Here is a copy of the job description that we have for the Worship Pastor position. I believe that this a very critical hire and integral part of the team that we are putting together to lead this church into the future.

We have began advertising the opening on seminary and college websites as well as churchjobfinder.com. You can find that posting here.

You can split the church right down the middle…

On the one side you have ‘those‘ people. You know, the ones that get all emotional and cry all the time. They have a little bounce to their step and are prone to raise their hands and say ‘Glory, Hallelujah‘ every five minutes.

We might even consider them a bit crazy.

And…

On the other side you have ‘those other‘ people. The ones that haven’t shed a tear since their birth and carry a 25 pound King James. They have every book of the bible memorized, are annoyed when the service runs long, and appreciate the order of service printed in the bulletin.

We’d probably call them spiritual killjoys.

 

Like Peanut Butter and Pickles

Some things were just meant to go together while other things simply were not. Unless your a pregnant lady, peanut butter and pickles probably sounds gross. They just don’t go well together. But peanut butter and jelly? Well that’s a match made in heaven.

Our worship, needs to be like peanut butter and jelly. It needs to have a solid balance between both spirit and truth. We cannot allow our worship fo God to lean too far in either direction, otherwise we might miss out on all that worship should and could be. It needs to be both.

Worshiping in Spirit and Truth | RobRash.us.

While on vacation over Thanksgiving, I finally got around to reading David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity (or GTD for short). It is a really good read and makes total sense…and if I can do the concepts in the system, anyone can do them!

The biggest concept that I have taken from the GTD process is the goal of having a “mind like water.” In essence, when you are not thinking about all of the things you must do, but have a reliable system to refer to, you use much less brain power remembering–which frees you up to dream really big dreams and make a difference in the world. I know that I waste a LOT of energy and brain power worrying about “everything” I have to do and then I am paralyzed not knowing what to do next. I am finally getting more organized and have felt like I have found the “holy grail” of productivity with “The Secret Weapon.”

The folks over at TRUETONIQS have created a perfect system to go along with David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done (GTD). Their solution is a combination of an amazing, free application called Evernote, your email load, and the GTD process. It is really cool, and something I have been looking for quite some time now.

I have used “Things” for the Mac and iPhone, but have found it really slow to keep up with updates and bug fixes. The other negative with Things is that you have to sync manually over WiFi, not remotely over the cloud…not cool. Oh, and it is a bit pricy as well. Oh, and did I mention that Evernote is FREE!? AND…it works with both Mac and PC as well as all smart phone platforms! Sweetness!

What I love about The Secret Weapon is that these creative people are already using Evernote and training all of their employees to be more productive. It is working extremely well for them…and they want to share it with everyone. Here is an extremely creative overview of The Secret Weapon:

Make sure you check out The Secret Weapon website and watch all of their videos to get you up and running quickly with The Secret Weapon.

I found out about Evernote several years ago from Michael Hyatt’s blog, who has several great posts about practical, real world use of Evernote for everyone. Check them out. You should also check out Brett Kelly’s awesome e-book, Evernote Essentials, Second Edition. It is $25, but well worth the time and money to get you up and really proficient in Evernote really quickly.

So tell me, what system do you use to Get Things Done?

It’s day nine of the 21-Day Prayer Challenge.

Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.

Revelation 12:10-11

Testimonies are one way we overcome the enemy.  If we don’t share the way God is at work in our lives, then we’re tempted to think God isn’t working at all. But when we begin to share testimonies of grace, testimonies of healing, testimonies of answered prayer, we are reminded that God is still on the throne!   

One of the joys of writing The Circle Maker has been receiving testimonies of answered prayer. Each one is like a shot of adrenaline to my faith. They stretch me. They convict me. They challenge me to pray bigger and pray bolder.

My friend Josh Gagnon, pastor of Next Level Church, read about my 4.7 mile prayer walk around Capitol Hill and he was inspired to do a 2000 mile prayer drive around six New England states. It took five days!  It was his way of marking God’s territory. It was his way of dreaming big and praying hard.  And I believe God will honors those prayers!

