Antioch Community Church Minneapolis

Here’s a short video about “wise stewardship” that a couple guys from Antioch put together.  Check it out!

—Andy O'Rourke

There are a couple excellent books by Randy Alcorn that I’m using during preparation for our current preaching series at Antioch entitled “God, Stewardship, & Giving.”  The first book is The Treasure Principle.  This is a great introduction to an eternal perspective on money and possessions.  It’s very practical and best of all, very short!  Our Community Groups are going through this book in conjunction with Sunday’s sermons.  The second resource from Alcorn that I would highly recommend is called Money, Possessions, and Eternity. This is a longer, more thorough treatment of the topic.  It goes into great detail regarding many of the questions one might have.  Also, Alcorn does a great job interacting with key biblical passages.

—Andy O'Rourke

By now everyone has seen the disaster left behind by the devastating earthquake in Haiti.  With hundreds of thousands of survivors in desperate need of help, many are asking “who will help the church?”  This tragedy is an opportunity for the church of Jesus Christ to shine and for the gospel to have a tremendous impact!

Mark Driscoll (Lead Pastor of Mars Hill Church, Seattle) and James MacDonald (Senior Pastor of Harvest Bible Chapel, Chicago area) recently launched a non-profit organization named “Churches Helping Churches” to come to the aid of the Church in Haiti.  The global body of Christ has a responsibility to live out the Apostle Paul’s words from Galatians 6:10: “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.”

Visit www.churcheshelpingchurches.com for more information on this new organization and how you can give to the cause of Christ in Haiti.

—Andy O'Rourke

Tonight I’m sharing with the launch team of a nearby church plant.  They asked me to talk about pitfalls, things to avoid, and lessons learned in the last two churches that I’ve helped to start.  It’s been interesting to reflect upon this.  Even though I haven’t been in the game that long, 8 years of church planting has given me plenty of mistakes to learn from!  Surely the list could be longer, but here are some lessons I’ve learned from the church planting battle…

1) Work at raising up leaders from the start, especially Elders. Church planting is exhausting, back-breaking work.  You’re initial servants and leaders will grow tired eventually.  If you don’t have some sort of process to identify, develop, and deploy new leaders it will come back to bite you.  Four or five years into the church plant, you’ll realize that you have a leadership vacuum and you’ll be in big trouble.  Elders are the most important leaders to raise up.  These are the godly, qualified men that God has designed to spiritually shepherd his people (cf. 1 Timothy 3, Titus 1).

2) Plan to multiply or you won’t. This is true on the level of small groups or church planting.  Most churches that don’t plant in the first 5 years of their existence never will.  You must have a strategy for reproducing even before you think you’re ready to expand.

3) Deal with sin, conflict, and relational issues as soon as possible in a biblical and Christlike manner. Sweeping hard issues under the rug doesn’t work.  They tend to fester and grow there, and eventually emerge as ravenous beasts in the church.  As hard as it can be to tackle things head-on as a leader, this is far better than ignoring issues are putting them off.  The health of Christ’s church is at stake.  Unresolved issues can kill a young church.

4) “Success” in ministry is less from the right models, strategies, and tactics and more due to prayer, the power of God’s word, and the work of the Holy Spirit. Planning and forms are not bad, but there is just no substitute for the spiritual resources God has given his people.

5) When it comes to programs and ministries, less is more. Especially in the first years of a new church (if ever!), you cannot be all things to all people.  Too many programs will spread you thin, drain the energy of your people, and distract a church from the mission of reaching lost people with the gospel.  A young church should do a few things and do them well.  Leave the programmatic smorgasbord to the big box churches.  Your best commodity is relationships.

6) You must be both internally and externally focused. This balance must be tenaciously fought for.  Outreach to lost people must flow out of authentic community where the gospel is being lived out and proclaimed.  On the one hand, you must avoid becoming an ingrown Christian club.  On the other hand, you must avoid becoming so focused exclusively on outreach that the people already in the church shrivel up and die on the vine.

