equipping to multiply healthy disciples + churches until there is #NoPlaceLeft
Today I’m flying out of Charlotte to Long Beach to see 15 houses over the next 3 days! Lord willing, I will have our new California home secured by the end of next week! Please pray that the Lord will provide the one home he has for us out there!
Now we just need to find our new home!
One of the major projects we have been working on for some time now is getting our house on the market to be sold. Saying it has been a challenge to get it ready while chasing two small kids and taking care of everything else is a bit of an understatement.
This house has become our home. We have raised our kids here. We have hosted church here. We have tested our maximum occupancy limit with college students. We have filled this place with memories of all kinds. In many ways, Boone has become more of our home than anywhere else, and this house is really home.
It has been a wonderful season here. It is bittersweet to consider that this season is coming to a close, but we are so excited for the next stage in our lives and calling – as hard as it will be to leave Boone, it will be so exciting to finally get settled in Long Beach, CA!
If you would like to join our ministry support team to help us make the our cross-country move to the West Coast, you can hit the button below!
We spent all of last week at Holden Beach, NC. This was our 4th year in a row going to Holden. It has definitely been a crowd-pleaser. This year we had more beach to ourselves than ever before and an unbelievable house to stay in. This is a big week for the Young family, and we are SUPER grateful that we get to do this.
This year, Emily confronted her fears of the water – both at the pool and in the ocean. She has always been afraid of it, but this year, she decided that she wanted to change that. By Day 2 she let us take her in the pool to kick around, she sat in the surf, and she was “body boarding,” which means she would stand on a boogie board at the shore and lets low tide waves flow over her feet. By the end of the trip, she was LOVING all of it.
We are pretty sure Silas is already the lone extrovert in our little family. Time will tell, but he always wanted to be where the party was. He loved sand on his toes, and he didn’t bat an eye when we walked him around in the pool.
On our last full day, I went with Kelly’s dad and brother to take “the bigs” (the bigger kids – there were 7 kids ranging from 5 1/2 to under 2mo) up to Southport to ride the ferry across to Fort Fischer to go to the aquarium. That was an awesome adventure for all of us!
It is such a joy to have these experiences with our kids at such young ages. They are so fun and watching them grow and develop in a true blessing. Now that we are back, we are digging in and working out our plans for what needs to get done so that we can move our family to Long Beach late this fall!
Chuck Wood and I had a good time testing out some software for doing interviews. There are some amazing tools available to us for serving Jesus and his people.
Our team in Quebec makes me so proud. Here they are modeling church in 3/3 pattern of care. They are such great trainers and laborers.
Our team of 6 has been in Quebec for the better part of a week now. Yesterday, two of our students led a guy named Maxim to Christ. Today they baptized him in the river!
Quebec averages around only 0.5% evangelical. It is one of the most lost places in North America. Tonight, we are praising God for new life in the kingdom in Quebec!
We’ve been pursuing #NoPlaceLeft for almost 3 years in Boone. In that time our work on campus has spread into the community and into the Hispanic population. Things like this tend to spread and we want to help healthy things spread. The same thing is happening across North Carolina, among many other places.
One of the foundational structures that helps us to develop leaders and support them over the long haul is what we refer to as a coaching call. They often look like this. These men represent kingdom work happening in most of the major regions of North Carolina. We will spend 3 months meeting weekly and then shift to quarterly group coaching, called Iron on Iron.
It’s all free and there are no positional leadership roles. I love the purity of faith and conviction in these men. They are kingdom giants.
There are some unique opportunities presented when working in a collegiate context. This summer we sent a few of our students to serve with other leaders on other campuses. Two of them went to Charlotte, NC to serve with Caleb Sprinkle, one of our student leader alumni. One went to Miami, FL to serve with “Scuba” Steve Carswell, one of the key leaders for NPL Florida.
In the course of planning for and sending these students, the network effect became more clear to me. Both of the leaders who hosted our students are a part of the No Place Left community, so I already knew we were all on the same page. Not only was there no slow-down or vision-disconnect, our 3 guys were able to jump right in, and get to work. Alternatively, the hosts were able to turn our students loose to do what we all already do and they were also able to do some coaching and development with them that helped tremendously.
Ultimately, it is the vision that makes this possible. We associate with one another not because we like each other (we actually do love one another deeply), or because we are paid to, but because we have the same belief system with the No Place Left vision at the center of it and an agreed-upon clear path in place. It is amazing that we can parachute into one another’s networks and get right to work as co-laborers and learn from one another on the job.
Last week I spent 4 days in New Orleans with a group called Baptist Collegiate Network (BCNet). It is a team of teams that meets together once a year on the campus of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary to dream up projects that will help move towards the overall vision of BCNet:
“The gospel for every college student on every college campus in North America.”
I was invited to join the Evangelism team (one of a handful of different teams making up BCNet) last year. This year I am leading the team. Our team is distributed across NC, KY, NY, TX, OR, and CA. It’s amazing that we can work together even being so spread out.
Each year when we get together in New Orleans we have 36 hours together as a team to review our progress from the prior year, determine what projects we would like to take on in the coming year, and plan our work for the year. It is a long few days of hard work, but it is tiring in the best kind of way.
Over the last 2 years our team has been working on Gospel Appointments. It is a simple and effective entry strategy and process for setting up gospel shares. It isn’t only a campus/collegiate tool, but it makes a lot of sense in that context. This year we are continuing our work with Gospel Appointments and some vision and strategy to help move the needle forward in collegiate engagement across the SBC community in North America.
There is nothing less exciting to my ears than a “committee of committees.” Peeling back the surface a bit, I am actually excited to be a part of this community. The most encouraging thing about BCNet is the God-sized vision I quoted above. I’m excited to be a part of a team of teams that is all about shooting for the moon.
There are 6,726 institutions of higher education in North America. What if there was a reproducing gospel presence on every one of them?
A key issue for many of us in Christian ministry is that we don’t know (how) to dream up God-sized visions. These kinds of shoot-the-moon plans stretch what we consider might be possible. They force us into dependence on God to accomplish them – which cannot be said of much of what we aim at week to week and year to year.
I’m learning that a God-sized vision forces us to think, pray, plan, and act differently.
I felt like a proud dad today as I received updates on the training taking place in Boone. I’m thankful for the leaders the Lord is raising up.