Sunday, May 29, 2011

Missionary God: Lesson 6

This is the sixth installment of Pastor Jeff Jackson's Missionary God series. This is by far one of the best teachings on the nature of God as it relates to being a missionary. Enjoy.

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Time: 45:38


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Mad Artist

This Aaron's latest work of art. Done is charcoal.

photo

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Bob Coy on May 21, 2011

Harold Camping has calculated the Second Coming and the beginning of Revelation’s Great Tribulation. Here are some comments from Pastor Bob Coy.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Sports Ministry in North Africa

blog-north-africa - North Africa

This is a post I wrote for CCFL this week...

Many places in the world are closed to Christians sharing the gospel.

Fulfilling Jesus’ Great Commission takes not only faith, but also courage, preparation and creativity. In closed countries, Christians are welcomed when they offer sports clinics and camps. Trent Gamble, director of sports ministry at Calvary, has leveraged sports as a vehicle for spreading the gospel.

Gamble recently returned with members of the Calvary Christian Academy basketball coaching staff from a sports outreach trip to a Muslim country in North Africa. This is the fourth trip Gamble has lead to North Africa.

Along with the team of coaches from CCA, Gamble took his 16-year-old son with him on this trip to North Africa.

"Nothing is more exciting than putting your son into a position where he has to grow."
---Trent Gamble

Gamble's son coached his own basketball clinic station, sometimes without a translator, which means he had to learn key, basketball related Arabic phrases, and apply them creatively to engage the kids and make them better basketball players.

The short-term team opened long term doors of ministry for those working and living on the mission field. Through basketball clinics for kids and coaches, a foundation was laid for on-going relationships with families, their children, and city delegates.

Gamble said that CCA coaches did a great job and learned that the way basketball is coached and taught in the U.S. isn’t the way instruction is given on the other side of the world. They had to adjust the education to the language barrier. Everything they taught–including character development–had to be accurately modeled for their students.

"You have to be strategic in sharing the gospel over there."

Gamble tactically wove the gospel into his conversations with Muslims. “Being prepared maximizes gospel-sharing opportunities.” says Gamble. With Arab students poised on the edge of their seats, Gamble and his team told the gospel story using basketball terms in many of the clinics they hosted. They were even invited to a remote village that rarely receives western visitors and never has the gospel presented to them. Through sports ministry, that village has been reached with the Good News of Jesus Christ. Pray that the seeds planted would continue to be watered and that growth would occur through the work of God’s Spirit.

On April 20, 2011, Pastor Bob prayed for the team before they left. Video can be viewed at this link approximately 21 minutes into the service.

blog-gamble-prayer - North Africa

Monday, May 09, 2011

Squirrel Adventure

Aaron got right up on this squirrel in this video…

Friday, May 06, 2011

Local Video Goes Viral

This sweet video was shot by homegrown kids here at Calvary Christian Academy. It features a young crooner working hard for the affection of a young lady.

As of this posting, the video has 917,854 hits. The kids are covering a song called The Girl by City and Colour. The irony is that the band’s official video on YouTube has 200,000 less hits.

Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Zopical

Page-Banner-Zopical - Zopical
Picture this:
blog-zopical-Bob - Pastor Bob Coy
It's Saturday night after service, the theater is packed, and you're a part of a live audience as Pastor Bob hosts an interactive webcast reaching out to the world. This is your chance to be a part of the dialogue, as people here and online text Pastor Bob their questions and comments about topics that really matter.

Our first topic?

Saturday, May 7 it's all about faith. Society tells us to believe in whatever we want. But doesn't it make sense to consider whether the object of our faith is worthy of trust? That's our first topic, so bring your friends and family—or direct them to zopical.com/believe for a lively and potentially life-changing discussion about faith!

Our second topic?

Saturday, May 14 we’re talking about forgiveness. What does it really mean to forgive—or to be forgiven? Bring a friend as we explore the freedom forgiveness brings—or send someone you love to zopical.com/forgiveness!


» Check out www.zopical.com


Sunday, May 01, 2011

Book Review: Ahead of the Curve

Ahead of the Curve
By Daniel Fusco
Mustang, Tate, 2010
Number of pages: 99

fusco

Postmodern this. Postmodern that. As the church tries to engage culture, it always seems to be a little behind the times. Current culture is postmodern say key note speakers at church conference venues, big and small, from coast to coast across America. But the church is about forty years late to the party if it's just now talking about this. "Welcome to the twentieth century, Twenty-First Century Church," author and pastor Daniel Fusco seems to be saying in his book, Ahead of the Curve.

Post modernity has taken root in Middle America and even the Bible Belt. "The northeast and the west coasts are already post-postmodern, and that is the subject of this book," writes Fusco.

Fusco traces his tracks from his conversion to Christ to becoming a church planter in two blatantly liberal demographics: New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Marin County, California. In the first half of this short book (I read the entire thing on a flight between Houston and Albuquerque, NM), Fusco lays out the definition of modernity, post-modernity, and post post-modernity and how world view and culture at large has been shaped by them. The second half of the book lays out how the church of Jesus Christ should respond and get out in front of shaping culture.

I'll have to admit that I was a skeptic as I worked through the first half of the book Two things were going through my mind: 1) this is too big of a subject to handle in such a small volume, and, 2) I braced myself for some kind of shrink-wrapped, seeker-sensitive marketing solution. Fusco kind of set me up for this, though, in the book's first half, using language like ex nihilo, ontology, etiology, and aporia. I appreciated his explanation of these words because, like I said, I was on a plane and didn't have access to my unabridged dictionary of rarely used theological and sociological words.

I was pleasantly surprised by Fusco's conclusions of how the church should engage and even stay out in front of culture. Fusco kept it simple. He kept the main thing the main thing. I don't want to give away what he wrote because there's only 40 more pages out of the 99 left to read. So, church-planter, pastor, future church planter, future pastor, you should get the book and find out for yourself. The book takes about two hours to read. It will be time well spent.

Missionary God: Lesson 5

This is the fifth installment of Pastor Jeff Jackson's Missionary God series. This is by far one of the best teachings on the nature of God as it relates to being a missionary. Enjoy.

Download
Time: 1:00:26


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