I recently committed to be a leader for the June 2010 World Race Squad. This means I will travel with roughly sixty folks as they embark on their World Race journey for the first time. My Co-Leader, Jenny Brown, and I will disciple, guide, and direct these people as they seek the Lord just as we did in our own World Race experience. We will travel with them, at times serving alongside them, and raise up leadership from within the Squad. After about four months, we will come home, handing over Squad leadership, while keeping in contact from the States to continue the discipleship work.
I believe wholly in the vision of the World Race. We are calling on the Lord to work through this program, that we might see a generation of young people discipled into the fullness of their God-given identity. We believe that the Holy Spirit is meeting World Racers as they go to the nations. We are seeing them come back changed into radical leaders in the Kingdom.
Often people ask me how I was changed on the Race. The best way to describe it is to say that I became more fully myself. As we pursue the Lord, we walk through refinement. God meets us in our circumstance and we become more Christlike. The World Race serves, and served in my life, as a swift kick in the shorts to get this refinement process moving in the right direction.
I asked Andi Wendel to help me illustrate my refinement process by designing the boxes you see here. The outlined square is the fullness of who I was created to be. The scribbled lines show how I was living before the Race and how I am living now, after that experience. The closer I get to living my life as God created me to live it, the more of the square will fill in. We need more of this in our churches. I believe the World Race is doing a good job helping to walk people through this process.
I believe a big part of my long-term ministry Calling is to help people walk through this same process of refinement in discipleship. I believe I need to be walking with people as they take their Faith understanding from “simple salvation” to a place within the Nation of Priests.
So the latest chapter in my Faith Journey will begin in June as I launch out with a whole new group of World Racers as they seek to know the Lord more deeply. I’m expecting two key things to happen:
1. I’m expecting the Lord to meet these people in radical ways and to change their lives and their pictures of who He is in their lives.
2. I’m expecting to be overwhelmed by the weight of Holy responsibility as I am entrusted to help shepherd this flock. I am expecting to be challenged in whole new ways, and to experience refinement anew as I lean on the Lord to help me meet the challenges.
I am hoping you will partner with me prayerfully and financially in this next step. I hope you join in this ministry as we strive to raise up a generation that longs to see the world radically transformed by the Grace of God.
Click the “Send me an Email” link on the upper-left of this page to let me know how you would like to be involved. I will share with you more about my need and how you can be involved in what I am doing in the lives of young Christians looking for more. I can tell you how you can be further involved in the World Race, or even how you could join the World Race to begin a journey of radical refinement yourself.
