Grace Church Spokane

It’s only ten and half months now until we make the move to Spokane and the countdown feels like it’s gaining speed. The training I’ve been doing (Church Planting Training, a great opportunity offered through Newfrontiers USA) is progressing nicely and I feel like God is honing me significantly through this. I’m currently reading Aubrey Malphurs’ book Planting Growing Churches For The 21^st Century and the Redeemer Church Planting Manual by Tim Keller and Allen Thompson. They’re challenging me to communicate a very clear vision for what God is calling us to do in Spokane. While I’ve had a pretty clear vision internally it’s been extremely helpful to have to write it down! I’ll give a brief summary in a minute, but here’s what else is up these days.

The kids and Becca are back in school and the fall schedule is in full swing: Irish dance for the girls, Boy Scouts for Gabe, church activities for all of them and our Community Group kicking off tonight. (The Community Group is our church’s version of smaller home groups since not everyone can really grow by just showing up at a meeting once a week on Sunday morning – in fact, no one really grows much that way!) Our Monday night group will focus in on relational evangelistic outreach into Missoula while also gearing up toward the church plant into Spokane. We’ll be asking anyone interested in joining the Spokane plant team to join us on Monday nights for prayer, training and outreach into Missoula.

We spent most of the summer getting our house ready to sell and it is finally on the market as of September. We had our first “open house” yesterday afternoon to show it. The place looks great and should sell itself if we can get people through the door. (If anyone knows someone looking for homes in Missoula send them our way – we’re selling this house ourselves. Don’t worry, we sold our last house ourselves too and it worked out great.) Please pray that we can connect with the right buyer for our home!

Okay, here’s a little sneak peak into the future of Grace Church Spokane. (Yeah, that’s still a potential name, but it’s gaining momentum. Let me know what you think of it!)

Why We Are Here:

Grace Church Spokane exists to glorify God as we enjoy and serve Him, each other, our city and the nations of the world.

I know you expected to read more, but there will be much more on the way soon. For now, notice two key words: “enjoy” and “serve.” These will be very important to the success and future of Spokane Grace Church. We will enjoy God, enjoy life together, enjoy the city of Spokane and enjoy connecting internationally. We will also be intentionally involved in service in every one of these areas. Sound like a challenge? Come with us. It will be hard work but it will also be greatly rewarding.

This Is My Passion

Maybe it's the fact that I'm teaching a songwriting class at the moment, or maybe it's the fact that I've said yes to God's prodding to step out of my comfort zone yet again. Maybe it's because both of these things have me praying a lot, but whatever it is, I feel like I'm getting more song ideas than I have in a really long time. While I tend to get lots of little song "sprouts," in recent years I've have a hard time bringing a lot of them through to completion so that they are usable for our local church congregation. My "seed file," as my songwriting idea file is affectionately known, is full of partial songs, choruses, titles, melodies and harmonic ideas. Lately though, the ideas are turning into completed songs and it feels really great.

I pulled out a song idea from 2009 last week and have been playing with all sorts of lyrical ideas to flesh it out. It feels really close but with a few potential weak spots: It has two working titles at the moment: "Passion" and "Risen One." It also has a different chorus for each verse. This might mean it needs to be honed in a bit. There are some others, but we'll leave it at that for now. The lyrics as of Thursday night, May 10 read as follows:

Passion (Risen One)

This is my passion, to live this life for You

With one desire: to honor You

Jesus, my Portion, I live for Your pleasure

To serve You forever, to worship You

To sing of the wonderful work of Jesus

Saving the sinners to call us sons

Of blood that was poured out to make us holy

Perfectly dressed in the righteousness of the Risen One

This is our passion, to carry Your kingdom

In this generation, declaring Your truth

So fill us again, Lord, with power from heaven

Provoking the nations to worship You

The sons and the daughters of many nations

Praising the Father, we join as one

Freely adopted through great salvation

Now we are dressed in the righteousness of the Risen One

©2011 JonnyDavids Music

On Saturday night I have the opportunity to have this song evaluated by a veteran Christian musician and songwriter, Bob Kilpatrick. In the 1980's Bob penned the song "Be Glorified" which became one of the most widely sung worship songs in the world and it's still sung in countless churches today. One of his songs was sung at Mother Teresa's funeral, resulting in a public compliment from Hillary Clinton. Bob is going to be leading a clinic for worship musicians, leaders and songwriters Saturday at 7 pm. He'll be evaluating songs from two or three local songwriters as a part of the evening. What fun! We'll see what kind of changes the lyrics undergo as a result of Saturday and I'll be sure to post them here.