—Andy O'Rourke

This weekend we celebrated Thanksgiving with a Sunday evening service of worship and sharing what the Lord has done this year. Many people had stories of God’s faithfulness and provision, and it was a great time of worship together. Here are some of the things we as a church are thankful for in the past year:

1. A new attender at Antioch recently prayed to follow Jesus as her Lord and Savior!
2. Many new people have become committed and connected to ACC over the last few months
3. A successful 1st annual ACC Fall Retreat at Camp Shamineau
4. Recent growing and strengthening of our 6 Community Groups this fall
5. Celebrating our 1st year of public services
6. A great working relationship with our rental facility, the Ukrainian Event Center
7. Opportunities to show the love of Christ to the NE Mpls community

This is just a small taste of the amazing things that have happened this year. We look forward to another awesome year of serving the Lord in NE Minneapolis.

—Coley Bloomquist

In conjunction with our fall sermon series (”Transformed by the Cross”), I’m reading an excellent book by Mark Driscoll entitled, Death by Love: Letters from the Cross. In chapter 4, Driscoll unpacks the essence of “religion.”

1)     Religion says that God will not love me until I obey his rules enough to earn his love.

2)     Religion says that the world is filled with good people and bad people.

3)     Religion is about what you do.

4)     Religion is about getting from God.

5)     Religion sees hardship as unloving punishment rather than sanctifying discipline.

6)     Religion is about you.

7)     Religion focuses almost entirely on the external, visible life of a person and overlooks the internal, invisible life of the heart where motives lie. How one appears on the outside before people is far more important to the religious person than how one appears on the inside before God.

8)     Because religion is about what we do, the end result is that we lack assurance regarding our standing before God.

9)     Religion simply does not work, because it results in either pride or despair depending on if we think we have done well or poorly in earning our salvation through moral conduct and religious devotion.

10)   Religion pursues righteousness through self-righteous means.

Living a good religious life is very different from living a life that is empowered by the gospel.  Religion has never and will never save anyone, only Jesus does.  The gospel is about living in the reality of what Jesus DID, not what we DO.

—Andy O'Rourke

Summer is a short season in Minnesota!   It’s a season where our regular routines are disrupted a bit.  Schools are on break, vacations are in full swing, people are getting married, and my personal favorite…the fishing is great.  The detours in our routine provide an excellent opportunity to step back and evaluate our relationship with God.  How’s our heart?  Where are our priorities?  Are we growing in love for Jesus?  Are we following hard after God?  The book of Psalms is a great place to bring these vital questions.

We’re in a summer preaching series at Antioch entitled, “Psalms: Cultivating a Heart for God.”  I invite you to join with us as we climb to greater heights in knowing God.  We long to be a people after God’s heart.  With each step of the climb, the view becomes more and more incredible.

—Andy O'Rourke

“Strong.  Army Strong.”  That’s the latest tagline for the U.S. Army.  You’ve probably seen it in a recent advertisement.  At Antioch Community Church we’re also committed to raising up an army.  We envision an army of young men and women who are bold, courageous, trained, equipped, humble, and sold out to King Jesus.  These soldiers are “Jesus Strong.”  We want to raise up leaders that are armed for a spiritual war and will do serious damage in this world for the kingdom of God.

My personal passion involves raising up and developing young men for leadership.  If you want to win a war you need good men, and you need a lot of them.  One of the great leaders of the Old Testament is a man named Joshua.  In Joshua 1:1-9, the Lord gives instructions to Joshua (Moses’ successor) on how to be successful in Israel’s conquest of the land of Canaan.  These instructions involve Joshua’s character as a leader and his dependance upon God.

