I joined Pastor Adam Sinnett and Pastor Samuel Choi at the West Seattle campus, which hosted the event. One-hundred sixty people attended the event, representing the core group who will be sent out to establish this new work of the gospel.

The Federal Way campus will be entering new territory in a number of areas:

• First campus with a sponsoring campus other than Ballard (West Seattle)
• First campus pastor (Samuel) whose native language is not English
• First campus setting out with specific goals to start new churches in other countries

All of these characteristics relate to the unique vision for Mars Hill Federal Way: in the next ten years, the Federal Way campus hopes to increase by 10,000 people by remaining a faithful congregation of about 500.

How is that possible? Pastor Samuel explained that the big building, the robust programming, and the flashy production are a long way off—and perhaps may never come. The campus plans to send out multiple groups to start new campuses and churches in Federal Way’s surrounding cities and sister cities in South Korea and Japan.

Rather than some complicated, overwhelming ambition, however, Pastor Samuel emphasized the simplicity of the task at hand: gospel and mission. At the Federal Way campus (and throughout Mars Hill) it’s all about Jesus. Jesus will work as we follow him—in community, conversation, service, and daily life in general.

Leading by example, Pastor Samuel challenged the core group to focus on Jesus and his mission above comfort, familiarity, and self image. Those in attendance responded to the challenge with energetic singing and giving, pledging $40,000 towards the expansion effort.

The first Federal Way gathering was an incredible display of God’s ongoing work in the hearts of his people and the life of our church. Please pray with me for the new campus, and check out the Mars Hill West Seattle website for updates.

Mars Hill Global

Serving the church and spreading the gospel. Support new campuses by giving to the Global Fund. More info at MarsHillGlobal.com

• Average weekly attendance for 2007-2008 = 5,771
• High attendance for 2007-2008 = 8,070 (Easter Sunday)
• Number of new campuses in 2007-2008 = 4 (Lake City, Bellevue, Downtown Seattle, Olympia)
• Number of community groups = 195
• Number of new bands = 13
• Over the last 3 years, giving increased an average of 42% and attendance increased an average of 26% (per year).

For more details, download a PDF version of the annual report.

Numerical growth is relatively easy to measure. Church health, on the other hand, does not lend itself to quantification. To paraphrase 1 Samuel 16:7, men tally service attendance and financial contributions, “but the Lord looks on the heart.” How can we know that we’re a people growing in our faith and not just keeping busy? The Lord looks on the heart, and only the Lord truly knows what’s there, but he’s given us things like prayer, the Bible, and each other to align our hearts with his.

What’s more, pastors are burdened with a special responsibility for the care of the congregation in their charge (Heb. 13:17). We have been commissioned by God to shepherd you (our local church) well—which means we must take time to reflect on the way things are going, which in turn means we must agree on measures to assess progress, which in turn means we must identify the indicators (if not quantifiers) of church health and fruitful ministry.

Our intent in all of this record keeping is not to reduce the Great Commission to a raw numbers game. These indicators are merely one way to monitor the general state of our church and keep track of the direction in which we’re heading to ensure that it’s faithful and sound. We share all of this information because we love our church family and we desire the faithful to be knowledgeable and united, that we may continue forward together, for the sake of the gospel and Jesus’ glory.

At Mars Hill, we want to be a big church because we want a lot of people to meet Jesus. We also want to be a healthy church where people learn to love Jesus, receive new hearts from Jesus, and bank their past, present, and future on Jesus.

It happened twenty-five years ago on Mother’s Day, the day Patty and I will always remember like yesterday. It was a crushing day, a refining/defining moment, an inflection point, and the day when we fully understood that children indeed are a gift from the Lord.

We were both a young twenty-nine years old, incredibly blessed with our nearly six-year-old daughter (Julie) and little Timmy, a few weeks shy of his third birthday. We were living in a suburb in Northern Virginia just outside of Washington D.C. where I was serving in one of the choicest assignments in the U.S. Coast Guard. After attending the morning worship service at Reston Bible Church, we went out to one of our favorite spots for a special Mother’s Day lunch, and then it was home for naptime. I was out in the garage putting the finishing touches on a handcrafted “train bed” I was making for Timmy for his upcoming birthday when Patty came outside to tell me that he had a really high temperature and to come inside.

