Archives for July 2007

Renew, Revitalize, Reconnect (and fishing!)

July 16, 2007 by Keith Seabourn 2 Comments

Some people are beach people. For them, Florida must seem like heaven with 1,350 miles of coastline. But Kay and I are mountain people. I prefer my water in a mountain stream full of trout.

Kay and I are in Colorado. We’ve been here a while, and have a while longer to enjoy mountains. Every two years, all 5,000 U.S. staff of Campus Crusade for Christ gather on the campus of Colorado State University. Kay and I are sharing an apartment with our “boss” and friends Roger and Maggie Bruehl.

Our focus is a time to Renew, Revitalize, and Reconnect.

Renew our calling to fulltime ministry

Revitalize our spiritual lives with a change of pace

Reconnect to the big picture of the vision and direction of Campus Crusade for Christ as well as reconnect with our staff friends from around the U.S. and often from around the world.

RECREATING with nature (recreation)

Kay and I have done our share of fishing. It’s been great. We’ve fished the Poudre river. We’ve fished Red Feather Lakes. We’ve eaten one meal of trout. Very good!

This morning, we fished at the YMCA of the Rockies where we are for a few days. Kay caught one. I got skunked!

Acts: The Missionary Roadmap

July 16, 2007 by Keith Seabourn 5 Comments

One of the things I’ve done is to take a seminary-level study of the book of Acts taught by Trinity Evangelical Divinity School professor John Nyquist. This “bible study” came complete with

382 pages of textbook reading
28 chapters of Acts reading
a summary book chart of Acts giving titles to each chapter and paragraph
a 10 page paper

All this in 5 days of class( plus one day of writing the paper)! It was great. It was rewarding. It was refreshing. It was revitalizing.

The Holy Spirit reminded me of four major themes in the lives of the disciples and the early church:

Engaged in evangelism
Empowered by the Holy Spirit
Prayerfully dependent on Christ
Unafraid of persecution and sacrificial suffering

I wrote a paper to help me process my thoughts. You are welcome to read it if you want. It is in Adobe Acrobat format, so if you do not have Acrobat Reader, you can click here. It is free!

My paper is Acts-The Missionary Roadmap.

In case you can’t wait to get to the conclusion, I wrote:

What does this mean?

There seems to be a tendency to reduce the missionary enterprise to training, to strategies, to tactics, to methodologies. Acts is a reminder that at the core of the missionary enterprise is the commissioning of God to go, the empowering of the Holy Spirit for supernatural effectiveness, the communing of prayer for wisdom and direction in daily decisions, and the role of suffering in the “presentation to the nations of the sufferings of his cross in the sufferings of his people” (Piper).

Tell me what you think?

My birthday

July 8, 2007 by Keith Seabourn 5 Comments

Last Friday was my birthday. I’ve celebrated all weekend.

On Friday, Kay and I went fishing with friend Peter Culver. We didn’t catch anything, but the scenery was great. If you’re fishing but not catching anything, at least it was at 8,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies with pine trees all around! There are worse places to not catch anything!

When we returned, we went to eat Mexican food. My “friend” Peter promptly announced to the waiter that it was my birthday. Nothing happened, so I thought I was safe. Then at the end of the meal, I got to wear a sombrero while they sang in Spanish to me. At least we got free sopapillas out of the deal!

On Saturday evening, Kay took me for a steak and a movie. We saw Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (the new one). It was OK, but it was over 2 1/2 hours, so it seemed long.

After church, we came home and cooked our trout. That was great!

Tonight (Sunday evening), we had about 12 friends over for coffee, cake and ice cream. It was Blue Bunny ice cream, which is OK. We couldn’t find Blue Bell ice cream here!

I’ve decided that 56 is starting out really good.

Movement leaders

July 7, 2007 by Keith Seabourn 2 Comments

I read in Steve Addison’s World Changers blog today:

The breakthroughs in the renewal and expansion of the Christian movement always occur on the fringe. Why? Because those with the biggest investment in the past and the present have too much to lose by facing reality.

Plummeting attendances and ordinations are painful, but not terminal if you’re sitting on millions of (dollars, euros, pounds) worth of assets.

Movement leaders raise the sense of urgency. They face the brutal facts. They heighten discontent.

The italics are mine. These are the sentences that connected with me. I am a leader in my missionary organization, Campus Crusade for Christ. I am celebrating 31 years with Campus Crusade this summer. I have a big investment in the past and in the present.

But I also feel a sense of urgency. Reality is my friend. The status-quo is not my friend.

And I know other leaders who feel the same way also.

The discontented feelings that we can do better in accomplishing the Great Commission. The urgency of the needs today. The desire to unleash new momentum among students.

These thoughts led Campus Crusade leaders to call thousands of students to Busan, South Korea. 15,994 students and staff members from 121 countries concluded a conference this week in our first ever global student missions conference. It was a historic event. The theme: Christ Magnified, Connected Movements, and Completing the Mission.