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Last year we decided to do something a bit different… instead of a typical Easter sermon or even a passion play we decided, for our Easter Sunday experience, to write an original drama that would take stories set in modern times weave them into the events of passion week… STORIES was a big hit!  We had a great response.

This year we decided to one-up ourselves and use four real-life testimonies of people in our church instead of the ones we had wrote last year… and weave those into the events of the Easter story.  WOW! It end-up being pretty powerful.  I’m not the most emotional person, but I got choked-up each time I watched it in dress rehearsal and live on Sunday.

One of my favorite elements of the whole event was the video that closed the presentation.  After actors has presented monologues based on the testimonies of the four people in our church, and after we say Jesus betrayed, crucified, and resurrected, the show closed with the four people who’s testimonies had been portrayed reciting lines from Isaiah 53 and John 3:16…

We live in a culture that’s addicted to Starbucks.  The people in our church are addicted too.  So am I.

We had an idea though: What if we could offer a better product at a better price and then use 100% profits to fund the work we do in our community and around the world?!

Well, we decided to go for it. Today Elim Cafe opens.

Elim is “coffee on a mission“ because all the proceeds go to fund projects like our teen center, summer camps for kids who would otherwise be home alone all summer, our school, and around the world in places like Peru, Haiti, Ghana, the Czech Republic, and more!

We’re excited about this new endeavor !

It seems popular right now for us to talk about and fixate on how busy we are.  Somewhere along the line “busy” has become the popular response to the question “How have you been?”

I’ve been skeptical of this for a while though.  It’s no doubt that many of us feel very busy, and in fact many of us are doing a lot… but if we’re honest, we also have a lot of free time.  The hours that we spend glued to the TV prove it.

This week I ran across  a really great keynote talk about “Cognitive Surplus” author Clay Shirky gave at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008. Here’s a transcript of his talk.

Shirky has some really great insights into how we, as a society, spend our free time and how we can better leverage it.  He’s speaking at a web conference, so he applies most of it to web development, but I believe these ideas also have implications in a ton of other areas.

Whether it’s reading a book, taking a class, or putting in some volunteer hours, often the problem isn’t we don’t have the time, its that we’ve decided to spend that time in other ways.

Hip Hop artist Lecrae has a great new song out with the proceeds going to the relief efforts in Haiti.  You can pick it up in the iTunes store.

Great song. Great cause.

Until it was first achieved in 1954 by Roger Bannister it was commonly believed that the human body was simply incapable of running a mile in less than four minutes.  Since then though, the feat has since been accomplished by many male athletes, and it has now become a standard of all professional distance runners to strive towards.

Once runners knew it could be accomplished, and were able to look at exactly how Bannister had trained and learn from his techniques many others were able to accomplish it too.  In fact in the years since the record was first broken, the many runners who have broken the record have also managed to shave another 17 seconds off of Bannister’s original time of 3′59.4″

I believe that one of the important roles the local Church plays is to allow people to see others accomplish things that they’ve believed to be impossible. Many in my generation have grown-up without having a successful marriage to look at and emulate, the church though offers incredible examples of people who’ve done it; people they can look to and learn from.  There are men who grew-up without a father in their home, but in the church they can look to the example of some great and successful fathers.  There are people who have been victims of abuse and believe they’ll never recover, but in the church they can see those who’ve overcome it…

In many ways I believe the church is called to the standard-bearer for the culture at large.  The place people can look to and see many of the things that are “impossible” are possible with God.

Thoughts?