Archive for January, 2010
Whiteboard Session Reminder
Our next Whiteboard Session will be this coming Sunday, 6pm at The 815. We’ll be unpacking the values of 2 Pillars Church this week. Please bring a dish to share and join us.
Gospel Community Leader Training
Gospel Communities (GCs) will be at the heart of who we are as 2 Pillars Church. Everything we do will flow in, through, and out of our Gospel Communities. As such, the leaders of these Gospel Communities play a critical role in our health as a body. We need strong men to step up and take on these leadership roles thus making a commitment to seeing the Gospel go forth in Lincoln.
This Sunday we will begin our Gospel Community Leader Training Sessions. This first session will be more of a high-level view of our Gospel Communities – what they are, what it means to be a leader of one, what the expectations are, what the training will entail, as well as a look at our process (completing the training does not auto-fit you as a GC Leader).
If you’d like to know more, take a look at our Gospel Community Leader Training Overview which lays out some broad expectations and details and then show up this Sunday at 6pm at The 815. Note: the hope is to quickly move these training sessions to someone’s home as soon as we can identify a host. This first session will meet at The 815 out of convenience until we can get all of the details worked out.
Overall Vision and The Gospel
This past Sunday we hosted our first of a series of Whiteboard Sessions at The 815. This is a progressive series of vision meetings in which we unpack the vision (from broad to specifics) of 2 Pillars Church.
The title of this first Whiteboard Session was “Overall Vision and The Gospel.” In the session we talked first about the Gospel and the wider storyline of the Bible including how God created everything and it was good (Creation), how Adam and Eve disobeyed God thus bringing sin into the world (Fall), how because of that we are sinful and in need of a redeemer, whom God sent in Jesus (Redemption), and how it doesn’t just stop there (with “me and Jesus”) but that it goes beyond that and that God is at work restoring all things and that one day all things will be restored (Restoration).
From there, we talked about the Gospel and how the wider storyline of the Bible plays out in each of our lives as well. We talked about the gap between God’s holiness and our sinfulness and how Jesus is the only one that can bridge that gap. Where irreligion tends to minimize God’s holiness and religion tries to minimize our sinfulness, we looked at how the Gospel says that both irreligion and religion get it wrong. In fact, the Gospel says that God is way more holy than we can ever imagine, that we’re way more sinful than we’ll ever admit, and that despite that – in Jesus – we’re way more loved and accepted than we could ever have hoped for.
That’s the Gospel. That’s the drum we’ll beat as a church. Our vision is to be a gospel-centered and missionally-focused church. When we talk about being a gospel-centered church, we mean that you’ll be hearing all about this all the time.
We then went on to talk about being missionally-focused. In doing so we contrasted two views of the church. The first is a “come and see” view, the second is a “go and tell” view. From there, we talked about living lives on-mission which involves us (as ordinary people), living our lives (doing ordinary things), with gospel-intentionality.
If you missed this first Whiteboard Session, we hope to see you at the next one. In the mean time, take a look at this Whiteboard Session Supplement which provides some additional information, key dates, and specific areas in which we need some specific help.
Whiteboard Session Reminder
As a reminder, the Whiteboard Sessions at The 815 kick-off this Sunday evening at 6pm. Read more about it here.
$1.8B Downtown Lincoln Transformation Proposed
There is a lot going on in downtown Lincoln and we are excited to be a part of it. There are currently ~$1.8B in transformative changes being proposed in downtown Lincoln:
“As the nation struggles to emerge from the worst recession in decades, Lincoln has $1.8 billion in projects on the drawing board in the downtown area alone – about 80 percent of it planned by the city and university.
The development boom is bookended by a proposed new city arena west of downtown and a new $56 million corporate headquarters for insurance company Assurity under construction to the east and topped off to the north by an $800 million renovation of the state fairgrounds into a research and development campus by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
City planner and historian Ed Zimmer said a $1.8 billion transformation would be one for the history books. It smacks of the 1910s and 1920s, he said, when city boosters bandied about the slogan “A New Skyline Every Morning” after more than a half dozen buildings went up downtown between 1912 and 1927, including the Sharp and Stuart buildings.”
Read the rest of Deena Winter’s Lincoln Journal Star article titled, Downtown: A $1.8B Transformation
