This last Sunday the unthinkable happened, and it scared me.

We had just gone through an amazing service focusing on the story of God, and the music had been great, I felt comfortable with the message God had given to me, and the energy in the room was awesome.  Al and the band were finishing up their last song, “All we”, which was rocking my face off (Thanks Darren).  The music silenced and people cheered when up onto the stage walked a young lady who had been sitting towards the front and who had come in by herself.

I can tell you this now because she eventually told me, but at the time I had no clue who she was – she had very little church experience and only then had attended Catholic churches.  She had told a few people that she was looking for something more.

I noticed as I preached that day that she rarely made eye contact, so I had no idea what she thought about the service, the music, or my message.  So it would be an underestimation to say that I was nervous as I watched her walk up the front stairs and take the microphone stand from Al.  Here’s what she said:

“Most of you guys don’t know me. Tina and Steve do, that’s why I’m here.  I just had tears s come over me, and now tears again. (wipes her face)  Let’s just put it this way, I have 3 upcoming rock concerts I’m going to that, you know, you pay for, big names like the Dropkick Murphys, and I didn’t even know these guys were here (pointing to Al and motioning to the band), (Scream/cheer from the audience, so next phrase is unheard), …but all I need to do is come here on Sundays and come to a concert!”  (she turns around and shakes Al’s hand, and he gives her a hug)

I talked to her after the service, and she clearly loved what she had just experienced.  She filled out a card and signed up for just about everything we have,including wanting to know more about life groups, getting involved in service, and most importantly, she writes that she started a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Sometimes I wonder if trying to focus and reach a younger generation with the gospel of Jesus Christ is worth it because (my mindset):  “If we just slowed down a bit or put some more piano in the mix, older Christians would come too.”  And then I realize…

I’m not a manipulating salesman who does this for the money. I do this because I’m called to reach people like Kirsten, who one day found herself on stage in front of a large group of people she didn’t know, thanking them for their input into her life that day.  And I do this for Phil, a 20 something first time guest this last Sunday.  Phil came as a guest of a member of our church, and who called her up Sunday afternoon thanking her for bringing him to Fellowship Church.  Phil hadn’t stepped foot into a church for about 10 years, since he last left the catholic school he attended then.  And I do this because of the group of 50 and over friends who made their way to my office on Sunday morning to pray for our service and to ask God to work in the lives of people that morning.

And we’re called to reach people like Kirsten or Phil so that one day they will grow to be Christ followers like Garret or Keith and Dawn or Steve or Ian and Katie or Al, Billy,Jeff or Pam, all of who are maturing in the Lord and who understand that we are not a part of the Kingdom of God so that we can start programs to make church people happy, but to reach and teach other people to grow in Christ.  This ensures that the real church of Christ will last far beyond my time here on this earth.  Nothing makes me more excited than this!

And it’s why I exist.

I have yet to decode the reasons why some small groups grow and exceed my expectations and why some die, and never work out. But I love small groups more than any other part of the church, because I believe it’s actually the church in action.

So I’ll keep working on decoding this mystery.

A good Lutheran thinks social justice is the way to go.

A good Methodist believes holiness is what it’s all about.

A good American Baptist loves the ACLU.

A good Independent Baptist despises the evil Michael W Smith.

A good Catholic focuses on subsiding his guilt.

A good Puritan enjoys that same guilt.

A good Calvinist lifts up praises to Paul’s letters.

A good Evangelical lifts up praises to pop songs.

A good Maverick avoids the institution of church.

A good Quaker does not give up meeting together.

A good Charismatic feels like God is moving.

A good Presbyterian orders her life to understand God.

A good postmodern thinks a little of this and a little of that.

A good Congregationalist can’t wait to vote.

Your turn.

My ordination in August of 2003

It could be that I had gone most of my life knowing what I didn’t want in a church, including my college years, but for for a few reasons, I got it right the third time out.

By the time college came and went, I moved to Atlanta to begin my life and to try to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of it.  I started as a teacher.  At this point in time, this was not for me.  After wrestling with God for a while and sharing with Him why I didn’t want to serve Him anymore (I’m glad He won), I headed to Massachusetts to help some friends of mine on their “church journey.”

This church mirrored the one I grew up in and was used to – an independant, fundamental, Bible-believing (as if the rest of the world was not), pre-millennial, King James only church.  I could stomach it for all of 11 months, until my gut told me to get the heck out of Dodge, and to me, this also included new England.

