All of our podcasts/recorded messages/Sunday morning teachings are being currently converted to a new format, and can be found HERE,
http://www.grassrootschurch.org/podcasting/sermon-audio/.

Eventually this link will have an easily accessible and permanent place on our front page. For the interim, you can reach our most recent teachings from our front page, where they are linked on the right-hand column.

Thank you for your patience while we merge podcasts.
-Erin

It’s taken a little while, but we have now posted audio for most of the Gospel of Mark: Following @Jesus on Twitter series. You can find them under The Gospel of Mark in Teaching Downloads. Since these were all posted at one time, here is a list of the date, speaker, and status for each week of this series. Thanks for your patience in waiting for these to be posted!

Week 1 – Aug. 15 – Steve – POSTED

Week 2 – Aug. 22 – Matt – POSTED

Week 3 – Aug. 29 – Mark – POSTED

Week 4 – Sept. 5 – Mark. Unfortunately, no audio exists for this week as we had our service at Pohiki and did not have audio recording equipment.

Week 5 – Sept. 12 – Steve – POSTED

Week 6 – Sept. 19 – Matt – POSTED

Week 7 – Sept. 26 – Mark – POSTED

Week 8 – Oct. 3 – Steve – Technical Difficulties. Will be posted soon.

Week 9 – Oct. 10 – Matt – POSTED

Week 10 – Oct. 17 – Steve – Unfortunately, audio for this week was not properly recorded so we have nothing to post.

Week 11 – Oct. 24 – Mark – POSTED

Week 12 – Oct. 31 – Matt – POSTED

Week 13 – Nov. 7 – Steve – POSTED

November 10th—December 20th

Update:  Thank you to everyone who prayed.  God answered our prayers in some incredible ways.  We now have a balanced budget for the first 6 months of 2010 and God has given some very clear guidance for what this next season of ministry will look like.

The Vision
From the beginning, Grassroots has had the vision of planting a self-sustaining and multiplying gospel movement that brings spiritual and social renewal to Puna and the world.

God’s Past Faithfulness
Over the last two and a half years we have moved slowly but consistently towards this vision. We have been blessed by a strong and unified leadership team, favor in the community, fruitfulness in gospel ministry, and consistent financial provision.

Our Present and Future Need
Grassroots Church is coming to a very significant crossroads as a young church. The support from our sending church expired in 2009 and in 2010 we will be on our own for sustaining the financial side of our ministry. For 2009, our budget was almost as tight as it could be without giving up either our full-time pastor or our sunday meeting location. In 2010, our budget will be even tighter and we are estimating that if the giving of the present Grassroots people remain the same, we will still need an additional $1,700-$2,000 a month to make budget.

The Possible Consequences of our Budget Deficit
The honest reality is that ministry costs money and if we cannot make budget we will need to give up our building and/or the blessing of having a full-time pastor. While the church is so much more than a meeting location and a pastor, our concern is that this downsizing will cost us dearly in momentum and ministry opportunities.

A Solemn Call to Prayer, Fasting, and Mission
We are calling everyone who considers Grassroots to be their home church to join us in a focused season of prayer, fasting, and mission for 40 days.

Beginning: Tuesday November 10th and Ending: Sunday December 20th.

Prayer Gatherings Wednesday Evenings @ the Grassroots Office 7pm-9pm during 40 Days.

Prayer, Fasting and Mission Details
Our heart is to be united together as we seek God and so we would encourage everyone who participates to use the prayer and mission guide on the back of this sheet for direction and accountability. No one else will see your sheet but we would encourage you to fill it in throughout the 40 days.

We are asking people to choose one day a week for themselves in which they will fast from 1-3 meals and spend the time they would normally be eating in prayer. We would also encourage people to consider fasting from TV, Internet, movies, etc. and to instead spend this time in prayer and Bible reading. For more on fasting, see Hunger for God.
We will be having group prayer gatherings at the church office once a week during the 40 days and we would ask that everyone who participates make it a priority to attend at least one of these gatherings.

For help on fasting, download A Hunger for God intro by John Piper: Hunger for God Intro

A new website offers some very helpful information is sifting through the fact and fantasy of Dan Brown’s book and movie.  For those interested, there is also a site dedicated to The Da Vinci Code.

I am a homegrown Punatic with a love for the cultures and religions of the world.  In my studies, I recently came across an enlightening quote from Mahatma Gandhi, a man that I deeply respect.  Gandhi was asked by E. Stanley Jones, a friend and Christian missionary what advice he might have for indigenizing the teachings of Christ in India.  While Gandhi’s words apply directly to Christians like me, I believe that we can all learn from his insight and wisdom.