PS - If you'd like to hear Bob speak and lead worship he'll be doing both on Sunday night, May 15 at 7 pm at Clark Fork City Church. His band will be made up of local musicians! (Surprise!!)

Hey everyone. I just realized that we've written several new songs that we forgot to post to our scribd.com page. I'm posting chord charts tonight for the following songs:

Send Us

Kingdom Of God

Just To Worship You

We Are Forgiven

Feel free to use these songs! (If your church is in its reporting period for your CCLI License, it's helpful if you report any copies you make! And I can make tens and tens of dollars!!) Ha!

The Rest Of The Story

While any story like this begins in the heart of God, it became real to me in 2003. My wife and I had vacationed in Spokane since our honeymoon in the mid-90’s and had felt a growing love for its people and culture ever since. After an enjoying afternoon in Riverfront Park we were headed home to Missoula, Montana when I asked the question: “What if we started a church here?” We began to talk and dream and eventually asked the leader of our church in Missoula, Steve Valentine, what he thought about it. He asked if we would be willing to stay in Missoula so I could help train church planting teams. After more prayer I agreed and thought that maybe I would get to train a team to be sent to Spokane in the future.

I dived headlong into training leaders and specifically worship leaders at our church – Clark Fork City Church – where I have served on staff since 1998 leading worship and then serving on the leadership team as a pastor/elder since 2004. As we were preparing to launch our leadership training school Steve was diagnosed with leukemia and battled for sixteen months before God received him into heaven in November of 2006. Though we experienced much turmoil God was more than faithful to our church, and we came through the fire full of great faith, more convinced than ever of the sovereign purposes of God even in the midst of great struggle.

Fast forward to 2009 at the Newfrontiers USA national leaders conference in St. Louis, Missouri: A bold pastor from South Africa named PJ Smyth had been preaching about the exciting vision of planting churches into the one hundred most influential cities in the United States. He led us in prayer as we focused on specific cities like Chicago and New York. As we began to pray, Spokane came to my mind and I began to weep over the city. The enormous knot in my throat made it difficult to pray at all and I actually felt a little twinge of guilt because I wasn’t praying for the cities we had been asked to pray for! It was only after the prayer meeting was over that I discovered that Spokane was actually on that list of one hundred cities! God had caused an old dream to resurface with a brand new vision.

Later in 2009 I had the opportunity to talk with Terry Virgo about the possibility of planting a church into Spokane. He remembered back to his first trip to the US when he flew into the city of Spokane. He had felt then that God said we would have a church there one day and was very encouraging to me about a potential plant into the city.

We continued to pray and the next year at another Newfrontiers USA event, Celebration Northwest, we were again gathered to pray. John Lanferman, the leader of the apostolic team overseeing our churches in the US, dared us to ask God for big things and to call them right out loud in the meeting. The atmosphere of faith was high! I wanted to declare my desire for a reproducing church in Spokane but felt I should not go “public” with that until we did that intentionally as a team. I talked to Josh Yakos, the lead pastor of Clark Fork City Church, after the meeting and he said, “I wanted to ask for a church in Spokane too but thought I should talk to you first.” More confirmation.

After the meeting at Celebration NW I told Ted Hoit, a Newfrontiers leader in Idaho, that we needed to start talking about “when” rather than “if” we would plant into Spokane. He grinned and told me that he and his wife had already been praying about Spokane and us and that they were excited to see us plant into that city. I talked with John Lanferman immediately and in late August we started the preliminary work to discuss making a plant into Spokane real.

Eight months and several leadership evaluations later we’ve finally gone public and the response has already been overwhelming. Twitter and the blogosphere have seen to that. While I’m used to taking big faith steps I’m not used to taking them quite so publicly! But hey, let’s go for it!

