Good morning! If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. Ephesians chapter 4 is where we’re going to hang out for just a little bit. The early part of God’s call in my life had me involved in what’s called itinerant ministry. What that means is that I was traveling around and doing conferences. I had started teaching at the university I was at, which was called Grace Bible Study, and it actually grew fairly large. We had tapes—I don’t know if you guys have seen those; Google it later. We would sell the tapes of my messages in order to pay rent for the building we were working in. Those tapes kind of blew away with the wind, and the next thing I knew, I was being invited to places like Pampa, Texas, to do a student band or lead a revival. I mean, name a little town in West Texas; I know all about it because of that. This kind of started a season in which I was primarily going into conferences, retreats, or venues like that. They would bring me in to be the preacher for that event, and God blessed it wildly! By the time that season was coming to a close, I was traveling all over the world. I’d been working with a band—you could call them a band, Shane and Shane—and we had started a nonprofit together here in Dallas. We were just getting it off the ground, and it didn’t take me long to grow disillusioned around the effects of conference speaking. I was outside of Denver; we had just done an event together with several thousand young adults. I was taking a nap in the afternoon because that was the season of life I was in—sometimes I fantasize about that season. I don’t know about you, but I sometimes remember when that was my reality. So, I was taking a nap, and maybe it was the altitude or maybe it wasn’t, but I got a real clear sense from the Lord that itinerant ministry wasn’t the future He had for me and that speaking events weren’t what He was going to do with me. At that point, the only models of pastoral ministry I had seen did not fit me. I thought pastors looked weird in jeans, and there was no way I was going to wear a suit to work every day. My style of preaching tended to not appeal to those over the age of 35. If you were here with me when I first got here at 28, you might remember some of that—lots of vinegar and a lot of misplaced confidence. The word I’m trying to find is arrogance. So, in that season, I started researching church planting and what it would be like to plant a church, where it could be whatever we built it to be. To really condense the story, I ended up here. What had captivated my imagination in those days was what it would be like to get on the ground with people and, for 30 or 40 years, grow in Christ together. I had seen the limitations of one-shot preaching on disciple-making, and what I wanted to do was spend my life making disciples, which meant I needed to put down roots somewhere. You’re not going to make disciples with a single sermon, no matter how good that sermon is. Discipleship takes time; it takes high pain thresholds. Preaching doesn’t take high pain thresholds like discipling does; when you do it, you’re carpet-bombing a place and then getting on a plane and going home. Discipleship means spending your life with one group of people, and they’re going to learn, «Hey, he might be able to preach, but he has serious flaws.» You want to get in the arena like that? That’s more difficult. So, long story short, I ended up here, and I was excited about being here. How many of you were with me at Metro before I got here? Alright, so here’s what was funny: I was preaching to about 2,000 to 3,000 young adults on Monday nights, and my first Sunday here, there were 168 of us. I loved it! It lasted about three weeks, and then that 168 became 600, then 800, 900, 1,000, 2,000, and finally 3,000. And now here we are, yet my passion has not changed. I do not want to be a conference speaker; that is not what we’re doing. This right here, this gathering—this family gathering—is important to me. This isn’t conference speaking. See, I’m going to run into you at Marty B’s, at Jason’s Deli—God knows I’m going to run into you at Target! Sheesh, at any given moment, half our church is at Target! Sometimes I’m telling myself, «Maybe I should go in, but if I do, we’re going to be in there for 45 minutes!» Right? I mean, we’re always running into each other at Target. In fact, I think I’ve already seen four of you in there this week! But my point is, this is life.
