Cody Thomas

I just read an amazing article on Neue. The article was titled “Love Without Agenda” and written by Jimmy Spencer, founder of The Shema Movement. Go read his article for a powerful punch in the face about how we should be spreading the love of Jesus without asking for something in return. If you want a sneak peak, here’s a few amazing quotes from the article.

• “Shocking how powerful love is when we truly, deep inside our hearts, set down our agenda to show people the truth and trust God to change someone’s heart without forcing the issue.”
• “We have to trust that God loves people more than us, and He will do the heavy lifting.”
• “People who choose to love others—not to convert them—simply because the person in front of them is made in the image of our Father. It’s spread through people who choose to see themselves as carriers of Kingdom of God, and use each moment in their life to reflect Jesus, the Son of God, to whomever comes across their path.”
• “When we stop seeing people as fuel for our institution’s fire and start seeing them as Jesus sees them, then we will start to experience the Kingdom of God.”
• “Having an agenda to simply get people to join your Sunday service will cause people to question your sincerity…This is not perceived as love. It’s seen as marketing, and people smell it a mile away.”

I never thought I’d hear Daniel Wallace repped in a song. YouTube never ceases to amaze me.

Okay, so maybe most of this is pretty lame. Greek students (and former Greek students) understand though.

We planned an outdoor Christmas Eve service for a couple neighborhoods in Simpsonville. Both neighborhoods connect at a pool/soccer field common area and we planned to do the service there. Some Christmas songs, short message, hot chocolate, hot cider, cookies, and candles. As we watched the weather radar all afternoon, we decided (at 4:15pm) that we were going to risk the weather (and a bunch of our equipment) to pull this off. The service was set to start at 5pm. So, here’s my bullet list thoughts.

Let’s go ahead and get the cons out of the way.

• We had just enough time to setup and quickly (I mean…1 minute or so) check the audio levels. That left no time to run through the songs again. Not good for me.
• I felt absolutely unprepared. I wasn’t well-practiced. That was my mistake.
• We were rushed. I was worrying more about weather than music. I would have had it setup by 4pm if I hadn’t been waiting to get a final call on the weather.
• I skipped the first song (because I knew that it was not practiced much at all!).
• I butchered the first couple stanzas of “Do You Hear What I Hear?” Starting too low=make up my own version of the melody.
• Not singing much or leading worship for the past 6 months was not a good idea.
• During Travis’ message, it started sprinkling rain. Then more. And more. We had to cover up and pack up half the equipment towards the end of his message so we could minimize the water damage.
• We had to cut the last song (the one I was most comfortable with) because of the rain.

Okay. I’m done. That stuff was the main stuff on my mind. I had to get rid of that so I can begin to look past it. So here’s the good stuff.

• People actually came to the service IN THE RAIN! It was Christmas Eve and RAINING and people still came. Awesome!
• Our people definitely stepped up! Loading up, setting up, serving people and tearing down. They did an AWESOME job!
• Setup and tear down went fairly smoothly (other than misplacing a small part on the Rhodes keyboard…).
• Travis BROUGHT IT with a great message of what Christmas is really about! He brought it in the rain!
• I had a great time with the launch team serving other people! They really did do a great job!

So, all is done. I’ve learned more about myself and the things that I overlooked. I know that I can’t go six months without singing much and then just jump into leading worship without much practice. It just doesn’t turn out well. Overall, though, it was a success (even if the rain kept some people away)!

Last, here’s the set list:

• O Come Let Us Adore Him (just the chorus of “O Come All Ye Faithful”)
• Do You Hear What I Hear?
• Joy to the World
• O Come All Ye Faithful
• Mighty to Save (although we didn’t get to do it because of the rain)

Merry Christmas everyone! Make sure to spend time with those you love and make sure they know you love them!

If you have been awake over the past week or so, you probably have heard about the horrible attacks coming at Barack Obama for asking Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration and at Rick Warren for accepting to do it. The gay community has been furious at Obama for selecting an openly anti-gay marriage and pro-Prop 8 evangelical pastor to do the inauguration. On the other side, many conservative and evangelical leaders have been furious at Rick Warren for accepting to do the invocation for Obama, who is pro-choice.

Rick Warren just recorded a web video for his congregation in which he tackles some of the issues around this controversy. The biggest points he addresses in the video are:

• re-stating/re-affirming his long-held view of Biblical marriage
• discussing civil rights and the idea that we, as Christians, should not discriminate against ANYONE else just because we disagree on a few issues
• discussing why he accepted the invitation to do the inaugurational prayer.

