Dan Cooley's Blog, page 31

Give This! The Radical 2011 Christmas Gift

[image error]What do you need for Christmas this year?

Admit it. You don't need anything - at least nothing a Visa card can buy. And it gets worse.

Most of the people on your list don't need anything either.

So - do something different this year. Do something radical. Since it's Jesus' birthday, not ours - give to Him. Give Him a drink. "When you did it (visited, gave water, gave food) to one of the least of these... you were doing it to me!" Mt 25:37-40. Keep reading - and don't miss the chart!

 

The Problem:

Haiti has the highest infant mortality rate in the Western Hemisphere. More than half of all deaths are due to bad water. Hepatitis, cholera, and chronic diarrhea are carried in the water. Haiti now has the highest rate of cholera in the world.

 

Our Opportunity:

The town of Pierre Brizare, where Ira (a friend of mine and member of Cottonwood Church) grew up, is still lacking clean drinking water.  The closest clean drinking water to Pierre Brizare is 18k (about 11miles) away.  Walking 22 miles, half of it with full water buckets is too much for many people.  For that reason most dig holes in the ground a short distance from a stream hoping and praying that the water is clean.  Often it isn't.

Ira's parents donated the land the school is on - and on this land we have permission to put in a well.  The cost for a well in Haiti is around USD $11,000. That sounds like a lot, but...

* If this Christmas is normal, Americans will spend between 450 and 500 billion dollars on Christmas this year, or around $1000.00 a family.

* To solve the water problem on the entire planet would cost between 10-15 billion dollars.

Something is messed up here. The opportunity is so simple, so amazing, why don't we help change this?

If you click here, you will go to "The Haiti Well Project" site where you can give directly to the well project through PayPal. Make certain to put "Haiti Well" on the "purpose" line.  Otherwise the money will go into the general Cottonwood Church account.  We are OK with that, but you might not be.

You can use the gift card below if you want to use the Haiti Well Project to give in someone's name. Simply right-click and save the picture, then print it out, fill it out and give it away. You, and the people of Haiti, and Jesus, will be radically blessed.

 

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"When you did it (visited, gave water, gave food) to one of the least of these... you were doing it to me!"

Mt 25:37-40.

 

Staplewood

[image error]This is too cool.

Stapleton Elementary, the school our church meets in, is having a craft sale this Sat. from 9-2.

They asked for our help to run the bake sale part of the sale.

We agreed.

There was a problem with the school selling food, so they told us we weren't needed anymore.

We agreed.

But then, they offered us a table, to sell crafts and promote Cottonwood Church and our Haiti Well Project.

We agreed.

How cool is that? I think we should re-name the church Staplewood.

No one here seems to  agree.

Below is the article we are hoping the Rio Rancho Journal will print about the event.

 

Give something real this Christmas!

E. Stapleton Elementary School (3100 8th Ave, RR 87114) is having a Craft Fair on Saturday, December 3rd, 2011. All proceeds from the booth rentals go directly to E. Stapleton ES. Buy a gift, support a school, how cool is that? But that's only just the beginning…

You can help Haiti too.

Stapleton has some students from Haiti who go to Cottonwood Church. Cottonwood rents Stapleton for Sunday services. At the Craft Fair there will be a booth where you can help put a Water Well in Haiti. Cottonwood has had land donated in Pierre Brizare, Haiti for a school and a well. This land now has a school, but it still needs the well.

Haiti has the highest infant mortality rate in the Western Hemisphere, and more than half of all deaths are due to bad water. Drinking it can result in hepatitis, cholera, and chronic diarrhea.  But this Saturday you can help.

It will take around $11,000 to put a clean deep-water well in Pierre Brizare. It's our hope that Cottonwood's connections + Stapleton's location + your generosity will save lives.

This Christmas buy some cool crafts, support a local school, and save lives at a Haitian school through clean water. Give something real this Christmas!

 

I Don't Want to be Thankful

[image error]I'm so much better at whining.

The country is in debt, the church isn't growing like I'd like, and JoLynn is only mostly perfect. I've had three mentor/friends die this year – Alice, Steve and Eric. I know they are happier where they are, but I'd be happier if they were here. However it did motivate me.

I had my first physical this year. Walking out I read the Albuquerque Journal newspaper headline which said, "Feds Probe Richardson Campaign." It's amazing how one hour in a doctor's office can change the meaning of a word forever.

So I whine. I whine about probes and death and debt - until somebody illustrates the foolishness of it all.

