Jonathan Shradar

How powerful is the gospel that you cling to? Because the gospel I see in Scripture, the gospel that awakened my dead and hateful soul, is the power of God for salvation. The power of God to transform the lost cause. The power of God to lead the murderer to repentance. The power of God to restore relationships… to heal the scars of abuse… to bring the abuser to repentance… to bring peace to the battlefield…. To reconcile racial disparity… to free the oppressed, to make demons flee, to strengthen a believer that has lost his family because he believes in Jesus… to make ordinary people so bold that they would rather die than stop preaching Jesus to a world in need.

" Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring ​— ​what your life will be! For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes. Instead, you should say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that .” -- James 4:13-15 (CSB) Every time someone asks what my "vision for the church" is I feel a little bit like a kindergartner being asked what he wants to be when he grows up. I can only hope my answer might be taken with a bit more seriousness or belief! It is a fair question and one we get asked a lot as a replant of a twenty-two-year-old church. We endeavored to fix organization issues with a new book of church order, we established a new elder council, we changed the name of the church to match our new identity as a body, and we have unrelentingly preached the gospel as the whole counsel of God from his word.

Almost ten months ago at our church, I invited a small group of guys to purposefully hang out once a month to read about and discuss issues from a gospel-oriented perspective. We have talked about defining the whole gospel, what it means to love our neighbors, how to form deep relationships in the church, preventing and exposing abuse, seeing our careers as the avenue we can do good for the glory of God, and how the church can become a "creative minority" in our culture. We meet each month on the third Thursday in local brewpubs or tasting rooms (which we have plenty of in San Diego) so we called it 'Brewing Leaders.' Of course not everyone in the group drinks... Originally the group was formed to give me more one-on-a-few time with those beginning or continuing to lead in the church and model a discipleship context that could be replicated when each of them begins their own group. But design doesn't always meet real life and there has been an increasing desire fr

Too often, we view our neighborhoods and cities as simply as necessary piece of life; we have to be close to work, or afford a life in some place and this is where we are. But in reality, you are exactly where God has determined for you to be, and he wants you to do good while you are there. Our exile is not a political one like Israel's; but in Christ, we are exiles in the midst of our cultures driven by the ways of the world. The answer is not to close ourselves off and start a commune, but instead work for the flourishing of our cities.