He also speaks of how we have to return love for hate. There’s only been a handful of times in my lifetime that I’ve ever seen Christians do that in the public eye. Click the picture below to see the video (or click here).

Rick Warren impressed me with his response. His character and integrity are outstanding. More Christians should learn to respond like this.

Holiness is a word that isn’t thrown around all that much these days. I don’t want to get into a deep study here as to the fullest meaning of the word, but I do want to at least give a brief, overall definition of what it is. Holiness, in its basic definition, could be defined as “the aspect of giving over one’s life to Jesus and the act of following Him through life.” Even more basic… living life to follow Jesus.

Here’s my problem, however. As I scan across what little bit of the Church that I can see, I mostly see a Church obsessed with “personal holiness.” We are obsessed with personal habits, personal “do’s” and “do not’s” (mostly the “do not’s”), my money, my marriage, my gifts, my church attendance, etc. When we think of becoming more holy, we think of things like “I need to read the Bible more”, “I need to pray more”, “I need to tithe”, “I need to cuss less”, “I need to stop drinking”, etc. None of those things are necessarily bad things, but each of those things, if we’d be honest with ourselves, are egocentric ways of thinking about holiness.

We have cheapened the idea of holiness to become something far less than it was supposed to. We have made the end result of holiness to be ourselves. Do we really think that God’s plan of bringing us into a holy life and making us a holy people was so that we would say fewer four-letter words, stop having that glass of wine at dinner, and read our Bibles 10 more minutes a day than we did before? I hope you can sense my sarcasm.

Again, there is nothing wrong with personal disciplines. However, if our efforts of personal piety do not lead to any other change of action in the world around us, it was all worthless and was not an attempt at holiness at all. If the end result of our attempts at living holy is ourselves (living a better life, living a “cleaner” life, etc.), then it isn’t holiness.

In the words of John Wesley, “There is no holiness but social holiness.”

Every one of our attempts at following Jesus should ALWAYS result in bettering society and being in the business of bringing heaven to earth. Instead of worrying about how much we say the word “crap”, how about we worry about how we don’t feed the poor or open up our spare bedrooms to the homeless.

Dear Greeting Card Industry,
Stop. Shut down. Go home. Your products are mostly worthless.

Dear people who buy tons of generic cards during the holidays,
Stop. Stop buying cards with pretty snow scenes and generic messages. If you really care about someone, you’ll take 5 or 10 minutes to write them a note. Save yourself $20 or $50 worth of cards to hand out each year and save everyone else the bag of trashed cards they’ll accumulate over the holidays.

Dear companies who send out Christmas cards to all their loyal customers,
Stop sending out mass cards to your customers over the holidays. If someone believes that you earnestly care about them because of a generic card that you sent to all 2,000 of your loyal customers, they probably think gullible is written on the ceiling too.

Christmas cards make up approximately 30% of greeting card sales each year. Total retail sales of greeting cards is $7.5 billion, which puts Christmas cards alone at $2.25 billion!!! Let’s all save some money. Stop with the generic cards.

Here’s some life updates and some other thoughts floating around in my mind.

