So a few weeks ago I got a job at Webspec Design, a small web design company here in Des Moines. I’ve really enjoyed it the past few weeks, and I’ve learned an unbelievable amount of stuff even though I’ve been making web sites since I was 12. Particularly, I work with WordPress most of the day, and the longer I get to make these cool sites at work, the more I want to redesign mine. So expect a facelift here in the next couple of months when I have time.

For now, I added the feature to subscribe to comments by email. A couple of people had asked for this due to some of the discussions on the last few posts. If you leave a comment, you can check a box to be notified of all subsequent comments to that post. (Unfortunately, it only works if you actually leave a comment, so if you want to follow a discussion then you have to contribute as well!)

A guy named Rob was speaking at camp that week, and during that evening’s session he told us a little bit about the church he pastored called Two Rivers Church. I had been at one church my whole life at that point, and the things he said intrigued me. Community-focused small groups. A monthly picnic at a park in an impoverished neighborhood, open to everyone. It sounded pretty cool.

Then, as if anticipating my thoughts, he said: “You may be thinking this church sounds pretty cool and you want to check us out. You’re welcome to come and visit, but I’ll warn you ahead of time: We don’t want you. If you want to go to a church because it’s cool, this isn’t the place for you. If you go to Two Rivers, we expect you to get involved with us in our mission.”

A church that had expectations of its members? Rob’s ten-minute description of Two Rivers that evening lingered in the back of my mind during the next few years as I was developing my church theology at Emmaus Bible College.

In August of 2009, six years after the Lifehouse concert, Amanda and I moved to Des Moines. We brought with us a list of churches we wanted to visit in our search for a new ecclesiastical home, and we agreed that we’d go to each of them at least once before we made our decision. Well, we went to Two Rivers the first Sunday, and our search ended on the same day it began. We knew immediately that it was the one and that it’d be a waste of time to even look anywhere else.

Over the coming weeks, we learned that 2009 had been a year of big changes for Two Rivers: in March, they had unexpectedly merged with another small church in the area called Echo Park. Josh, the pastor of Echo Park, had been developing a friendship with Rob over the previous few years. One day near the end of ‘08, Josh felt God tell him very clearly: merge with Two Rivers. It was a crazy idea—both churches were healthy and growing, and merging churches isn’t something pastors just do for kicks. But out of obedience to God, Josh brought it up to Rob over coffee.

After a long discussion, they decided that they would take a few weeks to pray about it. Rob felt that the only way this would work is if the two churches complemented each other’s strengths and weaknesses, so to that end, he came up with a list of ten important character qualities for a pastor. They were to each rank their qualities from 1 to 10, with 1 being the strongest and 10 being the weakest.

When Rob and Josh met again, they compared their ranked lists: Josh’s number 1 was Rob’s number 10… Josh’s 2 was Rob’s 9. This pattern continued down the list until Josh’s number 10 was Rob’s number 1. With one or two minor exceptions, their lists were inverted. The very next month they held their first church service together.

The merge was complementary. They decided to keep the name Two Rivers Church since it had been around longer than Echo Park and had more recognition in the community. They kept Echo Park’s location at Callanan Middle School because it was closer to the part of the city that the church wanted to reach. And Rob and Josh became co-pastors together, alternating preaching each week and dividing up the pastoral responsibilities between them.

If a church division is the highest display of disunity, then a merge must be the highest display of unity; but while I’ve seen many churches divide, I’d never seen a merge before now. Praise God for obedience.

I’ve added a “Subscribe by Email” link to the top navigation as well. If you want, you can get all of this delivered by email as soon as it’s written. You can also use a RSS client or add it to your Google homepage (among other options) by visiting this link.

This was not just a one-year experiment, so I have no plans to stop now that the year is over. There’s a chance I may soon change the day from Tuesdays to something else like Thursday, as I’ve been late a lot in the past couple of months, but otherwise nothing’s going to change. If I’m not writing, I’m not thinking, and though some weeks it has been very difficult to find the right words to express my ideas, this discipline engages my mind in a way that I can’t afford to go without.

