Worship At The Refuge

I know that this picture is totally lame...I'll try to hijack a cool one from someone else who was here last night. Don't let the lame pic keep you from reading a kickin' story.

Last night a group of us from Campus Church, along with some other churches in the community, met at The Refuge downtown for a great night of worship.

THE REFUGE: The Refuge is a missional community of college age adults living in a small apartment complex being renovated from the inside out. Tim Ulrich, the director of The Refuge, is leading a band of "Freakazoids" (I feel honored to numbered among the few) into a fly by the seat of your pants, while listening to God speak, aproach to ministry in the downtown area. I love it.

BRAD KILMAN: Brad Kilman lead worship last night. Nobody but Brad and I could have known how much last night meant to me. Brad is an official member of a group that doesn't exist called The Upper Room Circle Of The O.G. (TURCOTOG: Ironically this anacronym is an ancient Guatemalan war chant that never existed meaning...Those that met in the upper room.) I have some great memories with Brad in the early 90's as we along with other TURCOTOG's did life, prayer, worship, outreach, and community together. The experiences that we all share from that time are experiences that are significant enough to ruin anyone who happened to show up.

OLD STORIES: God was moving through this group of college age kids in ways that we never could have imagined. Truly a time that we would all acknowledge...the Gospel was proclaimed in Word and Power...the result was transformed lives. Worship would naturally turn into times of weaping repentance for some, undignified shouting and dancing for others, and a rich intimacy with Jesus and each other. Man we had fun serving together. We would do monthly services at the Jesus House (the most ghetto shelter ever! For real, it was ran by dogs and drunk vagrants. It's changed quite a bit now), intercessory prayer, group evangelism, playing music on street corners downtown, on and on.

NOT THE GOOD OLD DAYS FOR ME: These are great memories for me and others, but not the last memory for any of us. From that point forward any one of the TURCOTOG's who ever really was a TURCOTOG merely found a birthplace of big expectation of joy and work in the kingdom. It's funny looking around sometimes and seeing what some of the gang is doing now. Many of us have had or are experiencing very hard stuff, either of our own doing or the consequence of knuckle heads who have hurt us (put me in the category of being a knuckle head of my own making...I'm doing less damage these days). I love seeing the faces of the Old Gang and acknowledging the joy and work in the kingdom that we all shared in together, but even better than that, God is continuing to work through us in different ways and we continue to see God raise up new faces of a new generation who are experiencing the power of God in their work also.