I heard a testimony last week about Dr. Bob Bagley, missionary to Africa.  His tribal church was literally meeting under a tree and one day the local witchdoctor cursed the tree and all the leaves withered.  They lost their shade.  They also lost their status!  That curse overshadowed them.  So Dr. Bagley decided to call a public prayer meeting.  He laid hands on the tree and prayed that God would resurrect it.   I love his prayer: “It’s not my name that’s at stake.”  He knew that he couldn’t establish God’s reputation without risking his own!  The rest of the story?  Not only did God resurrect the tree, it became the only tree of its type that yielded fruit twice a year! Come on, somebody!

One more testimony.

There was a terrible drought in Mississippi about fifty years ago.  A rural church with lots of farmers in the congregation decided to do something about it by holding an emergency prayer meeting at the church. One of the farmers came to the prayer meeting dressed in waders! Some people thought he was crazy, but this farmer actually believed that God was going to answer their prayer so he dressed for the miracle. He said he didn’t want to walk home wet. Well he didn’t, but everyone else did!

Those testimonies remind me that He that is in us is greater than he that is in the world.  They remind me that God is able to do immeasurably more than all I can ask or imagine.  They remind me that God wins,Satan loses, and I’m more than a conqueror through Christ.

To share your prayer testimony, visit www.thecirclemaker.com.

*Taken from National Community Church. Day Nine.

We are continuing our 21 day prayer journey based on Mark Batterson’s book, The Circle Maker. Check out the first post in this series to get a daily email in your inbox from National Community Church. I pray that God will continue to bless us all as we Dream Big, Pray Hard, and Think Long and begin to draw prayer circles in our lives.

Welcome to Day Eight of the 21-Day Prayer Challenge.

Let me get straight to the point: if you don’t have a prayer journal you need to get one!  You need to journal like a journalist.  Why?  You need to document your prayers so that you can give God the glory when He answers them. Think of your journal as a prayer genealogy.

I know that journaling isn’t technically a spiritual discipline, but I think it could be and should be.  Habakkuk 2:2 says, “Write down the revelation.”  When you get an impression from the Lord, you need to put it on paper.  When God gives you revelation on some situation or some Scripture, you need to jot it down. When the Holy Spirit puts a prayer in your heart, you need to journal it.

I recently got one of the most well-documented testimonies I’ve ever read.  No surprise that it was from a journalist.  She is a part of the press corp that covers the Whitehouse. In fact, she is part of the travel pool that accompanies the President on Air Force One.  Her first trip was April 29, 2011, the morning President Obama gave the go on the Osama Bin Laden mission. This was her dream job.  She wanted to work for a major network and cover politics.  “Of course, God did one better and said, not only that but you’ll work at the network with the biggest audience, so your work will have a reach farther than you can imagine.  And then He said, I’ll do even better than that, you’ll cover the most famous address in the country, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Let me retrace the circle and let her share her prayer genealogy.  She went back through all of her old journals and shared her story with me.  The seeds of the vision trace back to 2001 as a college senior when she penned this  ten year-old prayer:  “Dare I ask for my dreams. Dare I see the imagination of the soul. Dare I risk.  What if I ask and receive.  So then, I risk.  I ask of my King, may I impact others with news and knowledge…”

Out of college she got a job in Wisconsin.  She thought about grad school, considered pursing library science, and thought about moving to Chicago or New York.  It was during this time of wandering that she created a prayer map.  It was one sheet of paper with verses at the top and prayer requests written below.  She circled Psalm 37:4: “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”  That was a a critical promise and a critical prayer at a critical time.  On November 4, 2003 she wrote out this prayer: “Where do you want me to go? Where can I represent you?  Where is your will? Tug at my heart.  I am willing and waiting.”

Fast forward to April 15, 2004. She was sitting on a bench overlooking Lake Michigan, depressed by how much money she wasn’t making, when the dream of working for a major network was birthed in her spirit. She knew she needed to move to Washington, DC and that’s exactly what she did.  She slept on a friend’s floor for months.  She sent out hundreds of resumes and made hundreds of cold calls.  She worked for a temp agency filing papers.  Then she got her first break working for a small bureau, but it was the graveyard shift.  Her first night as a full-time journalist in her new job was the day Hurricane Katrina hit.  “As awful as those overnights were, turns out those overnights were the best thing to hone my journalistic skills.  This was also the height of the Iraq War so everything was happening overnight.  I got to see how the early morning shift can set the agenda for the entire news cycle.”

