The Uprising

Tomorrow, the Uprising begins!

This is the annual regional conference Chi Alpha hosts as an opportunity for students to learn, grow closer to one another and form new friendships, and be challenged to draw closer to God and experience the life changing power of the Holy Spirit.

This year, the conference will be hosted in New Orleans!

I'll be getting up super early in the morning to help facilitate a team of students coming in early to work with Habitat for Humanity for the day. We'll be working on the Musician's Village project as part of rebuilding New Orleans.



The conference begins tomorrow (Friday the 29th) at 8:00pm Central Time.
I ask that you would pray that many students would encounter God in new and life changing ways. I also ask that you would pray for me as I teach a breakout session on encountering God in the books of the Minor Prophets, and properly interpreting those prophetic books.

Eugene Peterson

Get to know Eugene Peterson. He's been gaining fame lately due to Bono's praises, and it's time you meet him, if you haven't.

I've been a fan of his since my dad and I first discover the New Testament installment of his Bible paraphrase called The Message sometime in the early 90's. That paraphrase is now complete, and available in the whole Bible. I got a copy last year, and am nearly finished with the Old Testament. For some, The Message may take some getting used to, but I think it would be good for almost anyone (unless you're a scholar of the biblical languages) to have a copy to supplement his or her Bible reading/study.
(If you buy a copy, I encourage you to get one of the older versions without verse numbers. The chapters are still marked, but you don't have as many numbers encumbering your reading. This Bible is for reading, not for parceling out into small pieces.)

Recently, I've read the first two installments in a planned five book anthology on spiritual theology from Dr. Peterson: Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, and Eat This Book.



Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places gets its name from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. The significance is that Christ is active in all of reality: creation, history, and community. Peterson makes a brilliant case for the Christian life lived in the hum-drum and the nitty-gritty, where Jesus made himself known. Peterson warns his readers against gnosticism, moralism, and sectarianism, encouraging them to live fear-of-the-Lord through Sabbath and wonder, Eucharist and hospitality, Baptism and love.

I love this book on many levels, and in some ways Peterson speaks for me through it. It's not an easy read, but it is conversational in tone, and understandable at the non-scholarly level.

This quote shares some of the power of the book:
But what tops the agenda for me is the Christian life as lived, lived with this sense of congruence between who Christ is and who I am; lived at this busy, heavily trafficked North American intersection with the kingdom of God; Christ playing in my limbs and eyes.

Eat This Book is about the Bible: how to read it, basically. However, it's much deeper than that. Peterson challenges his readers to forsake all efforts at using the Scriptures for our own purposes, and instead to enter into the Scriptures, let the Scriptures enter into us, and let God be sovereign in His revealed word.

I won't go any further in this post, as it's already quite long. Here's a quote from Eat This Book:
I wanted to gather a company of people together who read personally, not impersonally, who learned to read the Bible in order to live their true selves, not just get information that they could use to raise their standard of living. I wanted to counter the consumer attitude that uses the Bible as a way to gather religious data by which we can be our own gods, and then replace it with an attitude primed to listen to to and obey God, to take us out of our preoccupations with ourselves into the spacious freedom in which God is working the world's salvation.

These books are well worth reading. They may even get inside you and change you, change your approach to God, to life, and to the Bible, change them it in a way that will lead you into deeper more active love, and richer more Christ-like character...

Some Great Prayers

I'm cleaning up my desk tonight, and need to get rid of some paper.
Sometime this semester, at one of our Tulane prayer gatherings a couple students wrote down these prayers; I thought they were worth sharing:

Lord, show us how to care about our friends. You have made us all to reflect Your glory in a wholly unique way; let us not treat our friends as commodities to be accumulated and managed. Our nonChristian friends are not missions waiting to be accomplished. Our Christian friends are not interchangeable support beams. Our friends are beautifully individual human beings who each bless our lives in a special way. Help us to see Your majesty in these differences. Help us to value the people You surround our hearts with.

Jesus, you are the ultimate friend! If only I could get even a glimpse of how to show that love to those around me! Father, as I seek to know you, I pray that what you've started up in me through relationship with you and through your word would manifest in my actions and my words. I give you my mouth. I surrender my tongue to you, for it is the most unruly member of my body. Put a coal to my lips that my words may glorify you to those around me. Father, open my mouth that I may speak life to those who are in my life. It's about you! It's not about me!

Christmas Letter

The letter was done on time, just not uploaded on time.
Many of you will receive this one in the snail mail, too, so this will just be a sneak peak. :)
Merry Christmas!
click on the image to zoom in

financial support prayers

Hello again, friends.

first: There's a Christmas update in the works. It should be online in the next 48 hours.

I want to ask all of you for specific prayer as I begin a round of financial support raising. We've seen some of our support taper off with the passage of time, and I need to get proactive about raising new support to replace that.

I will be asking some current supporters to consider increasing their monthly support, as well as pursuing new supporters from among our friends, and churches that we know. Of course, Jen and I will also be praying, as we look to God as our provider in all things.

My goal is to raise $600 in new monthly support over the next three months. Then, this summer, I hope to raise a solid base of regular support specifically for Chi Alpha New Orleans, as the ministry grows and expands around the city (the specific goal on that is not yet determined).

Thank you for praying with us.

If you would like more info about supporting us, please email me: xa@nolaxa.com or call me: 504.324.9880

To give a one-time/special gift online, click here.

The Diversity Project

It wasn't long after I finally decided to truly be a Jesus follower, at 16, that I began to feel the 'call' to ministry. I didn't know what this would look like, only that I should go to Bible college and prepare to do some form of Christian ministry as my primary vocation. The 'call' took on a bit more shape as time progressed, and I found a definite direction during my first year at NCU. If you would have asked me what I was going to do, I would have told you that I was going to train missionaries. Of course, I realized that I should probably do some missionary work myself, first, and still didn't know what I would actually be doing...

Skipping ahead a few years: here Jen and I are as Chi Alpha missionaries to the campuses of New Orleans. We have been teaching and mentoring students to be ambassadors of the Good News on their campuses, but I sensed that there was more to the call to 'train missionaries'.

One of the most influential experiences for both Jen and I was the Campus Missionary in Training (CMiT) internship that we participated in the year after graduation (2002-3). At UL-Lafayette we learned much of the how of being a campus missionary, as well as growing in character and knowledge.

The CMiT program at UL has long been widely respected as one of the best Chi Alpha internships in the nation. On an average year there are about a dozen nationally approved, active internship programs. Louisiana decided to take what was great at UL and expand it to be even better state-wide.

Enter the Diversity Project.

With this program, CMiTs continue to receive the excellent teaching in theology, Bible interpretation, and much more, and are able to participate in their practical ministry experience and mentoring at different campuses around Louisiana. This is the first year of the project, and we have 9 interns total: 4 at UL-Lafayette, 1 at LSU, 1 at LA Tech, and 3 in New Orleans.

I have the great opportunity to oversee the theology and Bible interpretation classes (I love teaching, especially teaching about Jesus!). And, Jen and I are working with and mentoring three interns here: Marshal and Stephanie Pilgreen (recent LA Tech grads), and Laura Adkins (recent UL-Lafayette grad). They are learning and growing as missionaries, and also making a difference here in New Orleans.

I am blessed to see this opportunity to fulfill God's call on my life so early in life, and to have some extra help in reaching the university students in this amazing city.

This is the first ever Diversity Project class. Our New Orleans interns are on the right: Laura Adkins is in front, in red; Stephanie Pilgreen is next to her on the end, in pink, and her husband, Marshal, stands behind her.

Please pray for them, as they learn and grow, and minister to students, and trust God for their financial support.