• Life has been crazy busy! I’m still working 20-25 hours at Panera each week plus working at least as much each week for the church. It’s good though. I’m VERY excited about what seems to be coming on the horizon!
• Panera is getting better…most days. I enjoy working with most of the people there. Some of them are pretty cool. I will have to be intentional about staying connected with a few of them when I am able to quit working there (meaning, when the church can pay me enough so I don’t have to work there). As for now though, I’m just trying to show some love to my coworkers there and wash dishes, mop floors, take out tons of trash, and make sandwiches for Jesus!
• The church is moving along. Church planting is a slow process, but it is really sweet when we get to see the church change other people’s lives and do amazing things! I can’t wait to see what happens as that vision keeps becoming more ingrained in the people and each of us.
• We are doing a Christmas Eve candlelight service for a couple of huge neighborhoods that are connected at a common pool/soccer field area. Some Christmas songs, free hot chocolate and cider, short message, and good times gathering as a community! Here’s the invite card I made that we are putting on each house in the neighborhoods.
• I am SOLD OUT to the idea that the MOST effective ministry is when ONE PERSON gives their time and love to ANOTHER PERSON. I’ve posted on this recently, but I just wanted to say it again. Find the person (or a few people) in your life that need to be shown love and need to be shown how Jesus loves. Then, give of yourself to show that person that love. Give sacrificially. Be selfless. Give until it hurts. KEEP giving even AFTER it hurts! Invite them over for Friday night dinner. Listen to their life story. Listen to their pains and struggles. Give whatever you can to make their life better. Be it money. Or a yard tool. Or your own Saturday to help them with a yard project. Whatever it may be, you go to the heights and depths to care for them!
• I’m learning that most people can become really FIRED UP about big visions like “We’re going to take this city for Jesus!”, but most people won’t live up to that vision. They like the big vision. It sounds powerful…beautiful…intriguing. There’s a certain charming or romantic idea to it. However, very few people realize that to “take a city”, it starts with one person. One person reaching one person. That’s when the “big vision” doesn’t seem so romantic. It’s not idealized romance anymore. Now it’s straight up hard work. There’s some passionate side in us that rises up when we hear a big vision like “eradicating world hunger” or “taking a city for Jesus”, but few of us realize that living out a big vision isn’t “romantic” all the time. It takes sacrifice and persistence.
• We have some big announcements about the church coming soon! New changes, new plans, new phases! It’s definitely exciting times!
• During my time at Catalyst, I felt that God was birthing a passion and a vision in my heart that I hope to see to fruition someday. My roommates and I have been dreaming some about what it might look like right now in life. I’m stoked to see what might happen!
• Both of my Carolina teams are bringing it this year! First off, the Heels are starting out with a BANG!!! Knocking out ranked teams left and right by over 20 points! Undefeated. Unanomously ranked #1 since pre-season polls! Also, the Carolina Panthers aren’t doing so bad either. They’re currently #2 in the NFC.
• Well, that’s about it for now.

Twitter.

Just like other startups, it started small. It started spreading across the computer geek world. Then the marketing/business world. Companies started embracing it for communication. Then it started catching on. Person after person. One person convincing their friends to give it a try. Then, most of them convincing their friends and so forth the cycle continued.

Now…

Over 6 million users worldwide.

Just as an example of how far Twitter has come, Twitter was one of the top web sources for real-time updates as the Mumbai attacks were happening. Eyewitnesses started “tweeting” about the events before CNN ever had news of it. Read more here about how users on twitter, flickr, and Google Maps all played a part in creating “citizen journalism” and “user-generated content.”

Granted, this isn’t the everyday use of twitter. What about the everyday use?

Earlier this year, I was skeptical of twitter. I, too, just like you are thinking right now, saw it as a waste of time. I’m not always an early adopter. However, I thought I’d give it a chance. It turned out to be a good venture.

If you aren’t giving twitter a chance yet, I think you should give it a trial period and try it out. If you want to know what it is, here’s some real practical info from me and some other twitter users (roommate A and roommate B).

What twitter is?

• Twitter is… a social network in which a person can concisely communicate (in 140 characters or less) what he/she is currently doing, thinking, etc. and have a one-stop page in which he/she can keep up with what others (who he/she “follows”) are doing, thinking, etc.
• Each person has a small profile. Name, Location, web address, and bio (in 160 characters or less).
• Each person has their own “feed” of updates, just like a news website has a feed of news stories (with the most current being at the top).
• Each update can only be 140 characters. You can write as many updates a day as you want…or as few. You choose your own level of involvement.
• You can find friends or others and choose to “follow” their updates. When you choose to follow them, their updates will now appear on your twitter homepage.
• Your twitter homepage is your one-stop to keep up with all those people you follow. On that page, it will show all the updates from all the people you follow (in chronological order).
• Other people can “follow” your updates. This allows them to see your updates on their home page along with everyone else they follow.
• You can also reply to someone else’s update by starting a “tweet” (update) with the “@” symbol and their username. This allows for the interaction and connection between friends…not just keeping up with someone’s updates, but interacting with them.

What twitter is NOT:

• Twitter is NOT comparable to facebook, myspace, or anything like that.
• It is NOT a social network for building huge profiles that no one is going to read anyways.
• It’s NOT a place to find out if you are the “most dateable” person among your friends.
• It’s NOT a place to take sides with the ninjas and pirates.
• It’s NOT a place to send invitations to 32,378 applications a week and make other people take the time to block all of them.
• Twitter is NOT a replacement to facebook… it’s better.

So, there’s some more info. I say…come on…just give it a shot. Trial period. 30 days. If you don’t like it, delete your profile. What’s the harm? Go try it. And then go find me here and follow me. I might return the favor if I know you or you seem cool.

Also, if you have a couple minutes, watch this great video about twitter, titled “Twitter in Plain English.”