MetaVision: Where We've Been with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

Well, I want to welcome you to week two of our MetaVision series.

If you are new with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

And in January of next year, we turn five years old as a movement.

We're very excited about that.

In this series, we are seeking to answer the question: what comes next?

What happens the next five, ten, even fifteen years as we move forward?

Next Sunday, August 20th, is Vision Sunday.

So, like we've said for the past several weeks, mark your calendars, change your alternate plans.

You need to be here on Vision Sunday if you're a part of this movement, because that's when we are rolling this out.

And in the first two weeks, we're really establishing some important context.

Last Sunday, we talked about who we are, like how we function and what we actually believe here, to give everyone an opportunity to decide whether or not they want to be all in at MetaCurch.

If you miss that, you can go on our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash metachurch and get caught up anytime.

Today, we're gonna establish another thing that I think is so important for us to look at before we get into the vision.

Before we look at what's happening moving forward, we first need to look back.

You may not know that the word remember is used in scripture over 1,200 times.

The phrase do not forget is used over 300 times.

Most of these are being spoken by God to his people.

Remember, remember, do not forget.

Before we talk about where we're going today, my message is where we have been.

Where we have been.

Would you pray with me?

Jesus, we love you.

We're here.

I thank you for a place like Metachurch for all people in all different walks of life, all different parts of their faith journey.

God, we're gonna take some time and look back at all that you've done for us as we prepare to move forward into a big, audacious vision.

Jesus, you know we reject the status quo of just living to come and assemble every once in a while on a Sunday morning.

We believe that you created us on purpose and with purpose, and that you have big plans for this movement to impact our world in significant ways.

I pray you would lead us to that future.

We love you.

We pray these things in your name, Jesus, and everyone who's ready to look at where we've been saying amen.

Amen.

In the Jewish scriptures, what we call the Old Testament of our Bibles, the main character really isn't a person as much as it is a nation.

The nation of Israel, these were God's chosen people.

And you know, just like you and I, as individual believers, uh, we often mess up and go astray from God's plan for our lives.

So did the nation of Israel, and often this had very costly consequences.

One of those big consequences is when God warned them not to get too comfortable in Egypt where they had gone to escape a famine, they didn't listen to that.

They overstayed their welcome.

A new king, Pharaoh, in Egypt, took power and enslaved the growing Israelite population.

They were enslaved there for hundreds of years, used as manual laborer in the kingdom of Egypt.

And you might know this story.

God sends a leader named that's a 20% on that test, Mediterranean.

It's a very popular story.

Uh, a guy named Moses, if you don't know the story, he sends a guy named Moses, and Moses shows up to like the most powerful man on earth, the Pharaoh of Egypt, and he says, God says, Let my people go.

And in the King James Version, Pharaoh says, Nah, Doug.

That's what he says.

Y'all aren't reading your Bibles.

He's not interested, like, at all.

He has a million plus people as free labor.

There's no chance he's letting them go.

And so God begins to intervene miraculously and he sends plague after plague.

These are unexplainable, they're miraculous.

After ten of these plagues, the Pharaoh relents and he lets the Israelites go free.

But he changes his mind, he sends the Egyptian army after the Israelites, pins them down on the edge of the Red Sea, an impassable body of water, impending death, is on the horizon, and yet God once again miraculously acts.

And you might know the story, he parts the waters of the Red Sea.

And not only did the Israelites walk across to freedom on dry land, but then as the Egyptian army seeks to do the same thing, God closes the water in around them, giving them the victory.

And then they get into the wilderness and they have a real problem because they can't find any food.

And so, you know, it's like, did God bring us all the way into the wilderness just for us to die of starvation?

And so God again miraculously intervenes and sends food from heaven.

Six days a week, he provides food, enough food for them to eat and to prosper.

And after all of that, the Israelites are finally on their way to the promised land, the vision that has been in front of them for hundreds of years, but something very interesting starts happening very quickly.

The Israelites grow discontent.

They start complaining constantly.

They don't like the wilderness, the miraculous food that God keeps providing is not up to their culinary standards.

They don't like the leaders who risked their life to free them.

They even start saying, we should just go back to Egypt.

You know, the place where we were literally slaves, we should go back to Egypt, where they were murdering our children for population control.

How quickly they forgot.

All the wonders that God had done.

Now we have to be careful when we read about all this in the book of Exodus because it's very easy to begin judging the Israelites, but often, like Jesus said, before we look at the speck in someone else's eye, we have to also kind of look at the plank in our own eyes.

All of us can become Israel in these moments.

And this seems to be a part of the human condition that the things we're often complaining about today were actually the things that we were praying for in our past.

There were a lot of things I wasn't quite anticipating when I got married.

I was so excited to get married.

And I remember the first several times we went to get togethers with other couples, like little parties or barbecues at people's house.

Here's a few things I was not ready for.

The first is I didn't know, as soon as you get together with a bunch of couples, the men and women segregate.

Did you know this?

And the men always go to the porch where it's hot, you know?

And the women always hang out around the kitchen island because that's where the wine is, right?

So that they stay in there and we go out there.

And I didn't know that was gonna happen, and I was newly married.

I wanted to hang out with my wife, you know, but I got cast in the outer darkness with all the manly men.

So I was out on the porch.

And then the other thing I wasn't ready for is that like 40 to 60 percent of the conversation that the men would have was just complaining about our wives, okay?

And then before the women get all mad, I have it on good authority.

Uh my my wife, that at least 75% about what y'all complain about is your husband's.

And I didn't know any of this was gonna happen.

And it was really surprising to me.

I mean, we got married and and found pretty quickly uh that a lot of people are just very unhappy in their marriages.