“I would suggest first of all that all of you Christians, missionaries and all, begin to live more like Jesus Christ”.

No one has ever lived like Jesus, but if Christians claim to know and worship him, then surely their lives should look a little more like that wild man from Galilee.  It is interesting to me when I hear people talk about “Christians.”  The names that usually go along with this title are are, “Evangelical, right-wing, conservative, fundamentalist.”  And if it wasn’t obvious enough, these are not often expressed as terms of endearment.  But occasionally I hear someone say, “The people at that church, they are real Christians.”  And with those simple words, there is a shared understanding.  We like “real Christians” because they are actually like their Master… and this is a very good thing indeed.

“Second” he said “I would suggest that you must practice your religion without adulterating or toning it down”.

Here Gandhi stands in stark contrast to all those who would seek to emasculate and relativize the teachings of Christ by making him into merely some self-realized guru, or a fabrication of church dogma.  As Gandhi knew, Jesus of Nazareth was the most radical and subversive man to have ever lived and only when we take him at full strength will we experience the true power of his life and message.

“Third I would suggest that you must put your emphasis upon love, for love is the center and soul of Christianity”.

Politics, dogma, legalism, and the color of the new church carpet.  These are all the stupid things that churches often get caught up in.  “As I have loved you, so love one another.”  This is the whole of Christ’s message and this is where the focus of every professing Christian needs to be.

“Fourth I would suggest that you study the non-Christian religions and culture more sympathetically in order to find the good that is in them, so that you might have a more sympathetic approach to the people.”

We Christians are often quick to find the splinter in everyone else’s eye, all the while having a log of blindness and fear in our own.  I have learned many things from the spiritual quests of those on different paths than mine.  If Christians truly believe that the Creator God has revealed himself in all of creation, then perhaps we should be slower to judge and quicker to listen when one of our fellow creatures speaks to us about the Divine.

(Gandhi quotes from Christ of the Indian Road by E. Stanley Jones).

Enjoy.

John Piper has a great new article on nudity.  This is relevant for us in how we should think about our local nude beach, Kahena.

Ray Fowler has a great post about cohabitation before marriage. It never ceises to amaze me how obedience to the scriptures (especially when it comes to family life) really does lead to the healthiest and most fulfilled life possible. Check out the statistics for cohabitation here.

Check out more great sermon videos by Pasor Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church

While the Da Vinci is no longer such a hot topic of discussion, the issues that it brings up about the person of Jesus still remain relevant in our culture. While many Christians have avoided these issues out of fear, the heart of Grassroots Church is to examine all truth claims about Jesus so that we can embrace what is true and to reject what is not. To understand our culture and to discern the truth about the authentic Christ, all followers of Jesus should wrestle with the questions raised by the Da Vinci Code. Questions like:

Was Jesus married to Mary Magdalene and did they have any children?
Did Jesus ever claim to be God or was that just an invention of the Church?
What about the “Lost Gospels” and why were they not included in the Bible?
Was the idea of the sacred feminine edited out of the Bible?
What was the secret discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls?

There have been many Christian responses to Dan Brown’s book that have offered compelling answers to these claims but sadly while his book is very entertaining and engaging, the responses have tended to be rather academic and technical.

So for those who sincerely do wonder about the questions brought up in the Da Vinci Code but who do not have the time or the patience to read through one of the technical responses to it, I have gathered the best (and most engaging) online resources on the topic:

If you enjoy reading, Dr. Darrell Bock has written a great short article entitled Christian Analysis of Da Vinci Code: What Dan Brown Did Not Tell You – Three Major Errors Plus a Few More

Below are some audio lectures that are both enlightening and engaging-

The DaVinci Code (Part 1): Was There a Plan to Suppress “Secret” Gospels? by Dr. Craig Blomberg
The DaVinci Code (Part 2): Was There a Conspiracy to Concoct a Divine Jesus? by Dr. Craig Blomberg
The Da Vinci Code Adventure by Mike Gunn
The Story of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Dr. Martin Abegg
The Story of the Dead Sea Scrolls Q and A by Dr. Martin Abegg

(All files are in the mp3 format. Left click on the link to listen, right click and select download file to download)

If you have ever wondered if Jesus really went to India to study and to teach, read this article.