Half way through the bloodiest conflict in US history, in a war with no end in sight (it would end with over a million US causalities), on 10/03/1863 our un-whining US president said…

"In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude & severity… peace has been preserved w/all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected & obeyed, & harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict… They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God…. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States… to set apart & observe the last Thursday of November, as a day of Thanksgiving & Praise to our Father who dwells in Heaven."

President Lincoln understood it's better to thank God for what you do have than whine about what you don't.

Fundamentalism Made Me Weird

[image error]Churched is a book I just finished by Matthew Paul Turner. It's a humorous book about growing up in a Baptist Fundamentalist home/church. I think Matthew's weirdness climaxed with him having to use his middle name. I mean, other than Southerners with the MaryJo kind of names, who uses middle names anymore? It's weird, but that's not all...

The Good:

Best line in the book: Fundamentalism made me weird. So true. Me too. At least, that's what I blame it on.

Turner somehow makes his upbringing in a fundamentalist Baptist church the closest thing to hell on earth, but does so without making a devil out of anybody. Well, maybe anybody but his pastor and a wacko Barbie-burning Sunday-school teacher. But hey, they had it coming. The counting souls, scaring folks into Heaven - I could relate to most of it. That was fun. And, some parts of the book were really funny. Turner is funny. But…

The Bad:

Enough already! For the first ¾ of the book I was looking for some redemption, some reason to continue reading. Was there really nothing of value in that church? Some smart comments are funny, but the continual avalanche of them made me want to put the book down to come up for air. You can smack even a fundamentalist just so many times. It's an easy target, but I was looking for something more…

The Ugly:

There was little more. I was hoping for some direction, instruction, some help in a humorous way. Instead Churched just poked fun at fundamentalism with a bit of introspection at the end.

The last section had a bit of hope and help, but by now I was tired of it all. It left me feeling like I'd been forced to eat too many chocolate covered cherries. It was fun at the beginning, but at the end I wasn't laughing anymore and didn't want to eat much of anything Turner had left to offer. Sorry, anything Michael Paul Turner had left to offer.

I received this book free from Multnomah Books for review. I was (obviously) not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. danielcooley.com

Us Against the Turkey... and the Idiot

[image error]It was us against the turkey.

We planned to leave at 3pm on Thursday to go turkey hunting.

We left at 4:30.  We is my son Caleb age 17, his friend Kyle, also 17, my future son-in-law Jake, and Max. Max is 1/3 Husky, 1/3 Bernese Mountain Dog, and 1/3 idiot.

We planned to be set up high and dry before the sun went down.

We set up after 6. In the dark. In the snow. On the side of a hill. In 18f degrees. Then it got cold.

But we had a tent-trailer.

The heat went out at 2am. It was colder than… 18f.

Friday was better. It didn't have much choice.

After breaking our frozen boots loose from the floor of the trailer we drove down 500' to where there was solid ground to set up on. What took two hours the night before now took 20 minutes. We drank hot cocoa, loaded our shotguns, pulled up our long-underwear, and went hunting. I told the boys if it was legal, they could shoot it - as long as they ate it. It sounded like fun. But...

There were no turkeys. No rabbits. No squirrels. No tweety-birds. No lizards. Only silence, mud, snow, clouds, and thousands of turkey tracks laughing at us.

I fixed the heater. We ate what we brought from Wal-Mart. We should have shot the dead lunch-meat so we could have said we only ate what we shot. It sounds cool. I slept great until 2am when the dog wanted out. And until 2:30 when he wanted out again. And until 6:30 when he wanted out again. I think Max and the turkeys were in cahoots. 

Saturday was better. It didn't have much choice.

The sun came out. Birds chirped. Ants crawled. We burned them.

On the last hike/hunt I brought Max because 1 – we hadn't seen anything anyway, and 2 – how could he make things worse?

I used a long rope and tied Max to a belt loop, loaded my gun, and Jake and Max and I took off. We took this cool hike up a trail that led us to an awesome overhang/cave in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Turkey tracks were all over, even on top of each other. Things were looking good. We kept hiking until we came to this beautiful meadow up on a hill. We went just past the edge of the meadow and sat down in some mostly dry pine needles hidden by brush. Max calmed down. Then we heard the turkey – the turkey that is supposed to be mostly silent in the Fall. Thanksgiving dinner was walking right towards us.

Jake was laying prone, facing uphill in the direction of the gobble/kee, kee sounds. I was facing the other way and didn't want to budge for fear I'd scare the turkey away before it got close enough for Jake to get off a shot. Suddenly I thought, "This sounds just like the noises we were able to make on that turkey call we brought. Are we that good (having never done this before), or is this not a turkey but instead some unlucky guy walking down the hill with a turkey call in his hand?" After two nights and not a sight of a turkey, Jake was likely to shoot anything moving. Of course, as I said, he would have to eat it. 