At the time, I decided some things.  First, the next place I served God would be a place where I could serve Him the way I felt called to serve Him.  Specifically in the area of music, I would be able to develop a band that could lead people into musical worship.  Not that this was the only way to worship, but it was a way God had gifted me to express that worship that found itself in my heart.  Then, the next place I followed God to would be a place that reached people in my generation and would prepare itself to change to reach people in the next generation that arose after me. (That definitely is one of the worst sentences [gramatically] I have ever written, that’s why I kept it – for your enjoyment)

So then I decided to move north to Holden, Massachusetts, and specifically Wachusett Valley Baptist Church.  “Oh Lord, not another Baptist church,” I thought to myself, “I’ll never be able to drink alcohol.”

The reason I came  to this place, complete with about 20 members (3 of which are here now), is because I felt that the vision of the pastor linked up to my own vision for serving God, and my gifts could be used to further His kingdom.  Really it was about trust and respect.  I trusted that the pastor believed that God wanted to do a great work in this generation of believers just like He did a great work in the centuries and millenia before me.  And because of that trust, I respected His position of authority- not blindly, but understood that he had the right to make the decisions for our church.

Oh yeah, and I liked him.  This always helps.

Eventually he left.  Another man came in, and by this time I had been here for a few years, and could have made things difficult for the church by “becoming the authority.”  Instead, I humbled myself (this was not easy – I’m a pretty amazing guy) and placed myself under his authority too.  If his vision for the church would have been drastically different, I would have stepped down quietly, and found another church (probably outside of the cold tundra) that shared my vision.

But what I found was that the more I respected the pastor, and the more I humbled myself to learn from him (he was only 2 years older than me), the more our visions collided, and I began to find God growing me in ways I could have never imagined.  Eventually, he mentored me into a position that could fill his position because this fulfilled the gifts God gave me.

I laugh now when people say, “Wow, you must love it here”, because it is not my love for new England or Massachusetts that keeps me here.  If this were the case, I would have left a long time ago.  No, what keeps me here is that this is where God’s vision for my life has brought me.

Because I a) sought God’s vision for my life and a church that linked up to that vision and b) humbled myself before God and the authority He placed in my life, I believe I have been successful during my time here in Holden.

As the  pastor of Fellowship Church now, when someone comes into our church community from a churched background, this is what I’m looking for. I don’t have the attitude of anyone who wants to come can come.  To me, church is more important than that.  There are plenty of other churches someone can go to in New England if they want to find a church community.  But if you love church, and are looking for a church in this area (whether you live here already or not), before you “check out” Fellowship Church, please make sure you attempt to activate letters a) and b) above, because if you don’t, eventually you will get mad at something this pastor has done, and then…

you’ll blame it on the church.

p.s.  maybe we can start a conversation about what it means to be churched or unchurched?  What do you think it means?

I see it in my own life.  I watched, listened, learned, then made decisions in my life based on whether or not I thought they were wise.  But for the most part, while I tend to view their overarching role in my life very positively, I look at specific things more negatively and do my best to be different than them.

I’m talking about parents, and the way we react to them as we get older.  One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this is because of the growing number of people I hear on a regular basis who claim to do certain things because there parents did it another way, and that didn’t work for them.  Or at least it had an impact on why they made a particular decision.  Of course I also hear the complaints of the churches that “people just aren’t as committed as they used to be.”  I always laugh when I hear this because it has nothing to do with commitment, and more to do with the people who have “committed” themselves in the past.

In the past (and quite possibly, the present) church leadership has asked their communities to do activities and jobs that take up a huge amount of time and effort.  I don’t think this is wrong, except when it seriously undermines time and responsibilities with the family (I should qualify this by saying ‘immediate family’).  The results might not be immediate, but the child grows up resenting the church, and this is clearly not what Christ intended to happen.  I believe Andy Stanley calls it “choosing to cheat.”

In my own life, I love the amount of time my dad put into the church he pastored, but I look at other things that he did in the church and do things the complete opposite, not because he did them at that church, but because I think there is a better way.  Actually, I think he does things the complete opposite now too.

So we have two reasons why children grow up and change the way their parents acted – either they are resentful at the actions of their parents, or they just believe there is a better way.  Do you think there is a difference in the end results of the changes made by those who made them out of resentment and those who made them simply for improvement sake?

