Had a cool time in Washington, DC the last two days. We went to check out National Community Church which built a really slick coffee house right in the heart of the city. We’re really pursuing some opportunities to plant a campus in downtown Memphis and one idea is to start a coffee house that will be open through the week. Mark Batterson and his team did it in DC and it’s an awesome place! They started Ebenezer’s Coffee House and built a basement that seats about 120 people for their Saturday night services. It’s a first class facility.

I love the idea of a campus in downtown Memphis. A church in the city. Someone told me recently that 27,000 people live in downtown Memphis. I know it’s not DC, but it’s our city and I think it’s a great place to have another campus. It could serve a dual purpose for us - provide a great campus to reach all the people living downtown and also provide an outreach center for ministry into the heart of the city. God has been dealing with me for the past year about some new outreach initiatives. We’re planning them right now so we can launch some new stuff in 2008. I think it’s cool that it’s coinciding with these open doors downtown. We’ve got to get down there and make a difference.

I love this quote…
George McLeod - “I simply say, the cross must be raised again at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am claiming that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap; at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write His title in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. At the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble, because that is where He died and that is what He died about and that is where churchmen ought to be and what churchmen ought to be about.”