About a year into the overnight shift, she wanted to get a day job so she could get a life!  It was killing her body, her social life, her spirit.  She applied for a network job and she got an interview.  She thought the dream job was finally at her fingertips, but the door closed. It was devastating. And that’s when many of us give up on the dream, but she kept circling.  “Nothing like not getting something sure has a way of getting you back on your knees praying harder.”  She kept working her job for another year.  Then she got another interview with the same network!  This time she got the job!

Long story short, it took a decade of working like it depended on her and praying like it depended on God for her dream to come true!  But because she journaled her prayers, she was able to document her faith, document the faithfulness of God. 

One last reflection on journaling from a journalist.

“It’s funny, as I was looking through my old journals this week in preparation to write this—I also found a journal entry from 2000, when I was leaving my internship in DC that summer in college.  I did not AT ALL remember this—but I found this entry about the internship that read, ‘I fasted to get here and I fasted to end here.’  Apparently, when deciding if I should take the internship in DC, I fasted beforehand and then fasted when it ended.”

That is precisely why you need to journal–so you don’t forget what God wants you to remember!  So you can give him praise when you look back on your journal prayers!  So you can trace your prayer genealogy!

I love this ending.

“I’m the granddaughter of farmers.  One of my grandmother’s only got an 8^th grade education because she had to leave school to help out on the farm.  She was told, “all you’ve ever do is milk cows.”  Now her granddaughter works at the Whitehouse.  She can be in the Oval Office and say, “Excuse me, Mr. President?”

What a country. What a God.

*Taken from National Community Church. Day Eight.

We are continuing our 21 day prayer journey based on Mark Batterson’s book, The Circle Maker. Check out the first post in this series to get a daily email in your inbox from National Community Church. I pray that God will continue to bless us all as we Dream Big, Pray Hard, and Think Long and begin to draw prayer circles in our lives.

On Tuesday of last week we experienced a crazy miracle.  Glen Echo Baptist Church signed over the deed to their property to National Community Church. Not only are they gifting a piece of property worth north of $1 million dollars. They are giving us the cash that is left in their checking and savings accounts.  And they are selling another property valued at $400,000 and giving us the proceeds.  Are you kidding me?

How does something like that happen?  My one-word answer: prayer.  Every miracle, every blessing, every divine appointment has a genealogy.  If you trace them back, you’ll find agenesis prayer that set in motion the Sovereignty of God.

Wait, are you saying that God can’t do it without us?  I’m not saying He can’t. I’m saying Hewon’t.  God has decided in his omniscience and omnipotence that there are some things He will only do in response to prayer. In the words of Jesus, “You have not because you ask not.”  If you don’t ask, God can’t answer.  The greatest tragedy in life are the prayers that go unanswered because they go unasked.  I don’t pretend to understand where theSovereignty of God and free will of man meet, but it motivates me to work like it depends on me and pray like it depends on God.

Back to the miracle genealogy. Here’s the prayer genesis.  It was nearly two years ago that I felt like God put a prayer in my heart: “Lord, do something unprecedented.”  It was a scary prayer because it means giving up a measure of control, a measure of predictability.  But it’s become a prayer mantra for us.  I believe the miracle of Glen Echo Baptist Church can be traced to that specific prayer.  I have no other explanation!  Let me state the obvious: Baptist churches don’t give their church buildings to non-Baptist churches. It’s unprecedented.  And that’s precisely what we prayed for!

*Taken from National Community Church. Day Seven.

Over the years I’ve developed a handful of prayer mantras that I regularly repeat. By prayer mantra, I simply mean a prayer that gets into your spirit and you fell led to pray over and over again!  It obviously must meet the two-fold litmus test of every other prayer: it must be IN the will of God and FOR the glory of God.  But it can be a prayer of praise, a prayer for help, a prayer of surrender, a prayer of confession.