Fast-forward a couple of hours…we had prayed for him and called both our mothers to ask them to pray for him. I can still see our son lying on the sofa next to Patty when seizure #1 hit him—his feet are trembling wildly, and his eyes are rolling back in his head, only the eerie whites of his eyes are visible. The next seizure comes a short while later, and then a third. We pack up Julie and Timmy and head to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, MD, praying for a benign diagnosis like a fast-moving flu bug. Little did we know.

After a nightmarish evening that turned into early morning, where the emergency room doc ordered up three blood samples and a spinal tap without much of an explanation (other than meningitis was ruled out), we received word that our son needed to remain overnight at the hospital. Patty stayed with the little guy, who was dealing with being a human pincushion as well as could be expected, and I took our sleeping daughter home. I rejoined Patty the next morning at the hospital after dropping off our daughter at school. Our church prayer chain evidently worked well as our pastor, Mike Minter, arrived a few minutes later.

Tears still flood my eyes as I recall the vivid imagery of what happened next. It was 1983, Monday, mid-morning. A nice doctor asked Patty and I to follow him to a meeting to discuss Timmy’s situation. Pastor Mike joined us in a conference room filled with numerous medical staff. My heart raced when I saw the grim, somber-looking faces around the table. “We have some really hard news for you,” said the physician, who identified himself as a pediatric oncologist with a specialty in hematology. “Your son has leukemia.”

In a moment, the vision of a future seeing my son as a teenager and as an adult simply vanished, replaced with an image of a small burial plot. Patty was so strong as I sobbed my heart out. It was the first time she had ever seen me shed a tear in our ten years of marriage. We heard fragments of the physician’s explanation, and tried to process the more positive news that “we caught this early” and “this looks like the best type of childhood leukemia, Advanced Lymphoblastic Leukemia [ALL] to treat”. We heard the news that treatment would need to begin immediately: a month-long stay in the hospital for aggressive chemotherapy protocol and followed by two weeks of radiation treatment, and then…who knows?

As Pastor Mike, Patty, and I shared in those early hours following this news, I recall how fundamentally flawed my thinking was about God. Nothing bad was supposed to happen to my family—how could the Lord let this happen? It was then I realized that as a sinner all I deserved was death and separation from God. It became clear that being married to Patty, having a beautiful daughter and son—even a son with a terminal illness—was more grace and mercy than I ever deserved. This fundamental understanding brought about an immediate, deep, hard to express sense of acceptance and peace. It felt like a special touch by the Holy Spirit. Hundreds, even thousands of people were praying across the country for our little guy, and we were pleading for Jesus to heal our son. The elders of Reston Bible came a few days later and prayed for healing, anointing our son in accordance with James 5. That day, Timmy’s white blood cells returned to normal. Jesus had miraculously and mercifully healed our little guy. Since the chemo treatments were already in progress, and we weren’t certain how Jesus had healed him, we decided to continue the remainder of the chemo and radiation treatments.

By God’s amazing grace, it’s now a quarter century later and our son is a healthy twenty-seven-year-old man who loves Jesus and is following him. If space permitted, pages could be written about the extraordinary and unconditional love and care that a young mother gave to both our children throughout this ordeal. We were changed forever as a result of this special day twenty-five years ago.

Psalm 51 holds a rich meaning for us. As King David writes, “Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.”

“The LORD said to Moses, ‘See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft. And behold, I have appointed with him Oholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. And I have given to all able men ability, that they may make all that I have commanded you: the tent of meeting, and the ark of the testimony, and the mercy seat that is on it, and all the furnishings of the tent, the table and its utensils, and the pure lampstand with all its utensils, and the altar of incense, and the altar of burnt offering with all its utensils, and the basin and its stand…’”

Here’s the context: after 400 years of living in Egypt (most of that in slavery), the children of Israel have departed Egypt and are in the midst of 40 years in the wilderness, wandering and awaiting their arrival in the Promised Land. God had given Moses the law (including the Ten Commandments), and God had just finished instructing Moses on building the Tabernacle—something like a big, fancy, portable church building.

