re-engineering in 2008: part 1 – walk with God

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: Bible, Bible study, church planting, emerging culture, evangelism, family, fatherhood, prayer, reverse-engineering
• Date: Apr 13,2008

Time to get on track with my “Re-Engineering in 2008″ series…

Over the next week, I will unpack how I will try to ‘re-engineer’ this upcoming year. Yes, it’s April. Most people do this in January. Well, in January – and February and March – I was detoxing from 18 hours of seminary in the fall, starting a new job, and the addition of Andrews’ child #4 in August. I feel like I’m getting back into a semi-rhythm. And with that, April resolutions in place of the typical New Year’s version.

Here are the areas I’ll be tackling: my relationship with God, my husband/father role, my health/sleep, my family’s finances, my work, and my continued learning.

First up, part 1: my walk with God.

It might seem weird to broadcast this on open airwaves. It probably is. There is nothing more personal than our relationship with God Almighty. But really, all of these posts dealing with ‘re-engineering’ will serve as a form of accountability. Here is a sketch of my plan to grown in my relationship with the Lord.

Read through the Bible in year – okay, nine months.

A while back, my friend Jason Allen posted a link to a bible reading plan that takes you through the entire storyline of the Bible and then takes you through the rest of it.

Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen, authors of the book, The Drama of Scripture have developed this reading plan. I’m really excited about this.

Journaling

To get the truths of God’s word down deep into my soul, I am going to journal along with my daily readings. I am going to use the Understanding, Interpretation, Implication, Significance, Prayer model – loosely based on APK’s model. I just bought a new Moleskine for this purpose, so I’m anxious to use it.

Memorization

Deuteronomy 11:18-21 in The Message says:

Place these words on your hearts. Get them deep inside you. Tie them on your hands and foreheads as a reminder. Teach them to your children. Talk about them wherever you are, sitting at home or walking in the street; talk about them from the time you get up in the morning until you fall into bed at night.

This will be a carry over with the husband/father post, but my wife and I are going to memorize Scripture with our children using Children Desiring God’s Foundation Verse Pack. Once we get through that, we tackle the Fighter Verse Pack from CDG.

Sabbath

We’ve done a pretty good job as a family so far this year, so we will continue to take a Sabbath – two evenings with a day between – each week to slow down, connect as a family, and disconnect from the world – i.e. the internet, TV, etc. My wife and I will continue to use the first evening of Sabbath to read, journal, etc. and end our sabbath with a date night.

Service

Real service is related to the discipline of submission, and false service is related to the sin of pride. I aim to serve the Lord in a spirit of humility, with no other purpose than a desire to please God.

Foremost, I am in the infancy stages of start a missional community in the third places of The Loop in U-City. I will be doing this under the auspices of The Journey. This is a primer to church planting somewhere down the road. Breaking the missional code in a diverse, socially progressive, bohemian subculture.

Fasting/Prayer

I will taking 2-3 times during the year to spend extended times in fasting and prayer. I would like to ‘get away from the world’ for these.

rhythm

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: examining, New Testament, reverse-engineering, the art of...
• Date: Mar 14,2008

I promise to get the Re-Engineering in 2008 series off the ground soon, but until then, this has resonated with me since I heard it back in 2005. This is the reason we all need to ‘re-engineer’:

This is where we find ourselves:

I think so many of us find our lives out of rhythm. We got this great conversion story how Jesus hit us or how something awoke in us. Yet ever since then, we have really struggled to find out how life works with Him…

-Matt Chandler, lead pastor of The Village Church from his sermon, Rhythm Part 1

What rhythm should do:

Rhythm should reflect health for you. Not health for me, for your friend or for the next guy. Rhythm by definition is created by contact then rests, contact then rests. The pattern of contact and rest is what creates rhythm.

-Ron Martoia, from his blog Velocity Culture and his entry “Now to Rhythm”

Why rhythm is more than a ‘Jesus’ thing:

…this doesn’t seem to be a Jesus thing only. His disciples (which He’s called us to be – His disciples, living a life of discipleship) are called to do the same. He said, “Come follow me, live as I live.” His life is marked by Him consistently getting alone for silence, and seclusion, and meditation, and thought, but He also teaches the disciples to do the same after they’ve been giving of themselves, teaching and running about. Jesus says, “Let’s get out of here. Let’s get where it’s just you and me. Let’s get away from the phone, the email, turn off the computer, let’s stop worrying about problems that have tolet’s rest, let’s re-sync. Let’s re-sync.”

-Matt Chandler, from his sermon, Rhythm Part 2

reverse-engineering in 2008…intro

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: family, fatherhood, parenting, relationships, reverse-engineering
• Date: Feb 4,2008

My wife and I have spent the entire month of January doing some soul searching.

The onslaught of the last six months – starting a new job, going to seminary, and having our fourth child – and the prospect of church planting in the near future has really forced us to take a hard look at what we want our and our children’s lives to look like. What is the legacy of the Andrews’ family going to be? Nine years in, we want to make sure the next, hopefully, 70 years will truly honor God and one another. It has been a time-consuming, daunting, and freeing experience all wrapped up into one…

The catalyst for this was a talk we heard a few years back by Mark Driscoll in which he described the process of what he called ‘reverse-engineering’ your life. ‘Reverse-engineering’ is a term Driscoll borrowed from a business friend to describe a process in which you choose a day as far in the future that you can reasonable plan toward—1 year, 2 years, 5 years. You ask questions to yourself, then define what/who you want to be on that day…then ‘reverse-engineer.’

We pored over Driscoll’s most most recent version of his talk at a 2007 Acts 29 boot camp. The notes from a previous talk on the same subject can be found here.

As we walked through the process, we found that the micro required most of our attention, but the macro was overarching impetus. Over the next week, I’m going to try to unpack and let you in ‘behind the curtain’ on more of the ‘micro’ of to encourage and maybe challenge you to think about what you can do right now to begin to reverse-engineer your life. In many ways, this will serve as an type of accountability for us…

Here are the areas we’ll look at:

1) Walk with God
2) Husband/Father
3) Schedule
4) Health
5) Finances
6) Work
7) Learning