Kevin Pounds' blog

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from David Medina, a good friend and church-planter in California.  In his email he shared the following:

I can genuinely say for the first time since we started, that numbers in that regard do not matter to our heart. It’s hard to explain, but I am so grateful to Jesus for being patient with us, and leading us to a place where we can be full of integrity in announcing to the world, and to our surrounding church co-laborers, that it is ALL about Jesus. We are whole-heartedly focused on our (as Piper says) our vertical relationship first, and then learning how to “bend” that vertical fruit of love out to all of our horizontal relationships.

For the past week and a half, these statements have been haunting me.  I cannot get them off of my mind.  Although as a Jesus-follower and pastor I wear the Jesus label, I have been forced to ask is it ALL really about Jesus?

What would my life and ministry look like if I focused on my vertical relationship first and then learned to bend that vertical fruit of love to all of my horizontal relationships?

Is the life I’m living, the family we’re growing, the relationships I’m building, and the ministry I’m starting all really about Jesus?

Am I trying to pray God into my agenda and my plans or am I faithfully responding to who He is and what He’s doing?

What if following God’s path leads to greater suffering and sacrifice than I anticipated- is Jesus worth that much to me?

Is everything in my horizontal life the overflow of a vibrant vertical love relationship with Jesus?

I desperately want the answer to be yes.   I want to be a the point where I can fully agree with what the Apostle Paul writes to the Philippians:

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith– that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

I appreciate your prayers in this matter.

Please pray that I would consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus.

Please pray that my marriage to Christin, my relationships with Jude and Wren (our soon to be born daughter), my friendships, and my ministry would all be the byproduct of bending this vertical relationship with Jesus.

Please pray that I would never use Jesus as means to an end in doing ministry or serving others-I want it to be ALL about Jesus.

Please pray that others would see the life of Jesus in me, on the good days and especially during the difficult times.

As I was watching my little boy Jude crawl down the stairs today, I was overwhelmed with a sense of thankfulness for the gift of life.  The life God has given Jude.  The new life God is soon bringing to my family.  The life God has given to me personally.  If knowing joy means I must experience sadness, if knowing peace means I must experience pain, if knowing love means I must experience rejection, and if knowing life means I must experience decay and one day death… I’ll take it.  Thousands of years ago God challenged the Israelites with a simple put profound choice: see, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. (Deuteronomy 30:15)

I choose life.

Thank you God for giving us a choice.  Thank you for offering us life.

Through the cross…

Jesus gives Himself as a ransom.

Jesus forgives our trespasses.

Jesus erases our debt.

Jesus liberates us from sin.

Jesus frees us from our futile ways.

Jesus reconciles us to God.

Jesus reconciles enmity between people.

Jesus reconciles all things on heaven and earth to Himself.

Jesus pays our penalty and removes our guilt.

Jesus appeases God’s wrath and justice.

Jesus upholds God’s righteousness.

Jesus secures our redemption for eternity.

Jesus models the ultimate denial of self.

Jesus displays God’s power for our salvation.

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

2 Corinthians 5:14-15

The past few weeks of ministry have been exciting as we’ve moved from hypothetical ideas to taking concrete steps forward.  Although our Home Fellowship is small, the buy-in from everyone is extremely high.  I’m excited to see what God does in the coming weeks as we invite those who are seeking and searching into this group.  I’m especially pumped about a new Conversational English Club we’ve helped start on Sunday nights.  Here’s just a glimpse of what God is doing.  See if you can connect the dots:

• In 2008 Jason and Rebecca Vickery moved into the Riverside Avenue Apartment complex with a desire to reach out to Somalian refugees.  Over the last few years Rebecca has spearheaded different efforts to serve that community with a vision of eventually creating opportunities to teach her neighbors English.  She had a God-given vision, tons of passion, but experienced little traction.
• This past November we moved to Burlington with the idea of starting Home Fellowships serving different neighborhoods.  With our initial Home Fellowship we all agree we want to focus on serving the refugees in Burlington’s Old North End.  Through some common friends, Christin and I are introduced to Rebecca and Jason.  We all see an obvious open door to begin serving.
• We put the word out that through Awareness to Action (a nonprofit I helped start in NJ) that we’re beginning a Conversational English Club and looking for volunteers to mentor refugees in English.  The result was fourteen volunteers including people from our Home Fellowship, North Ave. Alliance Church, the Navigators ministry at UVM, and a few from the surrounding community.  We held an orientation with these very excited and motivated volunteers on Sunday, April 10.
• On Friday, April 8, I received an email through my blog from Michael Ly.  Turns out Michael is an accounting professional in Seattle and one of the pastors at Soma Communities (a church doing something very similar to what we’re attempting).  He also happened to be in VT visiting his in-laws.  We met for coffee the afternoon just before our English Club volunteer orientation.  Guess what area of Seattle he focuses on serving? A community of 70,000 Somalian refugees.  He’s also the Northwest Director for an organization called Peace Catalyst.  What an amazing guy to learn from!
• Last night we finally kicked off our Conversational English Club last night with ten students, and it was AMAZING!  This is going to be a six week trial run, but we already have more refugee students wanting to attend and more potential volunteers wanting to jump on board.  This has the potential to grow exponentially.  We’ve also been so blessed to have the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program open up their tutor training to our volunteers and help us figure out what we’re doing as we move forward.

Here are a few ways you can pray for us in these coming weeks:

• Pray that through our Conversational English Club that God will enable us to bridge cultural, language, and religious barriers.  Pray that we’ll develop meaningful relationships with our refugee neighbors.
• Pray that God will give Christin and I wisdom in serving a Nepali family  through the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program.  We’re becoming fast friends and want to be a blessing to them as they  adjust to life in America.
• Pray that this Easter Sunday we’ll see some of our friends who are seeking and searching attend our Home Fellowship.  Pray that the hope we have in Jesus’ resurrection comes through loud and clear.
• Pray for God to send more workers for the harvest.  We are asking that God will continue to add to our core group, either by raising up leaders from the Burlington community or leading people to transplant their lives here.
• Pray for Christin and I as we prepare for our baby girl who is due on May 6- she could come any time!

Over the past few weeks in our Sunday morning Home Fellowship we’ve been looking at the early church in Acts 2 and how that impacts the way we “do church” now.  One of the defining characteristics of the early Jesus movement is they were committed to sharing their lives with each other- eating together, praying for each other, sacrificially serving one another.  SO a very counterintuitive, paradoxical principle came up in our discussion: to effectively open your life to others, you must also learn to effectively set boundaries. With seemingly limitless needs in the community, opportunities to serve, and potential relationships to invest in, this has proven a timely reminder.

I admit this principle sounds extremely contradictory, because isn’t creating boundaries the opposite of opening up and sharing your life? Not necessarily.  Let me put in another way.  To develop deep meaningful relationships with some people, you cannot possibly develop deep meaningful relationships with all people.  None of us have the time, energy, or relational capacity to do that.  Just take a look at Jesus.

As we read through the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John we can see that multitudes (literally thousands) of people would gather to watch and listen to Jesus.  We can also see that out of these multitudes Jesus had a band of 70-120 people he referred to as disciples with whom He had a more committed relationship. Jesus had a closer knit familial relationship with His twelve apostles and some other close friends such as Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.  Still even within that group, Jesus would often pull aside Peter, James, and John, who became His inner circle.  For some reason, Jesus made a deeper investment and had a qualitatively different relationship with those three guys.  Most importantly, Jesus made a habit of withdrawing from all these people to spend time with the Father.

In my own life I see this at work.  To say yes to personal time with God through the scriptures and prayer, I have to say no to other things- that’s creating a healthy boundary.  To say yes to spending time with my wife and son (and soon arriving daughter), I have to say no to spending time with other people.  To say yes to mentoring potential leaders, I cannot say yes to making that time for everyone.  To say yes to sacrificially serving some new friends God has placed in my life, I have to actually say no to other opportunities.  These are all healthy boundaries- not boundaries to limit God’s activity but to focus the time, energy, and resources He has entrusted to me.