"God, Make Us Transformists!"

I'm celebrating good things God did for us this past Sunday at ClearView. We were excited to host Kary Oberbrunner, author of the new (Zondervan) book The Fine Line. Kary shared about three types of Christ-followers:

• Separatists separate themselves from the world and "wordly" people or "secular" things for the purpose of maintaining holiness. The problem is that they end up looking like the Pharisees (adding a bunch of rules to Jesus' two commandments- love God and love people) and loose the opportunity to have a significant influence in the lives of those Jesus loves that don't yet know Him.
• Conformists go to the other extreme. They so want to relate to people that don't share a biblical worldview that they dive fully into everything the world offers in order to be "relevant". In the end, they don't look any different from someone that doesn't follow Christ and also loose the opportunity to influence people towards Jesus.
• To the contrary, Transformists walk the fine line. They are "in the world...but not of it." They are vitally linked to those that don't yet know Jesus through showing genuine love. They are used of God to transform culture...by living with both grace and truth in their spheres of influence.

Obviously, at ClearView, we want to build transformists. I was excited for our launch team and many guests to hear this important message.

Other fun and exciting things:

• 47 people were present (our second largest gathering)! I was praying for 50...so we were just a few off.
  
• We used the special circumstances to push the capacity of the room we are in at the YMCA to see how many it would seat. It was a fun time for our people to rally around a big Sunday and work hard to welcome guests and tune up for a fall Grand Opening.
  
• Most important: our team had positive interactions with people that are searching spiritually. In one case, Dan and Katie had the opportunity to share the hope of Jesus with a man that had come into the YMCA to work out. They encountered him in the hallway and had an interesting conversation around spiritual Truth. This is a public blog...so I'll leave it at that...GOD IS WORKING!

Please praise God with us for a special Sunday! Thanks for praying with us!