jasonackerman.com

It’s official. Summer is here. I was loving spring… but when the 15 day outlook calls for only one day below 90, well… that means it’s summer. And summer here is hot. Not Arizona hot, and not deep South hot… just hot. I think it’s more about the intensity of the blazing sun than the actual heat. A guy can burn awful quick here. But it’s dry, so there’s none of the oppressive humidity of the south. It just hangs out in the 90s with intense sunlight for days and days on end. The short breaks when the thunderclouds roll in are quite welcome.

I always have a weird feeling with the 4th of July. I don’t really care about the fireworks so much… I could take them or leave them. It’s that for some reason, I always get the sense that it’s the middle of summer, and it’s the downhill side to fall after that. That isn’t really true of course, as summer just officially started a couple weeks ago, and in the Northwest, school just got out. I think it comes from childhood, where school ended at the end of May, and started up again somewhere around the 3rd week of August, which does put the 4th pretty close to the middle of summer. But now, I feel like it should just be the beginning. I think part of it is knowing that we’ll hardly blink and it will be September again. It’s also hard to believe we’re navigating our second summer here in Colorado. None of the seasons are new, now… we’ve been through one full cycle and now it’s just life. I’m a much bigger fan of fall and spring around here than summer, anyway.

The photo above unfortunately is not recent, but from an early July trip last year to Estes Park. The Rocky Mountains are something to behold… either in their winter snow blankets, or in their light summer vegetation, as the photo shows.

We spent last night at a neighborhood party/fireworks extravaganza. It wasn’t “our” neighborhood so much, but over in Thornton where all the church folk live. So we dropped in for a few hours of hanging out. For an informal, just come hang with us party, it turned out to what had to be close to 100 people. It was pretty insane – in a good way.

We’ll spend today (hopefully) just hanging out. I do have some more sermon prep to do for Saturday, but I won’t devote the whole day to it. I just need to rewrite a few sections, and start to put together a media presentation. This has been a week where I’ve spent almost all my time on church stuff… it would be so easy to bail on everything else and just focus on this, if not for the income-related issues that go with not doing any other work. Hopefully, that day comes soon.

Enjoy your holiday, don’t get too drunk, and enjoy the sparkly exploding things.

i took this picture in downtown denver the other day. it’s a camera-phone picture, so it’s not the best… it was very sunny and i couldn’t see the screen, so i just pointed and guessed, and did the cropping later. i’ve spent a couple days downtown, the last one i was tagging along with nick as he looked for swanky bars and bistros to apply for bartending jobs at. it’s pretty easy to come across wifi down there, so i mostly just sat and did what work i had to do, then did a fair amount of people watching.

the work i had to do was pretty quick and easy, and just like that it was wrapped up for the day. our work flow, and consequently our cash flow, has slowed to a frightening trickle. a couple weeks into august, and we’ll have nothing coming in. i’m not sure what the deal is, it’s not like we’re in an off-season, or like i haven’t pitched design work to everyone i come into contact with. it’s just not happening. i guess you could pray we come up with something before the september 1 rent payment comes due. it’s looking kinda bleak. i’m not super freaked out about it, i just know that in the past we’ve always had something to fall back on. we’re kinda working without a safety net here, because our safety net is what’s got us into this crunch in the first place. i can’t help but think that God is stretching us to the max for a reason, to clarify that even as hard as things have been, we haven’t had to rely on him as completely as many in the world must.

i also feel like perhaps all this focusing on business this and fence company that has removed our eyes from why we came to denver in the first place. there are some really intriguing ideas and opportunities floating around in my head about the church plant stuff, and i really just want to dive into it headlong and see what happens. maybe that’s what we need to do, i’m not sure. it’s the diving and finding out the pool is empty and i’m just falling at terminal velocity into a concrete bowl that makes it a little harder to ‘just do’. ultimately, it means hitting the fundraising trail again, and counting on friends and family to support us while we begin the process of living out this vision God has given us. fundraising wasn’t exactly a resounding success for us last time we did it, so you can see how we might be a little gun-shy risking our entire livelihood on it. in any case, we came here to live out a vision of planting a specific kind of church– specifics i won’t get into now– and the only thing we really feel compelled to do is push that process forward. if it comes down to flinging espresso drinks at a local coffeehouse in the meantime, i’ll do what i must.

