Countdown to Tübingen

My choice of English words to talk about Unterwegs.

What an interesting time to be given the sermon slot. Two days after Christmas after 7 months in Germany – the opportunity to talk about campus ministry with the condition that everyone get a message they can take home for themselves. So, my epiphany from this week: grace – the biggest theme in the story of Jesus – also happens to be the centerpiece of Unterwegs.

It was written on the wall in front of me. No, seriously, it was on the wall in front of me. I wrote it there. Here’s what the Unterwegs wall says (translated to English) (stop me if I’ve posted this before):

Unterwegs is a group for students and young people, bound together by Christ’s love. We’re open for everyone and everything.

We are here because of our love for God. God’s grace is like a party, and everyone is invited. Come exactly as you are.

Speaking of things, I just got word from the language school in Tübingen: I am TestDaF certified fluent in German at the university level. I will start the application process for university within the next week.

These are a few of my favorite things.

This Sunday I’ll be speaking at the Tuckerfirst Contemporary Service.

The Sunday after Christmas is tricky business. With the incredible American Christmas escalation finally having peaked just days before, dare one mention the Christmas story at the risk of being boring and repetitive? Or would a talk on December 27th without an element of Christmas come off as irrelevant and uninteresting?

The trick here is to find a binding, relevant connection between the Christmas story, the message I want to deliver, and the ministry I help build. So, what do the three have in common? I really like the idea that, as we say on the Unterwegs wall, “God’s grace is like a party – and everyone is invited.” Unterwegs, like Jesus, operates with an open guest list… Shepherds and kings are invited to celebrate his first birthday; The Wedding Feast in his parable (Luke 14) is filled with “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.”

So, there’s our starting point. Let the writing begin.

Got a sweet, hot little something for a rainy day in Tucker. Also, I got a latte.

Well, after four days touring and three nights sleeping in Europe’s premiere airports, I am back in Atlanta. It was a hard journey – harder on my poor passport, which now shows me entering and leaving Switzerland twice without ever entering another country. Such is the danger of traveling standby, I suppose. But sitting in Mighty Joe Espresso, Shalynn by my side, is worth the trip.

The last month at Unterwegs was nothing short of fantastic – thus the lack of blog updates recently. We had Thanksgiving dinner with 70 of our closest friends, and then two weeks later we had our first official Unterwegs Thursday night – a Christmas program with a skit, a band, and a video – and we had a crowd of 60 show up to that. Thus we begin our arrival from the dark, seething, ill-defined, chaotic sea of outreach to one of our first ports of call: Structure.

As a part of our new “Structure” feature, last Thursday I presented a two-minute talk on what Unterwegs is at the end of our program. It went something like this (only in German):

A lot of people are still trying to figure out what Unterwegs is. On the one hand, we are a Christian group, but we’re not a church. On the other hand, the atmosphere here is genuine and exciting – we have parties, activities, and games, but we’re not a disco, we’re not a dorm or a flat, and we’re not a bar. So what are we?

But Unterwegs is more than the house – it’s the group of people here. You can read the words we have on the wall downstairs, but the sum of it is: we are a group of students and young people bound by the love of Jesus, which means that every person is welcome here, every person is accepted, and every person is loved. It’s that simple.

And thus began the next step on our exciting journey :)