I do have one request: I’ve never solicited comments before, but in an effort to make this site as good as possible—if you read this, whether it’s today or two months from now, could you post a comment and say what is your favorite thing that you’ve read on here? It would mean a lot to me to get an idea of who reads this and what they like about it.

Thanks, everyone, and have a happy new year!

The way it works is this: If Westboro decides to picket an event or place with their inflammatory signs, someone will set up a pledge fund in the area, getting as many people as possible to pledge one dollar for every minute Westboro pickets. Then after the protest, they will donate the money to the organization that is being protested, or else a charity that represents the cause. They will refuse to show up to counter-protest in person, instead leaving only a sign that informs the Westboro protestors of the pledges: the longer they protest, the more money goes toward that which they protest.

Most of WBC’s protests are against pro-homosexual organizations. I have already made clear my position on homosexuality, but this forced me to ask myself what I would do if Westboro came to Des Moines. Would I donate to an organization that I may somewhat disagree with in order to fight against a group that I disagree with much, much more?

I wonder to myself what Jesus would have me do, and in the midst of all of the answers that fill my thoughts—”fight!” “stand up for your beliefs!” “no compromise!”—I hear one that could never have come from within: “love them all.” I still don’t know what this means or how to do it, but I know it’s the right answer.

My friends Jeremy and Shana are part of Vineyard Community Church, and about three times a year, a group from the church will volunteer at Hope from 9:00 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon. They were doing it this weekend, so Jeremy invited Amanda and I to come along. It’s always the same basic schedule: the morning is spent sorting through donations at Hope Bargain Center on the east side of Des Moines. After that, everyone goes to Hope Café for lunch, and then in the afternoon a group goes down to the tent camps by either the Des Moines River or the Raccoon River to give food and supplies to the homeless people who live there.

It’s long, so click the link below to see my full account of the day.

Hope Bargain Center

The Hope Bargain Center is a thrift store on the east side of Des Moines. It’s open to the public, but they also provide free clothing to those who need it. When we got there in the morning, Amanda and Shana sorted through boxes of books while Jeremy and I helped to finish a new room that would be used to sell furniture. Jeremy is a contractor who does remodeling and finish work, while I have barely used a power drill, so you can imagine who did most of the work. But at least I could hold the boards in place while he hit them.

At the bargain center I met Rodney, a living testament to God’s working through Hope: a few years ago, he was an alcoholic who had reached rock bottom one too many times. He found out about Hope, went through the Door of Faith recovery program, and gave his life to Jesus. Now he runs the bargain center full time. Rodney is one of the most cheerful people I’ve met. The bargain center gets a lot of donations and it’s a lot of work to sort through everything, but just by being there and being himself, he maintains everyone’s perspective. It’s not just a sixth weekday. It’s kingdom work, and kingdom work is exciting, even if it’s just throwing away romance novels!

When we were done there, we went over to Hope Café for lunch, which is part of Bethel Mission, the men’s homeless shelter.

Hope Café

When we arrived, we were taken to the chapel area where we were joined by two other groups: a team of about 15 from a local Catholic church and a youth group of maybe 12 from Fort Dodge. There, we met Dave Burrier, who handles public relations for Hope Ministries. He gave us a proper introduction to Hope, painting us a landscape view of what Hope Ministries does in the community: their men’s shelter is the largest in Iowa, and their recovery program has such a high success rate that the courts will often require people to go through it, even though Hope is entirely private, receives no government funding, and is brazenly Christian.

I said earlier that Hope Café serves three meals every day of the year to anyone in the community. This is not entirely accurate. After Dave finished telling us about Hope, he had everyone count off to five, and asked the 3’s and 5’s to come with him. Jeremy was a 2 and I was a 4, while Shana and Amanda were 3 and 5 respectively, so we were separated from our wives. Dave led the two groups out of the room, and returned alone a few minutes later. “They are all in line for lunch right now,” he told us. “The rest of you won’t be eating today.”

