Before I begin, let me provide you with a little picture of the twins. I thought after you have all been praying for us that you should at least see what the twins look like.

They were born, as Shane announced, on July 26th, 2009. (more…)

Thinking about the ramifications of this video now.

I dropped off our breast pump and some extra diapers with Cheryl today at the BC Women’s Hospital.  Just in time… they were considering transferring them out to Surrey tomorrow. I have such brilliant timing.

She was telling me of a conversation with a lady in there with her new daughter, and how that woman was telling her she doesn’t go to church, has a vague sense of something holy and eternal but very little curiousity beyond that.  Digging deeper, she discovered that the woman was the daughter of a single Mom, and when they went to church when she was young, she was treated poorly because she “didn’t have a Daddy” – both by the other children and by adults in the church.  Subsequently, her mother continued to send her to Sunday school but ceased to go herself because of the people at church looking down on her.  Now, she has much the same desire – she knows her child needs to be instructed spiritually but knows she can’t do it, so she wants to send her to Sunday School – of course, her daughter will value it just as much or little as she does as long as her mother models its lack of importance in her life.

She is not the first person to tell us a story like this.  It is a story that has been repeated so much I seriously question what the heck was up with Christians 20 years ago.  It makes me wonder how much of the spiritual apathy that we are reaping today is the tragic result of thousands upon thousands of people who desperately needed the love of Jesus demonstrated by his body, but were soured. By what?  By  judgemental, sour, unloving people who were sitting in their pews and tsk-tsking the fruits of the “free love 60’s”.  In the meantime, the children of those Hippies, who only had the vaguest sense of church as something important but their parents lumped it into their rebellion, tried to come back to church but were turned away at the door because of sins that they may have not even been aware were sins.

What a disgusting mess we are in!  We are now facing two generations of adults whose experiences with church have been that of judgement and shame.  When Cheryl told me how lucky I was that I was saved in a church that showed real love for each other and the lost, and every church we have ever gone to had done that as best they could, I keep thinking that this is how most churches are.  But they aren’t are they?

I’ve just been working in the last few days on an application for a church planter’s assessment.  In one of the questions they as what makes me so sure that I am called to be a church planter.  Well, this sense of offense, of righteous anger, that so many churches are now continuing this sad trend and people are being driven away from the loving arms of Christ by people who expect the world to REPENT! and be done with sin.  I want to be a part of creating a new body, a body of renewal, that demonstrates this love in such a loud, brash, overwhelming manner to her community that people, even atheists, stand up and point and say, “Now THAT’S what a church should look like!”

It’s a lofty goal.  And if it were simply up to me, I would probably fail.  But I trust that God is in this enterprise, and his will, will be done.