From Francis Chan:
Excellent!
How does your community of faith compare? Are you trying to push the Big Red Tractor with your own strength, or putting its true power source to full use?
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Tag: Francis Chan
The local church and foster care
“These kids have been forgotten by many adults and they’re waiting for another adult to forget them… show them that ‘I love you and I want you and the reason I’m going to do it is because Christ loved me and wanted me while I was still a sinner…'”
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Quick… take this well known passage and fill in your name in each of the blanks ::
If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.
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Crazy Love
I got a copy of a great DVD last week in the mail — Francis Chan’s “Crazy Love.” The DVD is a companion to the book of the same title and is put together as a great resource for small group discussion.
I watched four or five chapters right off the bat and loved the simplicity as well as the quality of the videos. I instantly thought it would be a great resource for our small group in the coming months and I’ve asked all the other community groups at encounter to consider doing the same.
The DVD is broken into 10 chapters, to correlate with the book. In each “chapter” of the DVD, Chan talks about various topics related to the same chapters in the book. The videos then wrap up with several questions for the group to discuss.
Publisher’s Weekly writes about the book:
Chan, senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, Calif., offers a radical call for evangelicals to consider and emulate in this debut guide to living crazy for God. Chan’s own life compels him to live with urgency, and with good reason. His mother died giving birth to him, his stepmother died when he was nine, and his dad when he was 12. As a pastor, Chan says that conducting weekly funerals for people younger than himself has likewise sobered him to life’s unexpectedness and frailty. Chan writes with infectious exuberance, challenging Christians to take the Bible seriously. He describes at length the sorry state of lukewarm Christians who strive for a life characterized by control, safety and an absence of suffering. In stark contrast, the book offers real-life accounts of believers who have given all—time, money, health, even their lives—in obedience to Christ’s call.Chan also recounts his own attempts to live crazy by significantly downsizing his home and giving away his resources to the poor.Earnest Christians will find valuable take-home lessons from Chan’s excellent book.
Just the first few “chapters” on the DVD alone had me re-thinking my relationship with God and how lacking it can be. Chan makes the point early on that he realized as a teenager that his prayers really seemed to be lacking – he never really “prayed to anyone.” His prayers were more about rattling off a list of requests than actually talking with someone.
He shared that as he began to read about the God of Scripture (in places like Revelations 4) and saw the mighty power and majesty of God, he began picturing coming before this mighty God each time before he prayed — it suddenly changed his heart, his mind and his thoughts. Suddenly he was no longer just praying out into space, but he was talking to his creator and God.
I’m looking forward to going through this book/DVD with our group and seeing and hearing what they take from it as well. If you’re in the DFW area and want to come join our discussion – let me know! We meet every Saturday at 6 p.m. in Red Oak.
And to get your own copy of the book, Amazon has a copy of the book in paperback, or you can buy the Crazy Love CD/Audio version,
Or for more information about the book and DVD visit http://crazylovebook.com/ or read other reviews at http://viralbloggers.com/2009/01/crazy-love-interactive-dvd/