He went on to explain that empathy is the key to what they do at Hope: “Right now, the other two groups are eating pasta and salad, with the guilt of knowing that you all are left in here with nothing. And you are in here with nothing, perhaps envious of those who get a hot meal. You may be really mad at me right now. I don’t care! Until we can understand how these homeless people feel every day, we can’t serve them in a meaningful way. But when you stop to get a hamburger on the way home, remember that most of them don’t have that luxury.”

Every hunger pang throughout the rest of the afternoon was a reminder to me that I don’t deserve to be fed. It’s not a right. It’s a privilege. And it’s a privilege that I have never had to do without.

But we were the only 20 people in all of Des Moines who couldn’t get a meal at Hope Café. They don’t turn anyone away, no matter what. When the other two groups returned to the chapel area from their meal, Dave told us that someone had once asked him how many people “abuse the system”. He is a very even-tempered guy, but he told us that this question infuriated him. There is no system to abuse! Free grace is a very simple thing. Their job is not to sort people at the door, but to give each person a meal in the name of Jesus Christ. No strings, no small print.

Half of us still hungry, we got in our cars and followed Dave to the Raccoon River.

Raccoon River Tent Camps

Along the Raccoon River and the Des Moines River are a number of homeless communities. They set up tents and shelters in the woods—some of them pretty elaborate!—and they just survive. We may go camping for a weekend to get away, calling it recreation, but for them it’s life, rain or shine… or snow.

Every Saturday, Dave leads a group of 4 or 5 volunteers to these camps to pass out supplies, pray for the people there, and ask them if they have any specific needs. Today there were at least 15 of us. We were concerned that it would look like Dave was the tour guide and we were a bunch of middle-class people who wanted to see all the homeless people up close. But Dave reassured us that he had been doing this for six years, and while the people in the camps were initially resentful, feeling as though they were being patronized, they quickly grew to understand that Dave loved them and so do all the people that come with him.

So we went down the hill to the camps. Each of us had a plastic sack containing a roll of paper towels, a pair of socks, a ham sandwich, a bottle of water and a can of soup, and we gave one to every person we met, or left one near the tent if the person wasn’t there. Dave knew most of them, so he would talk them for a bit about what they’ve been up to since he saw them a week ago, and tell them to say hi to the other people who weren’t there (many of them spend a lot of their time at the library about a mile away), then ask if we could pray for them. If they had any needs, like extra coats or batteries, Dave would write down a list and make sure they got what they needed. Then we’d move on.

(Sometimes when we proclaim the Kingdom of God, it takes different forms. That afternoon, it took the form of a warm place to stay. Facing the prospect of living in a tent through the winter—if the city doesn’t evict them from the riverbank first—the best gospel they could hear is that they can be warm. First things first.)

A few of the people we met:

• David, in his mid-50’s, was a former trucker who had fallen on hard times along with his wife Diane. He lost his CDL license and is waiting to get it back so he can start working again. He was very friendly, wanting to know all of our names (15 of us, remember), and he treated his wife like a queen.
• Steve lives in relative style, having built a rather spacious shack for himself and his roommate Allen (complete with windows and doors!). He hasn’t been able to find more than temporary jobs lately, so if he doesn’t find something permanent in a few weeks, he’s going to ride his bike down to Missouri (where he has family) to wait out the winter.
• Andy, in his early 40’s, came to Iowa for his ex-wife’s funeral five months ago, and decided to stay once he found that the work environment is a lot better here than it is in Sacramento, where he came from. Andy is a really nice guy and very well-spoken.

Andy told us that when he first came to the camp in the spring, he found that it was something of a “gated community” and that they didn’t want anything to do with him. He set up his tent nearby, but it took a few weeks for them to accept him. He later found out that they are suspicious of new people because they have a very strict drug-free policy in their camp. (The drug users are on the other side of the bridge.) Andy ultimately stayed for the past 5 months because he hadn’t ever been in a homeless community as good as that one.