I do.

Whenever you make decisions about your future based solely on resentment to the past, I believe you stunt the possibilities God has for you in your life and close opportunities you might have been able to see otherwise.  For instance, I now see clearly that although my dad’s taste in music is less than adequate for a church in 2008, his leadership and people skills are far superior to mine, and I can only hope to learn a portion of where he has gone in his life.  I’m opening myself up to learn some and to improve some.

But their are things that I look at in my life that I can’t believe people did – whether to me or someone I love – and I can’t allow myself to make decisions out of resentment towards an individual or even an organization.

Some of my heroes are people who have overcome (or are overcoming) tremendous odds to become the person God wants them to be.  One person who has recently become a hero of mine (don’t tell her, she might get a big head) is Jenn. She’s also a pastors kid (always a resentment starter) and she works at our local Starbucks (God is good).  In late September/early October, doctors told Jenn, who’s around my age, that she has cancer. If you were to read through her blog in the last few months, you would realize that Jenn is not ignoring her situation or going through life without some serious questions for God, but she’s fighting through her circumstances, asking some hard questions, and freeing herself up to grow through her trials.

Now I don’t know if there are differences in this discussion between whether you go through a sickness or if someone imposes an undesirable circumstance in your life somewhere along the way, but I do know this:  That true heroes are the people who overcome the circumstances they may have gone through – either because of bad decisions of the adults in their lives, an illness we can’t shake, or a freak accident of nature that comes upon us – and fight and fight and fight to come out “shining as gold” on the other side.

2 things before I’m done with this post:
1.  This lady proclaimed me the “King of Hyperlink”  I now see why.  A gift from the king.
2.  My posts were so intense this week.  I’ve got to lighten up.

My mentor Lonnie, taught me a lot.  One of the things he taught me was knowing when to react and when to not react to any given situation.  The dude breathed focus and no emergency seemed to phase him.  “Things would go on and happen whether I choose to do something quick or slow or even not at all.”  Internally I never believed him, because I had been trained since the early days of my life to run when someone else says “run” and to jump when someone else says “jump.”

I realized the problems with this, but it was just so hard for me to say “no” or turn my back on something that supposedly required MY attention.  “But”, Lonnie would say,”sometimes it is not your attention the situation requires.”

Recently a situation like this arrived.  I had gone on a long walk with my wife and then I had some plans, and I had left my phone back at the house.  As the Voyager lay there, lonely and wanting, several calls came in vying for my attention.  “This requires your attention”, the voice said and “BIG TIME EMERGENCY HERE DUMMY!  WHERE ARE YOU!”  (Paraphrase and emphasis mine)

So when I finally did get to my phone, my stomach was sick as to what “hitrocities” I had imposed on innocent people by not being near my phone.  How could I have been so selfish?  How could I have been so thoughtless?

Thankfully Carie, my lovely wife/girlfriend/princess did some checking for me and everything had been taking care of.  Someone else was near there phone.  Someone who was actually close to the emergency in a relational way, and not just a token “preacher man.”  And the emergency wasn’t quite the emergency I had assumed it was.  The truth is, things went on without me.

This is the point of the church.  Not the pastor doing everything, though he or she certainly has an important task of leading in Scripture and by example.  But people in the church actually being the church.  And though it would be nice for me to be everywhere all at the same time, occasionally…

I have my phone surgically removed from my ear.

Rarely do I rant and rave about a particular topic on my blog.  I just try to share experiences I’ve gone through in my life, so that you may be able to relate or learn from any of these experiences.  Today’s post needs to start off with this explaining, because I’m not ranting and raving, I’m just writing an experience.

In this post I shared that on my vacation, Carie and I drove to the tip of Massachusetts to go to the beach.  This is a place known as Provincetown, and has a particular reputation of being inhabited heavily by the homosexual community.  The beach was small and private and we were pretty much with a small handful of people the whole day.

That evening however, we drove to the downtown area of P-Town where the shops are world renowned for all things art.  We began to walk through the crowded streets, and I instantly knew I had never been in a setting like this.  I’ve seen guys holding hands with guys and shows like Grey’s Anatomy on Television have tried really hard to push their agenda of making me think this is normal behavior, but this atmosphere proclaimed things that I had never seen before.

