We're Moving

For the past several months, our community has been renting space from a Baptist Church in our West Asheville neighborhood. While it has worked out "okay," it has not been an ideal situation.

In Jan., I caught wind of a downtown congregation that was dissolving and contacted several people to find out what was happening with their building. They are doing good things with it and we wanted to join them in keeping it a multi-use facility and continue the worship of God in their "sanctuary."

After several months of proposals and discussions we have secured use of the building to house our offices and worship space. We are elated at this move as it will allow us to move out of our core group phase and into a public worshipping community. Please continue to pray for us as we are seeking to bring the gospel of the kingdom of God to the people of Asheville.

We will continue to meet as a core group in West Asheville and in July, we will make our move into the new location at the corner of Patton and Haywood St. downtown.

Thanks!

I want to give an extra special thanks to folks that are part of our Missio Dei Church community.

I spent Holy Week taking care of my boys while my wife traveled up to Cincinnati to help her parents as her mom was recovering from Emergency surgery.

Our people pitched in to help so that I could prepare to preach for a group at UNC-Asheville on Tuesday and prep for our Passover Seder for Holy Thursday. I wouldn't have been able to minister without God's people ministering to me. Our people continually checked in on us and prayed for us.

It's great to see that folks who just months ago were total strangers have, in the name of Christ, very quickly gelled into a believing community that behaves like a family. Thank you my brothers and sisters.

Vintage Jesus

One of the fringe benefits of being part of a great network like Acts 29 is the resources. Mark Driscoll, the founder and president of the Acts 29 Network, of which Missio Dei Church is a proud member, has just released his latest book, Vintage Jesus. I received my copy early this week and have been thoroughly enjoying it.

Vintage Jesus offers a fresh, winsome, down-to-earth look at the real Jesus. One doesn't need a Masters degree to unpack the bold truth in the book.

Let me whet your appetite with a quote from chapter two, "How human was Jesus?":

Jesus was a dude. Like my drywaller dad, he was a construction worker who swung a hammer for a living. Because Jesus worked in a day when there were no power tools, he likely had calluses on his hands and muscles on his frame, and did not look like so many of the drag-queen Jesus images that portray him with long, flowing, feathered hair, perfect teeth, and soft skin, draped in a comfortable dress accessorized by matching open-toed sandals and handbag. Jesus did not have Elton John or the Spice Girls on his iPod, The View on his TiVo, or a lemon-yellow Volkswagen Beetle in his garage. No, Jesus was not the kind of person who, if walking by you on the street, would require you to look for an Adam's apple to determine the gender.