No doubt about it, the sound was getting closer. Then silence. I was sure the turkey had left – then, almost as if I'd imagined it, up it came again, but a little louder this time. A little closer. Then silence. This happened three or four times. Surely, I though, Jake should see some turkeys by now. But the brush was thick and sounds travel far in the otherwise silent woods. And then it came!

Some ditzy blond rabbit came skipping down the hill. Max, ever a sucker for blonds let out his wolf howl/bark/yell and took off drooling. Turkeys within a 200 mile radius flew for safety. Elk cowered. The ground shook. I was frantically trying to put down my gun, untangle myself from the rope, and not shoot myself or the dog in 1.3 seconds. Then I remembered the rope was tied to my jeans.

Max ripped the jeans apart in stride and kept on running.

It was supposed to be us against the turkey. The dog won.

 

Turkey Hunting

[image error]I've never been hunting. Thursday I go.

It's stinking cold outside – had some flurries today. And we are just a mile high.

Turkey hunting is in the mountains they tell me. Like 8000 ft high and up.

There is snow there now. It's not melting.

I'm taking my son Caleb, his friend Kyle, my future son-in-law Jake and possibly my current son-in-law Jon.

None of us have shot anything except for paper targets, beer cans and the occasional unlucky lizard. Once we killed a butterfly.

With a 12-gage.

It took two shots.

Pray for a blind, deaf turkey to wander into our camp. That way we can get off 7-8 shaky frozen hand shots before it flies away.

And pray for mountain warming. I'm a wimp.

If you have suggestions for us, send away. I'd write more but I need to turn on the electric blanket an hour before bedtime...

Dead or Alive

[image error]I just read Tom Clancy's Dead or Alive. All 950 pages. It killed me.

This may be the first Clancy book I've read. It may be the last.

I love the fun  way an author can turn a phrase, insight into personalities, quotes you want to use later.

This book didn't have much for me to love.

Read at your own risk. I'm going to go take a jog. Need to work out the rigamortis.

Extraordinary: The Good. The Bad. And the Ugly.

For this book John Bevere should have heeded some wise words from my first Camp Director. He said…

"At this camp we do two things. We have fun and we make disciples. If you mess up, then mess up on making disciples. Have fun. At least then the campers will come back next year and someone else can introduce them to Christ. If you try to make disciples at camp and have no fun, you won't succeed at either."

The Good:
Extraordinary focuses on making disciples. There is some great truth hidden in here. His emphasis on God's grace giving us the power to live life differently was well done. I'll steal some for future sermons myself – for sure.

The Bad:
John seems to be a bit hyper-dispensational, seeing Old Testament believers as unable to live the life God now calls us to live. He sees Jesus as raising the bar in the New Testament when He calls us to live a "perfect/holy" life. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what John was teaching, but it seems to me Jesus was not raising the bar, but clarifying where the bar was set. The Pharisees moved it, Christ re-set it.

The Ugly:
Extraordinary reads to me like a collection of poorly organized sermons. With better editing, maybe 25% shorter, this could have been a fun, exciting encouragement of dying to self and allowing Christ to live through you. Instead it was dull.  I kept putting it down, waiting a week, telling myself it couldn't be that bad, trying again, putting it down… There were always paragraphs to mark, good content hidden in the chapters, but getting there was work. John is a better author than this – don't let this sour you on his other books.

I received this book free from Multnomah Books for review. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. DanielCooley.com

Halloween Bible Story

I love Halloween Bible Stories. Here's one of my favorites.

A Jewish guy dies. He starts to smell. His friends want to dig him a nice tomb, but the mean Moabites are hanging around. They kill Jews for sport. They could bury him in a hole in the front yard, but that seems morbid. One day they get out their binoculars and recheck the road to the tombs. The Moabites are gone!  They grab the now stiff corpse, dash to the tombs and start digging. The elf-eyed binocular look-out guy lets out a whoop. The Moabites are coming!

Not wanting to join their friend in the afterlife, they find a tomb they can open. It's Elisha's tomb. Believing Elisha's bones won't complain about double-bunking, they toss his corpse into the tomb with Elisha. That's when it gets weird.

Their rigamortis friend jumps to life. Hopefully he saw the Moabites coming and got back to town with his friends. Otherwise it was one short resurrection.