What sort of leader was Joshua to be?  God tells him to be a man of action.  He was to “arise” and “go.”  Joshua was also to be a man of strength.  Three times he is commanded to “be strong!”  Israel’s leader was to be a man of courage.  He was not to be “dismayed” or be “afraid.”  Joshua was to be a man of God’s word.  This involved speaking the truth, meditating on the truth, and living out the truth.  God made this clear in 1:8 where he says, “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it.  For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.”  Finally, Joshua was commanded to be a leader who is assured of God’s continued presence.  This was the bottom line.  The Lord’s mighty presence in the mission was the guarantee for success.

We need more men like Joshua today.  Young men who are “Jesus strong” and willing to attempt bold and courageous things for God.  Men who will take risks for the mission of spreading the gospel among lost people.  Men of character who are devoted to the advancement of God’s kingdom.  Men who are willing to go to war for the fame of Jesus’ name.

God, raise up an army of young men like that.

—Andy O'Rourke

Last weekend I had the chance to speak to a group of women in leadership at an E. Free Church here in the cities. We had everyone from the 79 year old woman who has been serving her entire life, and still has more fire in her than some of my own peers, to the 27 year old who recently took on a position of leadership for the first time. The only similarities among them were that they all loved Jesus and they all had a heart to serve the women around them.

I was invited to come and talk to them about mentoring. To be honest, I didn’t really know what I could tell these women that they didn’t already know. When I first arrived, I asked the leader of the event how old the youngest attender was. Come to find out, I was the youngest one there! I really was the odd one out when it came to life experience and history in ministry. But truth is truth regardless of how old the voice, right? Whatever else, I wanted these women to feel encouraged and leave with a renewed perspective of why they do what they do.

The biggest thing we discussed was what redefining our idea of mentoring. Most people have a top-down model in their heads. A person seeking mentoring has little experience and wants to become a better person, so they seek out a mentor who is older, wiser, and has time to focus on them and their issues. This idea is rather rigid and really self-centered, if you think about it. Visually, this looks like two people sitting across from one another at a coffee shop having a conversation about life. This is not a bad thing, but mentoring is about so much more than just coffee and conversation.

The alternative is a constellation of mentors (stealing vocabulary from Cadre Ministries…thanks guys!), where I am being poured into by mentors but I am also pouring into the lives of others around me (peers) and following me (disciples). In order to pour into someone’s life (or put more accurately, to overflow into someone’s life) we must be a part of their life. Not just sitting at coffee shops, but working, serving, playing together. This is so much more how Jesus did it–he took his disciples everywhere! They watched him lead, teach, care, and rebuke. Then he sent them out to try it themselves.

If every believer was overflowing what the Lord was doing in their life, truly sharing life, with those around them, the kingdom of hell would have a lot more to fear.

Whenever I hear “constellation” I think of Daniel 12:3 which, speaking of the last days when the dead will rise, says, “And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.” The light of millions of stars could shine Jesus into the darkest crevices of people’s hearts.

Mentoring is not for the purpose of making individual people stronger, smarter, or feel better about themselves. It is about building them up to build up the Kingdom of God. The Church is not a school, or a philosophical idea in which we help students iron out the rough spots in their thinking; it is a place where we ought to be equipping warriors with the weapons they need for the battle! This spiritual life is a battle, and not one of us can fight it alone. We need as many warriors as there are stars in the universe!

Whenever I start to wonder if this is all worth it–all the time put into an individual who walks away, all the energy put into developing a group that ends up turning on you–I remember that this is what Christ has called us for and has promised to be with us to the end. “Go and Make Disciples.” Until He returns I can do no less.

Coley Bloomquist
Women’s Mobilizer, ACC

—Coley Bloomquist

Finally, the countdown is over.  We’ve officially launched as a new church!  This past Sunday, October 19th, was our first public worship service as Antioch Community Church.  It was a great time of celebration together as we marveled at God’s faithfulness.  Our first worship service is the culmination of a two year personal journey, and it’s also the beginning of an exciting journey into the months and years ahead.  Thank you to everyone who has been praying for this new church in NE Minneapolis.  We are very grateful for your partnership in Jesus’ kingdom work.  Keep praying!  There is much work to be done for the gospel.

—Andy O'Rourke