it doesn't exactly fill out the total meaning what the Bible says.

Context matters! This goes equally true for the Bible. A Greek word that the New Testament uses is 'latreia' and is translated as 'worship' as are other Greek words that in their context have a broader meaning than what we understand as 'worship'. 

'latreia' is better understood as service, submission, and work done for God. As Evangelicals we are married to the term 'worship'. As long as we are there must be a fleshing out of the term so that we can biblically worship God. In context we discover that worship is either private or corporate, is a matter of the heart not location, worship involves unity of believers, requires a profession of our faith, the self sacrificing of self to serve others, the giving of monetary means to others and causes. 

The movement that Jesus initiated was a movement of service to others in all practical ways that would validate and affirm the value of each one of His creations. When the serving of others is replaced by the tradition of worship the movement ceases to be anything other than a religious expression of doctrine. From a biblical contextual perspective 'worship' is intentionally setting out to make ourselves available to the needs of others. 

Mark 10:45 "The son of man did not come to be served but to serve and give himself up as a ransom."

Romans 12: 1-3 "Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship." 

"Worship is the response of grateful and humble people to the living God where submission, sacrificial service, praise, profession, testimony and gratitude are freely expressed in innumerable ways. This is a much richer concept than mere corporate singing and praise once each week for 20 minutes - an event that could occur without any actual worship going on at all." Elmer Towns

Do you 'latreia'? Have you lately? READ; Worship God by Getting Up....Getting Out....Getting Going. 

Glory & Misery

Thursday, 24 February, 2011

Blaise Pascal was a philosopher, mathematician and an inventor. He also was a man with exceptional reasoning powers and strong Christian faith. In his Penses he speaks about the 'glory' and the 'misery'.
The context is that life is never one or the other but both. The 'glory' experiences of people speaks to us of what God intended for us before the Fall and the 'misery' of people reminds us of something in all of us that was lost. It's the human condition we live every day of our lives. And it's the condition we work on to deny, hide and overcome.

The Bible, God's story, is essentially a three part act. Creation that reveals what God ultimately intended for us as His creation, the Fall which recounts something that went horribly wrong and which we live and face everyday in ourselves and world, and the Redemption which tells of God's plan to restore His ultimate intention. This being the greatest expression of unconditional love when God became man and died on the cross to reinstate us into right relationship with Him and secure an eternal future.

Are you, like Blaise Pascal's observation, in a season of 'glory' or 'misery'? You are in good company with all of creation experiencing what you could become or are experiencing how broken we are.

Recently in my small group study we discussed how individuals came to a personal relationship with Jesus. Everyone has such a fascinating story and journey! My unique experience was that God 'rained on my party!'. Unlike many others I was living a life of 'glory'. No money concerns, not yet at a totally self destructive point with alcohol or drug problems, no dreary depressive outlook on my future. It was all good! Money, great friend,s promising educational future, secure business future! A great place to be in to refuse religion.

But I was faced with an opportunity for a personal relationship with God. That was a hard one. But the 'glory' I was enjoying had a shelf life. It wasn't going to last forever and payday was coming. The converted Scholar and Rabbi Saul of Tarus wrote to Roman citizens that, 'the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life'.

Whatever your present condition a free gift is available. Not care free, not free for all but free to receive at a great cost of Jesus' death on the cross.