Send Us

So I finally finished the song this week that I blogged about in January. The title stayed the same: "Send Us." The bridge is completely new and I'm glad we waited until we got it right! I had the great privilege of debuting it with Becca and my good friends Dennis & Tammy Reschke and Caleb Burk at the Missoula 3:16 Rescue Mission's banquet/fundraiser Friday night. It's appropriate that the song was finished this week and here's why. Drum roll please...

We announced today that Clark Fork City Church is partnering with other Newfrontiers churches in the U.S. to plant a new church into Spokane, Washington in summer 2012 and... that I will be leading the team to do this! It would be an understatement to say that I'm excited, but I'm not walking with my head in the clouds either. This is going to be the biggest challenge I've undertaken to date. It's one thing to be on a team planting a church with someone else leading it. It's another thing entirely to lead that team.

This is where some good theology is really helpful! God is in control, which means my family and I and the whole team are in the best hands imaginable. While we will make our plans, God is the one who is actually directing our steps. This same God who began a good work in us (even in the dream stage) is the one who is committed to being faithful to complete it. If He is for us... who can be against us? This is the foundation we build on, not how awesome of a leader I can be, and that really takes the pressure off!

I'm going to post again about the amazing story leading up to this crazy announcement today, but first I'll leave off this post with the words to the new song:

Father God, we Your sons and daughters sing
Let Your kingdom come here
Father God, we Your children long to see
Your will be done here

You are sovereign, You have chosen
To work Your will through us
You are able, more than able
To glorify Your Son

Let Your kingdom come in us
Let Your will be done through us
In mercy and in love, send us
To the rich and to the poor
To the leper and the lame
In the power of Jesus' name, send us

Let Your goodness flow to the high and low
To the broken heart, to the captive soul
Let Your Father's song from Your Father heart
Be our anthem as we go

New Song In The Works

So I started writing this song a little over a year ago... and then I wrote another song called Kingdom of God in about 20 minutes, but inadvertently used a couple of the ideas from the other song to do it. Song #1 got shelved and Kingdom of God has become one of our most sung songs over the last year. But I still really like Song #1!

In seemingly unrelated news, we just started a six month worship leader training program at the church so I get to teach classes on Monday nights and Thursday mornings for that. There are about nine worship leaders and leaders-in-training taking these classes, which is really encouraging for the future!

There is something about training worship leaders that sparks my creative juices. It's probably the fact that I once again am teaching worship fundamentals, how to flow in the prophetic, and preparing to teach on how to write songs from the heart that we can use to worship Jesus together! Thinking about teaching others to write and lead stirs me up to actually model the things I teach and to see what God will stir in my own heart in this season. My heart is stirring ... and the song ideas are starting to flow.

Back to the song I mentioned a minute ago: It's based on the opening lines of the Lord's Prayer, "Our Father in heaven ... let Your kingdom come, let Your will be done." Several years ago I heard Brian Doerksen, a great Canadian worship leader, call the Lord's Prayer "The Sons and Daughters Prayer" because we get to call God our Father. I've latched onto it myself (which you can hear about in "Prayer That Works - Our Father In Heaven" at http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/clark-fork-city-church/id390001111).

For now, I'm tying in three concepts in this song's development:
1. God is our Father, so we get to talk to Him as His sons and daughters.
2. He is a sovereign God who has chosen to work through us.
3. He has chosen to send us to minister to the world in Jesus' name.

The working title of the song is "Send Us" but it might change as it moves along! We'll see... I thought I'd post this so you can all see how I process through a song! Notice all the scribbles and ideas in the picture. Stay tuned!

A little update from the other half...

Happy Tuesday everyone!
Jon and I had the opportunity to sit down last evening with Terry Koepke and Jeremy and Connie Sinnott at the Break.  We had coffee (and pie, yum!) and some really encouraging conversation.  I think that's one of my favorite things about Jeremy and Connie...how encouraging they are.  The Father's heart just shines through them. 
Jon has also been working hard on getting some of the newest songs recorded.  If all goes well, he may be finishing up vocal tracks on "What Amazing Love" and "We Are Forgiven" this week.  That's exciting news for all of you who have been asking for these songs for a long time!  He's also been working on getting some demos down for "Just to Worship You" and "Kingdom of God," which I know many of you have asked for as well.  So be encouraged, there are actually plans in the works to get these songs out to you!
Have a great week!!
Mrs. Meek