Thought I'd point out some places where Element and its "Bold As Love" Initiative have caught some attention.

Michael Spencer, the online provocateur known as The Internet Monk, talks us up pretty well at Jesus-Shaped Spirituality.

He also spends some time on us in the latest episode of his popular podcast (over 1,000 downloads in 24 hours!).

Bill Kinnon, media guru for the Allelon Missional Network, has some fun with our announcement.

Others are weighing in as well.

I'm so proud of you guys in the Element community. You are awesome, and you're even more awesome for truly wanting Bold As Love to be less about Element's renown and more about God's. It's a privilege to serve you.

Last night at our first annual Vision Night, we unveiled a risky new move for Element's next phase of missional ministry.

We are about to do something radical. Something virtually unheard of. As we have reflected on and prayed over what it means to be a countercultural community of Jesus-followers, we have decided that you can’t just preach revolution without acting revolutionary.

We have heard Jesus commanding us to love our neighbors as ourselves and we don’t want to assume this is either a suggestion or a sentiment.

Click "Read More" below . . .

July 13 (6:30 p.m.) Element will be meeting at Immanuel Church in Brentwood (at the intersection of Granny White Pike and Otter Creek Road) for our first ever Vision Night.

If the Element community is at all important to you, you won't wanna miss it. Some things we'll cover:

a. The story of Element
b. The mission and values of Element
c. The way Element's leadership and operations work
d. The financial status and operations of Element
e. The theology and methodology behind Element
f. Element's blueprint for the future

This will be a great time to come together and celebrate what Element has meant to each of us and learn together how we can participate in its future for the glory of God and the good of Nashville.

Also:
July 13 will be our last worship service for the summer. We will be breaking from the service until September 7.

PRAXIS will continue. Service projects will continue. Girls' Day will continue. Bros and Brews will continue. Social events and get-togethers will continue, including some on Sunday evenings. We're just taking a month and a half off from the worship service.

And when we relaunch, we'll be back with gospel guns blazing!

This is something that is important to the theology and methodology of Element, and we're going to be talking about it more in the coming weeks, especially at Vision Night (Element @ Immanuel, July 13).

In the meantime, Bill Kinnon's latest post on "What is missional?" is excellent.

"The long view." Yes.

Bill writes:

A missional understanding of the church places us within a historical context. It removes the ticket to heaven pressure that the Western Evangelical Church has placed upon itself. Missional people recognize that God is on the move in our villages, towns and cities. We need to engage with Him in what He's doing. Rather than building big box church warehouses that "vacuum cleaner up all the surrounding Christians" (to paraphrase Al Roxburgh @ the end of the video, Three Churches and a New Age Mall) and calling that the Church, we are to be the leaven that permeates our neighborhoods with the lived out good news of Jesus Christ.

This is not a two-year, three-year, five-year or even ten-year plan. This is a lifetime's engagement with the communities where we have been strategically placed by the hand of God. We may see a great awakening that happens in our very midst - or we may be like David Livingston and Hudson Taylor - who never got to see the incredible harvest that came from the seeds they planted. But our call is to be the hands, feet and voice of Jesus as we live amongst the people who are our neighbors. I believe that is what missional is.

Not an easy sell, is it?

Leaders, pastors, teachers: We must learn how to inspire and train the folks in our churches to think about church mission in terms of investment, cultivation, lifetime discipleship, long term covenanting with a community, etc. These difficult values are far more important to the biblical approach to "doing church" than any amount of programming or attractional goods and services.

What an awesome thing it is that the radical life of the kingdom of Jesus is countercultural even within American Church culture!
Daunting. But awesome.

We talked about spirits and spiritual warfare at Element last night, and the main takeaway I want everyone to have is this: God owns. He owns it all. He's over it all. Everything and everyone belongs to Him and falls under His sovereignty. This includes Satan and the demons. God can and will do whatever He wants with them, and since Genesis 3 we know their days are numbered.

The devil is not yang to God's yin. He cannot and will not thwart God's plans for this world or for you. So stand firm and walk in confidence.

Even the devil is the Lord's devil.
-- Martin Luther

Last night at the Element worship service we continued in our Coffee Shop Theology series, answering the submitted question, "How do I know God's will for my life?"

I proposed that the answer is not quite as complex as we make it out to be but still as difficult as we feared.

Assuming that we are praying for God's guidance in making decisions, and assuming He has not given us a clear answer, I offered a checklist for making decisions:

1. Is an option a sin?
2. Is an option unwise or conducive to sin?
3. Has God clearly told me not to choose a particular option? (If you're not sure, then He hasn't.)
4. If your answers are "no" to all three, do what you want.

It's that simple. And yet it's that difficult, because it requires that we trust God as we walk into the unknown and the potentially unsafe.
We have this mixed up notion that if we make a choice and it blows up in our face, then it must not have been God's will. Where we get the idea that God never wants us to endure hardship or pain I don't know, but it has seriously messed with our concept of faith.

Here's what I laid out for our folks as God's will for their lives:

1. It is God's Will For You to be Holy
2. It is God's Will For You to be Wise
3. It is God's Will For You to be Faithful
4. It is God's Will For You to be Satisfied

That was the title of the Element message last Sunday night. It's a hot topic, so I thought I'd share some of the points in this space for anybody who missed it.

I began my treatment of the subject by challenging the notion that God is ever silent. I acknowledged that quite frequently he doesn't speak to us the way we'd like him to or that he doesn't say what we want to hear, but neither scenario is the same thing as him not speaking at all.
What I propose is that God seems silent because he is broadcasting on a frequency that we are not tuned to receive him on.

This opened up the discussion to cover a) the ways God is speaking, and b) the reasons we don't hear him.

Read the whole thing by clicking on Read More . . .

This is the video we showed at Element last night. Powerful stuff.

This was shot for Saddleback Church's HIV/AIDS initiative.
There is one thing I disagree with Straton on. He says he did nothing tangible to help. I'd say that holding, visiting, counseling, feeding, praying, and comforting is very tangible. Being the Body of Christ is as tangible as it gets.

And if more of us would, as Straton says, "Just show up" fewer and fewer people would feel like God is silent.

Probably. Maybe. I don't know.

But this Sunday night at Element we're gonna be talking about the whole "end times," rapture-type stuff. Left Behind, pre/post/mid tribulation, mark of the beast, trumpets sounding, dead bodies rising.

Yes. It's gonna be trippy.

Sunday, 6:30 p.m.
The Onion @ BCC