Our Journey

Dear Friends,

I want to let you in on an incredible opportunity that Libby and I are pursuing.  It’s a dream that has been building in our hearts ever since we took a two week pilgrimage to Israel four years ago, and then another even more profound experience last year.  God has made it clear to us that as a family we are to temporarily step away from ministry and live in Jerusalem from January 25 until May 20 (2010).  During this season, I will be a full-time student at Jerusalem University College, our kids will be enrolled in an Anglican school, and as a family we will be just that – a family in this intensely, cross-cultural, biblical place.

With 17 years of full-time ministry under our belt, this will no doubt be a long-term WIN for our family. Libby and I thrive on learning together.  However, the main reason we are pursuing this opportunity is because of a growing passion that is burning in my gut.

Over the last couple of years, God has been burning in my heart a deeper passion for the Word of God.  I don’t say that to make some super-spiritual boast.  It is simply a statement of fact.

How many times do we hear our kids say – I am bored. The best fed, best clothed, and most entertained generation is bored. Their boredom is giving way to despair.  Reason?   IMO, it is pretty simple – nobody has told them who they are and why they are on this earth. That’s what the Spirit of our age has given us.

As a pastor, father, husband, neighbor, coach, etc, I can’t help but think how trite and weightless our world has become as we have been taught to base our life on trite and weightless things.  I see this in almost every arena of our lives, and yes, especially in our youth, but most shocking within the church.  The church has become arguably the most trite and weightless reality of our day, leaving the Bride of Jesus in our part of the world irrelevant.

But I say – What a time to be alive.  I concur with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “I wish to live no other age other than the present”, because we have a most awesome God who has authored the most incredible story. It’s the story of all stories. It’s God’s story spoken to the world in the Scriptures about a God who from the beginning wants to covenant with a people, and as husband and wife to partner with them to reclaim the entire world.  This story is our story.  It is stunningly weighty and significant, making our lives intensely weighty and significant, but only to the extent we know it, love it, teach it, and live and breathe it.

The passion that I have burning in my gut is to know God and the glorious face of Christ through His story.  I have a passion to see a people rise up who know the story (it’s their story) and be so consumed with this story to the point that this story defines fully who they are, why they are here, and frees them from all the counterfeit and competing stories of our day that continually rip people off.

So, it’s because of my growing love for God’s story as it comes to us in the Scriptures, that my family and I will pilgrimage to Jerusalem to seek our own Emmaus walk with Christ.  At 40, I have dreams for my life, my family, Crossroads, and the Bride of Jesus in the 21^st century.

• As a man, I want God’s inspired story to burn hot in my gut and to define every last ounce of my life and my itty-bitty story.
• As a husband and father, I want this story to burn in the hearts of my family so we can be a family that knows who we are and why we are here – causing us to be wholehearted unto God and to partner with Him to reclaim the world.
• As pastor, I want to know the biblical story at the deepest level – to learn all its threads, its people, places, events and its pictures in the place it occurred so that I can be even more faithful in teaching it in a way that causes hearts to burn, and lives to be changed.
• As disciple-maker, I dream of taking the guys I disciple—pastors in training—and the hungry people from our hungry church to live and breath the Scriptures in a way they never could in seminary or a sermon.   This dream has been birthed out my own first-hand experiences of studying the Scriptures in Israel with Ray Vander Laan, which have, like nothing else, fueled my intense love for God’s Word and a greater understanding of it.

So my hope is that our time in Israel would prepare me to lead these kinds of experiences in the Holy Land through TTWMK Ministries (www.followtherabbi.org) as something I do annually while I pastor Crossroads Bible Church.   These trips will not be tours nor would I be a tour guide.  These trips would be a 2-week pilgrimage for people who want to learn the story, love the story, live the story, pray the story, and burn the story by walking the story in a manner very similar to Jesus and His disciples.

So there you have it.  At 40 years of age, I guess you could say I am a dreamer, or maybe just a real-life Jerry McGuire who is crazy enough to articulate his dreams.  But Joel 2 says, “In the last days your young men will dream dreams”.  As I talk with people, what I am sensing is that God is birthing dreams in the hearts of believers all over the globe.  People are dreaming dreams again of the Kingdom of God.  This is the dream God has laid upon my heart.  His whisper has been very clear – Lech L’cha, Rod, get up and do this.

We covet your prayers.  This will be an intense cross-cultural experience for our family. Our kids are intimidated a bit at the thought of it.   While they are not going “kicking and screaming” they have genuine anxieties and fears about this experience.  Our hope is that they will be able to make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime, cross-cultural experience where they will be attending an Anglican, International school, and walking where Jesus walked.  I will be working hard for our church during these months.  I will be taking 4 classes and auditing a fifth at Jerusalem University College, formerly called the Institute of Holy Land Studies.

For Jesus and His Kingdom,

Rod