Almost the entire town it seemed, save for a handful of shop dwellers, derived their identities and festivities from dressing opposite of their culturally perceived genders (aka drag queens), walking around in their underwear, or simply holding hands with their loved ones who happened to be the same gender.

Now before you judge me for being a biggot or old-fashioned or a compromiser or whatever you might judge me based on your perspective of what I’ve written so far, you should know that I believe that sex is a gift from God, is part of his plan to populate the earth, and is designed especially for a married man and a married woman (to each other, by the way).

The purpose of this post, which I’m sure will receive both positive and negative comments,  is not to bring condemnation on these actions though, but to bring condemnation to the church.  About halfway through the town, there was a big white church, as there commonly is in the center of most towns in the US.  It was a mainline denomination.  There was an event going on at the chuch the same evening I walked through the town.  It wasn’t music (though there was a drag queen singing karaoke nearby), and it wasn’t sharing the true love of God that comes through Jesus Christ.  It was Bingo.

In fact, as I walked by, the bingo dj yelled out as loud as he (or she) could, “O-69″ to the wild cheers of the crowd around.

I was sick.  And I thought to myself, “Why aren’t we doing something about this?”  I don’t mean something like hand out gospel tracks and preach against the long hair and short skirts of the passerbys, I mean, “Why has the church of Jesus Christ just abandoned this town.  Why wasn’t anyone doing something? 

I’ll be asking myself this question for a while, and my prayer is that God would consume me with the answer and the remedy.  My hope is that someday my church will be able to plant a church that leads people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ in provincetown, Mass.  A church that will not have a freakin bingo game in the middle of the city during night life or even have a nerdy guy with a bullhorn yelling “you’re going to hell!”, but will be a shining light of the love of God in a place that mistakenly believes that “feeling good” is what life is all about.

Until then, may God continue to burden you and I for people and places like this.  May we get ourselves out of our Christian ghettos.

Things I didn’t say in this post
Homosexuals are going to hell. (No more than the deacon who is into porn or the pastor who cheats on his wife deserves hell.  Or the girlscout who steals money from her cookie sales.  Sin is sin is sin.  God hates all of it.)
Homosexuals are a lower class of people. (They are not.)
Homosexuals are going to heaven.  (Jesus said:  “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the father, but by me” )

Thats me, the fourth from the front on the left
I am so busy relationally right now, I can’t even believe it.
And I have no clue how to slow it down or even if I should slow it down.
My schedule is filled with people, people, people.
From people at Fellowship, to people in the Central Massachusetts area, to friends visiting from out of town.
I haven’t had a busier two months (July and August) relationally since college, but don’t tell anyone I went there.
A shout out to my beautiful wife Carie (third from the front on the right) for her patience and love through the busyness.

And all thanks to God!  I love my life!

Yesterday I posted about Sunday Morning @ Fellowship, and shared about the chipmunk that decided to join us.  Today I wanted to share a few thoughts I wanted to write down concerning my message that day:

1.  Any group (family, church, organization, country, etc…) is based on an ideal. (i.e.freedom, love, justice, peace, etc…)

2.  That ideal is propagated by a core group of people who sacrifice for that ideal.

3.  Those who sacrifice are followed by a larger group of people who give valuable service.

4.  Eventually that group reaps the fruit of their efforts.

5.  The fruit and the ideal should be the same thing.  Far too often in our culture, the fruit is comfort, which is typically not the ideal.

6.  Fruit over time, goes bad; and so we need new fruit, which means new sacrifice.

Later this week, I’ll give examples for each of these 6 progressive thoughts.

Would you add to or disagree with this list?

It’s Monday, almost a week since my last post, and I admit that it has been a nice break from the norm of daily blogging.  But I’m also glad to be back.  Thanks for not giving up on Marty Holman or his blog.  I’ve learned a lot in the last week.  I can’t wait to share and hear your feedback.  I’ll just say this about where I’m at in my life right now.  I love it!

I have a great wife, family (including my church family), and situation.  Yesterday’s service at Fellowship only materialized what I already know about where we’re headed.  Before it’s all said and done, God is going to bring a whole part of the country toward Him like never before right in front of our very eyes.

Notice I didnt say to a subculture or a style, but to Him.  I’m pumped for my friends and family and church because they get to be a part of this amazing time in New England history.  I’m pumped for you.  Because you can be a part of it too.  How?

Just ask.