One of my prayer mantras as a preacher is simply: “Help me help people.”  It’s my way of reminding myself how much I need God’s anointing. People don’t need to hear a word I have to say, but everyone needs a word from the Lord. I find myself repeating that prayer as Iprep for messages.

One of my prayer mantras for my kids is a prayer blessing I’ve taken from Luke 2:52: “May you grow in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and with man.”  I’ve prayed that prayer thousands of times.

My newest one?  This past week I found myself praying “whatever.”  It’s a simple expression of surrender to the Lord–I’ll do whatever you want me to do! Whatever. Wherever. Whenever.  For the record, I think one-word prayers can be some of the most powerful prayers. God responds to a heartfelt cry for “help” when we don’t know what else to ask for!

There is something powerful about prayer mantras that we pray repeatedly.  You have to make sure they don’t become an empty incantation.  And prayer mantras are not some abracadabra that work like magic. After all, God doesn’t respond to our words as much as He responds to our hearts.  God is not a genie in a bottle and our wish is NOT His command.  His command better be our wish!

The most powerful prayer mantras are biblical.  It’s as simple as turning the word of God into a prayer.  You can even pray the prayers of Peter or Paul. Or the prayers of Jesus.  Isn’t that what we’re doing when we pray The Lord’s Prayer?  Just make sure that you own them andthey own you.  Otherwise you’ve giving God lip service!  But something powerful happens when you take someone else’s prayer and it explodes in your heart and you give expression to it. I often close conference sessions with this prayer mantra and I pray it with all of my heart because I know it was Jesus’ prayer:

“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.”

*Taken from National Community Church. Day Six.

Welcome to Day Five of the 21-Day Prayer Challenge.

The people God uses the most are the people who spend the most time in His presence.  Why?  Because the more time you spend in God’s presence the moreyou know Him and the more He can trust you. We need to be people of His presence, and prayer is one way you get into the presence of God. For the record, you’ll get further into the presence of God when prayer is combined with worship and fasting.

When I was in college, I was determined to spend as much time in prayer as I possibly could. During my senior year, most lunch hours were spent in a darkened, empty chapel.  I’d pace and pray in the chapel balcony seeking the heart of God.  I was desperate to know God, to be used by God.

The story that inspired me more than any other was Exodus 33:7-11:

Now Moses used to take a tent and pitch it outside the camp some distance away, calling it the “tent of meeting.” Anyone inquiring of the LORD would go to the tent of meeting outside the camp. And whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people rose and stood at the entrances to their tents, watching Moses until he entered the tent. As Moses went into the tent, the pillar of cloud would come down and stay at the entrance, while the LORD spoke with Moses. Whenever the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance to the tent, they all stood and worshiped, each at the entrance to their tent.  The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. Then Moses would return to the camp, but his young aide Joshua son of Nun did not leave the tent.

Did you catch the last phrase?  Joshua “did not leave the tent.”  Why did God choose Joshua to succeed Moses?  I think it’s because Joshua spent more time with Him than anyone else in Israel.

I wonder if our generation has forgotten how to linger in worship and tarry in prayer.  You can’t just pray. You need to pray through.  Now please don’t misread what I’m writing. It’s not a contest to see who can pray the longest. It’s not like you clock in and clock out logging hours.  But I just don’t think you can have quality time with God if you don’t have quantity time.  And like the Psalmist said: “Better is one day in the courts of the Lord than a thousand elsewhere.”

I believe everyone needs their own tent of meeting.  You need to find a place and find a time where you have a standing meeting with God.  If you need to, add it to your calendar or set an alarm.  After all, it’s the most important meeting of the day hands down!  The goal of the 21-Day prayer challenge isn’t praying for 21 days.  It’s establishing a daily habit for the rest of the year.

*Taken from National Community Church. Day Five.

We are continuing our 21 day prayer journey based on Mark Batterson’s book, The Circle Maker. Check out the first post in this series to get a daily email in your inbox from National Community Church. I pray that God will continue to bless us all as we Dream Big, Pray Hard, and Think Long and begin to draw prayer circles in our lives.