As we were going home, I realized that I had gone down to the camps for me, not the homeless people. Dave Burrier could have done it all by himself without fifteen of us following him through the woods. But he knew, just I have come to realize, that we really were tourists, and this was an exhibition of bringing hope to the hopeless. He also knows that it always has to begin this way for everyone. We just have to keep taking the tour until, one day, it is no longer a tour but an act of pure love. And all fifteen of us had our perspectives changed that afternoon.

1. “When bears play or beg for food, they usually make people laugh. All bears are EXTREMELY DANGEROUS! You can’t even trust a tame bear.”
2. “In his dream, he was an Indian cheif. He said, ‘I will help my people,’ he said. ‘Does anyone have an idea?’ He asked. ‘I do,’ said an indian boy. ‘What is it?’ Ika asked. ‘Try cutting down a tree and cut it into thin pieces,’ said the boy. ‘It is white,’ said Ika. So that is how paper came to be.”
3. “Columbus’s faults were greed, kidnapping, and pride.”

Despite the huge layout overhaul, the biggest change is going to be the content. I will still post new entries every Tuesday like I have been doing, but I will also be posting quotes from things I’ve been reading, as well as general “life” updates (including site maintenance, like this one). I have a pretty big collection of quotes I’ve saved from the past couple of years, so I’ll probably post these a couple of times a week.

To accommodate this, I made what I’m calling the “Stream Selector”, just under the navigation links. This is a dynamic filter that will show and hide posts from the above three categories. If you only want to read my original writing, you can hide everything else but that. If you don’t care about anything I have to say, but you think I have a good taste in the things I read, you can choose to only see quotes that I post. And if you just want to read a normal blog, you can do that too by selecting “Life”. I made the category selection consistent across pages, so if you use the “Older” or “Newer” links at the bottom, it will keep your filter intact.

Still to do: Add a good Archives page, as well as an About page and some other stuff. It’s also not very easy to browse old posts right now, but it will be. And some elements that aren’t on the main page need some styling (like the comments box).

Let me know what you think of the new design!

We started this event in April of 2007 and originally chose to hold it at a bar in Cedar Falls. Many people exist only for the moment and spend their lives ignoring the big questions, and if we can just get some of them to think—even if they completely disagree with us and what we stand for—then we are doing something good. (Bar patrons who wanted to spend their Tuesday evenings in peace have complained about us to the managers. That means they’re listening!) We share these goals with UNIFI.

We also disagree with each other about some very fundamental issues. UNIFI consists mostly of atheist/agnostics (and other “enthusiastic nonbelievers”) while Kaio consists of theologically-conservative Christians. Regardless of what topic we choose for discussion, it always drifts back to creation vs. evolution, the historical authenticity of the Bible, or the source of morality.

During the past two years, we have all come a long way in our understanding of each other. We at Kaio quickly noticed that real, live atheists are nothing like what you read about in Christian apologetics. The people in UNIFI realized that (some) Christians are nothing like what they read about in Dawkins or Harris. And we are all better off because of it.

However, Grab a Brew has gotten frustrating for me during this past year. I feel like everyone just recycles the same arguments. Often we’ll even come to a consensus on something one week, only to have someone bring it up again the next time as though we’d never talked about it, and we’ll have the same discussion all over again. There hasn’t been anything new.

Until last Tuesday.

i slept in this morning, grr.. o well, i dont ahv really anythign to wake up for anyway but it ticks me off, so i went n ate breakfast and there was no cinnamon for my toast, so i was like MOMMM can you pick up some cinnamon at walmart. maybe tomorrow. so i got on to do some bloggin and read some of my other blogs to see what they were up to, and now im writing this post… did u see the news, man, policians need to die.

Get a life. No one wants to read about your every waking moment up to and including the authoring of the blog entry. Unless you are Batman or Burl Ives, you don’t lead a life that is exciting enough to document every second of.

What it comes down to is the fact that I have a blog now. I have no idea how long it will last — it depends on how busy my life ends up being, and whether I feel like I have anything significant to say.

Basically I don’t care who reads this. It’s more of just an outlet for my various opinions and spiritual musings. I have full knowledge that you don’t care what I did this morning, and so I will not waste time telling you, because it is better for both of us this way.