The principle? Ministry (the funeral) is worth the pain (the Moabites) because it raises the dead.

2Ki 13:21 (NLT) Once when some Israelites were burying a man, they spied a band of these raiders. So they hastily threw the corpse into the tomb of Elisha and fled. But as soon as the body touched Elisha's bones, the dead man revived and jumped to his feet!

Will This Win?

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Can we do it? Can we really win?

The Orange Church Conference is offering 5-free tickets for the best letter asking for them. We need 'em. Here is our plea (but without the cool pictures that make it more fun...

Greetings Orange Conference People,

Here are our "top 10" reasons for awarding 5 registrations for Orange 2012 to the Ministry Team of Cottonwood Church of Rio Rancho, NM.


1.    We're Stoked. Last year we took up some special offerings with orange envelopes in order to send Susan, our Children's Director, to the conference. We were shocked as people who were already familiar with and sold on Orange, gave enough for the bus ticket, used tent, Orange ticket and MRE meals (I lie. She flew and had a cool hotel with unlimited happy meals.) Susan came back stoked, and her energy has been contagious. Her "Boot Camp" (teacher training) has the children's leaders, parents, and now youth leaders catching the Orange virus. Shoot – she even forces us to eat "Orange Pops" for snacks. (We don't mind so much, they're chocolate inside.)

2.    We need Orange Counseling. We're a 13 year old church from Albuquerque that restarted three years ago in an elementary school in Rio Rancho, NM. We average around 120 people on Sunday. We have taken our staff (OK, 1 full-time pastor, a 1/3 time worship pastor and a 4 phenomenal volunteers) and elders through Seven Practices of Effective Ministry and Next Generation Leader.  As a result we are updating our vision and focusing on "wins" through discipleship. 2012 is the year of the MOVE for us (stealing from last year's conference). But, we really need more training to make it the game-changing experience it could be. And, the problem is…

3.    We're Destitute. Well, not quite – but close enough. We still give to Haiti (Maranatha Children's Home, and are saving to build a well), as well as going there on mission trips. We also give to families in need at the school we rent - but we've have had to reduce our own operating budget yet again for 2012. Cutting sucks. We can take special offerings to send one person to Orange again, but at this rate the process of integrating Orange throughout all ages is a bit like driving cross-country on a moped. We will get there – but when? We are hoping/praying/willing-to-bribe for the 5-free-tickets. That would be a bit like driving cross-country in a Ferrari. Do you like orange pops?

4.    We're Odd. Other churches give flowers at child dedication. We give real, wooden, orange arrows. The idea comes from Psalms 127:4 "Children born to a young man are like arrows…", and wanting to find creative ways to connect Sunday Morning with Orange. Jesus helped odd people. You should too.

5.    We're Dangerous. Out here, to reach out to other men, we go Jeepin' and Shootin'. For graduation our girls receive daggers, our guys swords. Each of these milestone gifts are engraved with Scripture demonstrating their next step in Christ. But they still cut and shoot. And, we are really bad losers. And we know where you meet.

6.    We Want to Win. After going through the Seven Practices of Effective Ministry, we generically defined a win for us as "when we enable someone to take one step closer to becoming what God intends for them." Each ministry defined a win for their ministry using this as a guide. As a church we want every ministry, every believer/minister to be enabled to take their next step (MOVE) towards Christ. We believe Orange is a key component in making this vision a reality, and the conference would help our other ministry leaders to fully understand and implement the vision. If we lose now, of course, it would all be your fault.

7.    We've Never Done This Before. We've never been able to attend a conference together. Not nowhere. Not no how. It's always been hit-and-miss. Maybe a few going to the Willow Leadership telecast, or a couple going to a conference in the Dallas area. But for all our staff to go to a conference together, with every major ministry area represented – wow! That would be like opening all your Christmas gifts and realizing you are in Ground Hog Day. (What - you aren't familiar with Bill Murray's greatest role before Zombieland? You are sadly young.)

8.    We're a Team. Check out http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2.... It's an article we team wrote on team teaching for Leadership Journal. From the nursery to the sermons we do things together. The way we are wired, we just can't do Orange in a kid's ministry vacuum.

9.    We're Alive! Six other portable churches in our immediate area have closed since the recession hit in late '08. God has been gracious to keep us going. Lives are being changed and we believe it's time for us to step up to become the most biblical, healthy, fun, efficient community of disciple-making believers on the planet. Later we'll push for a big goal. Meanwhile Orange can help us make this one a reality.

10.    Cottonwood Trees are Orange. Inside. Kind of. We want to be Orange inside too. Will you help us?