Years ago I had a paradigm shift about prayer as I read something Elizabeth Elliott wrote: “Dreaming is a form of praying and praying is a form of dreaming.”

All I know is this: the more I pray the more I dream and the more I dream the more I pray.  Prayer is where holy dreams are conceived by the Spirit of God.  Prayer is a dream incubator.  And the bigger the dream the harder you have to pray!

George Washington Carver is considered of the greatest scientific minds of the twentieth century.  Around the turn of the twentieth century, the agricultural economy of the South was suffering as the boll weevil devastated cotton crops. The soil was being depleted of nutrients because farmers planted cotton year in and year out. It was George Washington Carver who introduced the concept of crop rotation. He encouraged farmers to plant peanuts and they did. The strategy revived the soil, but farmers were frustrated because there was no market for peanuts. Their abundant peanut crop rotted in warehouses. When they complained to Carver, he did what he had always done. Carver prayed about it.

Carver routinely got up at 4 AM, walked through the woods, and asked God to reveal the mysteries of nature. He circled Job 12:7-8: Ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will teach you;or speak to the earth, and it will teach you. Carver literally asked God to reveal the mysteries of nature. And God did.

In Carver’s own words:

I said, “Lord, why did you make the universe?”

The Lord replied, “Ask for something more in proportion to that little mind of yours.”

“Then why did you make the earth, Lord?” I asked.

“Your little mind still wants to know far too much,” replied God.

“Why did you make man, Lord?” I asked.

“Far too much. Far too much. Ask again,” replied God.

“Explain to me why you made plants, Lord,” I asked.

“Your little mind still wants to know far too much.”

So I meekly asked, “Lord, why did you make the peanut?”

And the Lord said, “For the modest proportions of your mind, I will grant you the mystery of the peanut. Take it inside your laboratory and separate it into water, fats, oils, gums, resins, sugars, starches and amino acids. Then recombine these under my three laws of compatibility, temperature and pressure. Then you will know why I made the peanut.”

On January 20, 1921, George Washington Carver testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on behalf of the United Peanut Association of America. The chairman, Joseph Fordney of Michigan, told him he had ten minutes. An hour and forty minutes later, the committee told George Washington Carver he could come back anytime he wanted. Carver mesmerized the committee by demonstrating dozens of uses for the peanut. In the end Carver discovered more than three hundred uses for the peanut. Or maybe more accurately, the Lord revealed more than three hundred uses. They included everything from glue to shaving cream to soap to insecticide to cosmetics to wood stains to fertilizer to linoleum to the secret sauce in Batterson burgers: worcestershire sauce.

So the next time you shave or put on makeup, the next time you stain the deck or fertilize your garden, the next time you enjoy a good old-fashioned PBJ, remember that all of those things trace back to a man who had a habit of prayer at 4 AM.  They weren’t good ideas. They were God ideas.  His praying led to dreaming. And his dreaming led to worcestershire sauce!

You are only one prayer away from a totally different life.  One prayer can completely change your external reality, your internal reality. One prayer can completely change your destiny, change history.  Do you believe that? Then pray like it. In the words of Walter Wink: “History belongs to the intercessors.”

Prayer is the difference…

…between you fighting for God and God fighting for you

…between the best you can do and the best God can do

…between letting things happen and making things happen

…between coincidence and providence 

…between impotence and omnipotence

…between impossible and possible

 

One prayer makes all the difference in the world.

Fourteen years ago I prayed one prayer that has made all the difference in the world.  I was standing next to my father-in-law’s casket.  His death came as a shock because he was in the prime of life, the prime of ministry.  Why God took him home I still don’t understand.  In my grief, I felt prompted to pray a very simple prayer: “Give me a double portion of his anointing.”  I don’t think I even knew exactly what I was asking for. I just knew I wanted an increased anointing so I could honor his legacy, just like Elisha. Fourteen years later, to the day, the Holy Spirit revealed to me that He has answered that prayer.  My double portion? It’s a double anointing to pastor and write. I’ve often said that I feel as called to write as I do to pastor, but it took fourteen years for me to realize that God has answered that one prayer and that one prayer has made all the difference in the world.

Prayer is the difference…

*Taken from National Community Church. Day Three.