In Exodus 31, God supplies the talent in the form of Bezalel and others to make the Tabernacle and its lavish furnishings. There are two things that are most striking and simply remarkable about the life of Bezalel:

1) God used the horrid circumstances of Egyptian captivity to serve as the training ground for Bezalel’s skills, abilities, and knowledge.
We can imagine that Bezalel learned his craft from his father. As slaves in Egypt for hundreds of years, they were likely serving an ancient Egyptian business owner whose employees (slaves) were making and selling idols and replicas of Egyptian household gods. So Bezalel the apprentice, journeyman, and master is slaving year after year, learning his stuff and plying his trade while making products abhorrent to his faith. (This may strike a chord for those of us who labor in a secular job, feeling far removed from what matters most to us. Another parallel would be the 20th century Jews who were forced to make war munitions for their enemy captors during World War II.)

Finally, the day of Bezalel’s dreams arrives and he joins the throng of millions of Abraham’s descendants in the journey to the Promised Land. After a few years in the wilderness, unable to use his skills and abilities because the Israelites were constantly on the move, one day he gets the call to lead the building of the project of a lifetime…the Tabernacle. (Like Bezalel, it often takes awhile for those of us at MHC to find the niche where we are invited to use the specific gifts, talents, and abilities God has given us. This requires patience, perseverance, and the faith that in due time, the Holy Spirit will move, guide, and direct us to that very place where we can best serve using our gifts.)

2) This is the first time in all of scripture where the Bible describes a man to be “filled…with the Spirit of God.”
This is simply staggering. Wow! Wouldn’t you love it if, like Bezalel, you could say without hesitation, “God has filled me with His Spirit, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship”? The fact is God has already done this for all Christians.

Jesus promised the Holy Spirit in John 14, and spoke to the work of the Holy Spirit two chapters later. Acts 2 recounts the arrival of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, and various works of the Holy Spirit are described in the Pauline Epistles. Each believer in Jesus can rightfully say that God has filled them with His Spirit. As it is written in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”

By God’s immeasurable grace, we can all “be like Bezalel.” May Paul’s prayer to the Ephesians be ours:

“…that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:17–23).

There are some killer passages found in Scripture to directly address this question. My personal favorites are 2 Chronicles 15:7; Colossians 3:17, 23–24; 1 Thessalonians 4:11–12; 5:16–18; and Ephesians 6:5–8. In the 2 Chronicles 15:7 account, King Asa receives the throne of Judah after a short three-year reign by his dad, Abijah. Asa “did what was good and right in the eyes of the the Lord.” In chapter 15, the Spirit of the Lord comes upon a prophet, Azariah, who shares God’s message with Asa, declaring, “But as for you, be strong and do not give up, for your work will be rewarded.”

I love this verse because it so defeats the lies the enemy whispers: “you’re tired and deserve a break,” or “your work doesn’t matter because you have no value to add,” or “who cares if you work diligently and excellently,” or “what a jerk so-and-so is.” Our work does matter to Jesus. It is one of the primary venues in life where we can reflect Jesus by our diligence, excellence, and an attitude aligned with the New Testament passages listed above.

So let me suggest that you take a few moments and read these passages bolded above. Let the Holy Spirit speak to you regarding attitude, effort, perspective, and, most of all, how to glorify Jesus at work—regardless of where that might be. After all, our boss is a Jewish carpenter, and it is to Him alone that we offer our sacrifice and our praise for the privilege of serving in the workplace.

I’m finding the rate of change at Mars Hill Church to be the second most important factor affecting our team of dedicated staff and volunteers. The most important factor is serving Jesus; we see that every day in so many expressions, most of which are positive and simply heartwarming. The rate of change does not evoke the same reaction, but it does deserve commentary. Coping or dealing with change is big business; it is one of the few fundamental leadership issues that impacts every organization.