Here is a quote from the article to give you an idea of the issues that it deals with:

Did Jesus travel to the East to study under gurus? Did He become “the Christ” as a result of what He learned and accomplished there? Are there mystical “gospels” that have been suppressed by the church, keeping us from knowing the real Jesus? In this article, we will look at these and other important questions related to the Jesus of the New Age movement. We begin by examining the claims of a controversial Russian writer.

Every religion or spirituality must come to grips with the question of evil and suffering.
There are 3 main families of answers to this question: Eastern, Scuralist, and Biblical. Rather than finding a common core between these three, the deeper that you go, the more differences that you will find.

Eastern
-Evil and suffering are at the heart of life.
-The world is driven by desire which leads to craving and to attachment.
-Death is not the problem, but rather dying and coming back again.
-There is not hope of a world beyond evil and suffering. There will never be a place or time with peace and justice.
-Rather there is renunciation. Withrawing and detachment. Nirvana is the great removal of personality, freedom from individuality (not freedom to be an individual). The great deathless lake of extinction.
-The desire that drives the cycle is the illusion that we are individual and separate from the rest of reality.
-While doing goods deeds to those who suffering will gain for us good karma, it will also not allow a suffering person to fully pay for their own karma, thus the motivation to seek justice and to bring healing to the broken is very weak in the eastern view.

Securalist
-Takes evil as seriously as the east.
-They fight it and try to make things right.
-The ultimate reality is chance. Time plus chance plus natural.
-As we fight suffering, we fight what is natural in the world and thus we cannot overcome it.
-It is like the parable of the Greek man pushing a stone to the top of a hill only to roll it down and bacdk up again.
-Life is never ending defeat. There is bravery and heroism but a bleekness.
-The average atheists just lives their life enjoying what they have and don’t think deeply about the meaninlessness of life. The great atheists like Camu and Nietzsche thought deeply about these things and came to the place of losing all hope for meaning in life.

Biblical
-Ultimate reality is not impersonal or a chance but a God who is persona, relational and infinite.
-The world of evil and suffering should have been otherwise. it is not how it was designed to be.
-The world will be better again and will be restored to peace and justice, without evil or suffering.
-Suffering and evil is a result of mankind’s revolt against our loving Creator.
-The four aspects of the curse that God brought on creation are related to our relationship with ourselves, others, creation, and God.
-Suffering and evil come to an end as the loving Creator enters his creation and brings restoration and shalom and undoes the broken relationships that have come as a result of the revolt against God.

Abba,
Your Word is written to strengthen us with endurance in hope (Rom. 15:4). Sometimes you minister to us through your word in our deepest moments of brokeness and longing.
In those moments of being alone, and feeling the wrenching fear of grief we hear those words that bring life, “I will never leave you nor forsake you (Josh. 1:5).”
Or we read the suffering of the Psalms, and we are strengthened as we consider that You, our God, took upon yourself all of our griefs, and sin, and bitterness, and lust, and pride, and all the horrible destruction that this idolatry has caused in our lives and the lives of those around us (Ps 22).
We thank you for those moments where you meet us at our deepest need.

But today we want to thank you also for the prophetic whispers of your Word, that come to us in our seasons of ease and comfort and shallow routines of religious duty. Whispers like Psalm 88.
So much of our Christian talk is full of pasty smiles and weak, “It will be oks.” We know the pop music of our faith, but have we forgotten the ancient hymns that know the deep reality of when sorrows like seas billows roll?
We hear the prophetic song of Psalm 88 and we are reminded that not every story and not every song (at least in this life) has a happy ending.

May this wake up our heart, as Peter says, may we be sober in spirit and prepared in our minds for action, fixing our hope completely on the grace to be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ (1 Peter 1:13).
Jesus, would you prepare the people of Grassroots Church to suffer with steadfast patience and joy.
In those moments when Psalm 88 is all that we can sing, and we do not see the light at the end of the tunnel of our despair,
please don’t let us give up on you,
or on each other,
or on the mission that you have given us.

May we have such joy in our suffering that the people in Puna really do say to us, “Tell me what is this hope that you have?” (1 Peter 3:15).
Through Christ our suffering King,
Amen.

What if the teachings of Jesus, rather than promoting religious hypocrisy, actually contain the greatest critiques of religious corruption ever spoken, and what if so many in the church, including those in leadership have simply missed the heart of what Jesus actually taught?

Share your thoughts and expepriences and let’s grow together into authentic followers of Jesus who are honest and open about our weakeness but quiet and hidden about our good works. Let’s be a “more jacked up than thou” church and not a “holier than thou” church.