in the meantime, we’ve been exploring boulder and all the cool things it has to offer. we’ve been kicking around at our house, dreaming of what it might be like if we had a couch. we’ve been simultaneously enjoying and cursing the hot weather and dreaming of fall.

two posts in one day? yeah, yeah i know. but i had two separate thoughts and didn’t want to mesh them into one post. i’m probably hard enough to follow as it is, without mixing unrelated ideas.

i’ve been thinking about community. more importantly, what is it about compass that i’ll miss the most? i mean, community is one of the big buzzwords of the postmodern church movement, right? the thing about ‘postmodern’, is that the word means nothing. those that really ARE, don’t use the word, and those that use the word really are no different than before they just want to appear ‘edgy’. hey, edgy, there’s another word that means absolutely nothing. what fun.

community, as it is defined and strived for here at compass, is sharing life together. it’s understanding that living out a vital and active faith doesn’t happen alone, that we were created to be together. now i believe that our deepest fulfillment happens when experiencing God in that particular, singular, individual way that can only happen in a personal encounter with the living God. community – sharing life together – is not meant to stand in stead of that. community is meant to supplement, to provide a depth of relationship that comes with being connected to another of God’s creations.

so what is required for community? see this question is the one that makes me question the entirety of church structure, because church – particularly the ‘community church’ – has become so enamored with the thought of community that it has overstepped the bounds of facilitating community, gone beyond simply being community, and has tried to legislate community. not legally, of course, but within the subculture of each church body there is a way that community is expected to happen. while i am firmly sold on what happens at compass, on the vision at compass, and on the existence of an organically occuring community, in some ways we have the same issue. join a life group. come to our events. do these things, and you too will experience community. but who do i really know? ummm… the people in my life group, and the people i work with. they are the ones i know. that’s pretty much it. oh, i have some pretty intense acquaintances, but that’s it.

here’s the point this has come to for me. why have church, and community, and relationship, when those things should all be the same? why shouldn’t sharing life go beyond a 120 minute small group effort, combined with the occasional social outing? those things are good– our life group has become a place we cherish, a group of relationships that are probably the closest thing we have to true community. but it takes effort to go beyond tuesday nights from 6:30-8:30. what if church/small group/sharing life/worship/teaching were all one thing? what if you de-emphasized the mass component of momentum and emphasized the velocity? what if you decided that if you couldn’t fit your church in your home then it was too big and needed to become 2 (or more!) smaller groups? what if those groups were so missionally minded and outwardly focused that they kept growing and kept having to multiply? what if all these small groups stayed connected and were able to pool resources to handle larger issues, and were able to gather to worship corporately on occasion?

hey wait a minute. i’m talking about cell church, or house church, right? i’ve always been turned off by housechurch simply because the housechurch proponents i’ve always talked to were pretty self-righteous about it – you know, the ONLY new testament biblical church is a housechurch crowd. well i think that’s a rather silly thing to say, but what if for some people, the best kind of community throws out the buzzword and just concentrates on COMMUNING. sharing life, and sharing it deeper than “how can i pray for you this week”. sharing life so deeply that you can hardly tell the difference between your life and the lives of those in your community.

i guess the bigger question is ‘what does church look like?’ i’ve seen most styles of church. i’ve been involved in several, and the institutional church requires so many filters to digest. maybe it’s time to try something new. to try something that goes back to the beginning. not to reinvent anything, or to insist that i have a new revelation of the best way, but to try to organically recapture what it means to share life together. to worship together. to put faith into action together.