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a graduate-level resident training program at Harvard Business School. It was an awesome experience and I returned home with a boatload (remember I spent twenty-five years in the Coast Guard) of fresh new mental models and concepts. One of them was so refreshingly simple, yet so rich in meaning:

Human nature is such that most of us (including action junkies) operate in the “contentment quadrant.” This is the world we know, status quo. What happens when change invades our contented world? Let’s illustrate using a flock of sheep–since that is a common metaphor the Bible uses to describe us. Say the head shepherd tells the flock we have to move to a higher pasture (since this current spot is nearly out of food). That simple proclamation and change message immediately causes the sheep to start the denial process. If sheep could talk, they’d probably say, “The pasture is just fine,” or “We’re happy here,” or “We just got here!” and on and on. Some sheep will have a quick denial thought and be done with this stage. They move on to the frustration quadrant because the shepherd has addressed not all of their questions, concerns, or issues to their satisfaction, or because they don’t have complete understanding of the situation. Once the explanation or understanding comes, these sheep will move up into the acceptance quadrant. Each sheep has his or her own built-in, Creator-wired acceptance rate; once acceptance is reached, we subconsciously move into a new place of contentment.

The Executive Elders have been spending time thinking and praying about this very topic. Experience teaches us that most people can effectively handle two major change boxes at any given time. We are praying about how to shepherd the flock deliberately through this process. Sometimes it means sending a sheep dog to lovingly move people out of a denial or frustration quadrant by providing help and understanding that leads them in a specific direction.

Disciples of Jesus should never remain in the contentment quadrant for long; collectively, our commission on earth will not end until He returns, and individually, God refines us to make us more holy, more like Jesus.

Please pray for your pastors as we learn how to shepherd the disciples at Mars Hill Church through the constant change that comes with service to our unchanging Lord.

If I have to speak about myself, 2 Corinthians 3:5 (”Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God”) is a solid anchor and launch pad. Thinking about “who I am” brings to mind major life events like:

• Dating a cute cheerleader in high school who leads me to Jesus.
• Being wise enough to marry that cute cheerleader and having a wonderful daughter and son (and two grandsons) with her in 34 awesome years of marriage.
• Spending a quarter century in the U.S. Coast Guard, living all around the country in cool places like Seattle, San Francisco, Honolulu, Galveston, New Orleans, and Northern Virginia.
• Having the privilege and opportunity to work in executive roles in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, shoulder to shoulder with local, national, and international leaders.
• Serving Jesus as an elder at Mars Hill Church alongside some of the most gifted, talented, and dedicated leaders I’ve ever been associated with.

The experiences gained from these major life events have prepared me well for my work as a pastor. It is a dynamic environment here at MHC, akin to some of the “battle station” conditions of my past. We are at war against the evil one–lest we be lulled into complacency–and it requires constant protection from Jesus. As tough as some days on the job might be, it is comforting to recall the provision Jesus granted in the past for other tough experiences like:

• Being the person to notify a family that their (fill in the blank: father, son, husband, etc) was lost at sea. Even tougher is the follow up call another day or two later that we had to suspend the search efforts.
• Dispatching your boat crews to respond to an incident where several young children have drowned, knowing that the job has to be done but realizing the devastating emotional impacts and nightmares the crews will face for weeks to come.
• Serving as the Special Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Transportation and accompanying him to the site of the Sunset Limited train wreck near Mobile, AL, where in the early morning hours of September 22, 1993, forty-seven people were killed in Amtrak’s deadliest train accident. We spent hours meeting the survivors and families of those killed, consoling them and sharing in their grief while trying to understand the causal factors for the accident. And handling the media requests at the same time.
• Helping a consulting client understand the plain bald facts that their organization has no basis (or resources) to continue operations–and the organization happens to be a faith-based ministry doing wonderful work that benefits orphans and foster children–then helping them close down.
• Doing your duty back in the day when the military first started HIV testing, and one of your crewmembers tests positive. The military doctor says it is your responsibility to break the news.
• Being asked to escort the body of a good friend back to his home for burial from the ship you served on (CGC Blackthorn) just months earlier, after it collides and sinks, killing twenty-three crewmembers, including many good friends and coworkers.and the officer who replaced you.

None of these difficult days at work could compare with the day Patty and I were invited to a room full of physicians and nurses. They were gathered to tell us that our two-year-old son has leukemia and not the flu or a virus–and then watching your young wife holding your son as physicians perform multiple spinal taps and bone marrow procedures throughout the next two years of ongoing treatment. Thankfully Jesus miraculously and mercifully healed our son and forever changed our hearts and our understanding of mercy and grace.

So after a half century of love, adventure, travel, diverse responsibility, hard places, pain, failure, and success, “who I am” is simply a servant of Jesus Christ who has been blessed beyond description, content and thankful in being in the center of His will.