A lot of people complain a lot about their spouses, and they annoy them, and they're not thoughtful, and the littlest things start bugging you.

You know, women, you guys get one eighth of a centimeter cut off your bangs, and you're just furious because he didn't notice it right away, you know.

Husbands, you did the dishes for the first time in, you know, ever, and she didn't say anything about it, and you're like, I'm never washing a spoon again, and we're just at each other's throats.

And we forget the years of just stinging loneliness, just begging God to bring us someone into our life, a partner, someone we could wake up every day next to and do life with and be lonely no more.

You know, we pray and pray and beg God for that promotion, you know?

And you finally get the promotion, and all of a sudden you're no longer one of the guys who goes and gets drinks after work and talks crap about the boss.

Now you're the boss, you know?

And people are drinking margaritas and dragging your name through the mud, and you gotta make the hard decisions, and you gotta fire people, and people are mad at you all the time, and now you go to bed every night with the heartburn that is caused from the answered prayer that you begged God for.

Some of you have like 13-year-olds, and you started a countdown in your phone to when you can kick them out of your house, you know?

You're you're so done with it, and how quickly do we forget holding that child for the first time?

It was a miracle, and now it's moody, you know.

This happens really fast, and sometimes it has really, really deadly consequences.

The Israelites, they took a beeline straight to the promised land.

That was the vision.

And Moses sends in a team for reconnaissance, they're gonna put a battle plan together.

Twelve spies go into the land.

The 12 come back, ten of the twelve are terrified.

They don't think they can win, they don't want to fight.

And their fear spreads through the nation like an epidemic.

They completely lose faith in God.

Now, this is like right after they watched ten miraculous plays, right after God literally parted the seed in half and they walked through dry ground with walls of water.

This is after months of God door-dashing food to their tents six mornings a week.

And they forget.

This seems to be part of the human condition that we we live with a very small frame of reference.

Our historical framework is somewhere between one month and one second, and it gets smaller and smaller the more affluence and convenience that we live in.

And I want to suggest that's a very dangerous way to live.

The spies who went into the promised land, they had cut themselves off from their past.

And the problem is that the miracles of God in their past are the very source of the faith that they need for their future.

They forgot all the things that God had done for them and they lost out on what God had before them.

The Israelites had to wander in the wilderness for 40 years.

God allowed an entire generation of Israelites to die off.

After all they had seen and experienced, after where they had been, to lose faith, God allowed them to wander right on the edge of their promise, but not to enter it.

At the end of those 40 years, it was time to cross into the promised land.

However, Moses was not going to lead them in, but before his time on earth was done, he gathered the nation and he gave a speech, retelling where they had been.

And this is something you see happen throughout scripture.

That right when people are on the precipice of moving into a new season of vision and promise, someone would gather them together and remind them of all the miracles that had gone before them.

And we're standing one week away from unveiling a new vision, a big, audacious vision for our future here at Metachurch.

And I think it's critical that before we move forward, we stop and remember what God has done among us.

Moses' speech is recorded in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy.

It's the fifth book in your Bible.

And let me just emphasize what that means.

The idea of looking back and remembering what God has done and accomplished in your life is such a critical idea that Scripture gives an entire book of the Bible to doing that very thing.

And I want us to look at a couple of passages that I think really apply to where we are and will help us prepare our minds and our hearts to move into the future that God has for us.

Here are some examples.

In Deuteronomy chapter 4, Moses says, only be on your guard and diligently watch yourselves.

Deuteronomy 4 · chapter mention

Diligently watch yourselves so that you don't forget the things that your eyes have seen.

And so that they don't slip from your mind as long as you live.

Teach them to your children and to your grandchildren.

Don't forget the things your eyes have seen.

Guard your eyes, guard your mind as long as you live.

This idea of not forgetting what we've seen is so critical for us as a young movement.

MetaCurch has existed for five years, but our congregational history goes back even further than that.

And whether you've been here for six weeks or whether you've been here since day one, you, if you're paying attention, have borne witness to the work of the Holy Spirit among us.

We have grown and grown throughout the years.

We have seen families restored and brought back together, marriages restored.

We've had people show up who have been through their divorce and are at rock bottom, and God has restored their peace back to them.

Some of you showed up to Metachurch with no spiritual community to speak of it.

And now your closest relationships were formed right here in the midst of this movement.

We have a program for our next generation of God-fearing leaders, and it's growing.

We've taken over a hundred young people to camps and these spiritual formation exercises as a movement.

We have seen 526 people baptized at Metachurch.

And we can lose faith in the power that God has in this movement.

And we can lose hope that God has a big plan for us.

And we can lose courage as individuals to go all in and see the roles that God has for us as a part of His church.

All we have to do is draw a line and forget what's on the other side of it.

What have your eyes seen?

What have you experienced as a part of this?

We live with such a limited scope of history, and we block out the miracles that God has done in the past, and maybe on a personal level, you're at a place where you have lost hope for your future.

Maybe as an individual, you're at a place where you live with a lot of bitterness.

You've lost all gratitude for what God has done, how he's protected you, what he's seen you through.

1200 times, God says, remember.

300 times he says, do not forget.

As a movement, we cannot forget what we have seen in five years of history at MetaCurch.

Five years ago, MetaCurch did not exist yet.

You have seen a ministry birth out of some ideas and a whole lot of passion.

Some of you didn't have kids five years ago when all of this started.

Some of you were on the edge of divorce and now you have your marriage back.

Some of you were on the edge of giving up.

And you have hope back.

If we're gonna move forward in a powerful position for the future that God has for us, we have to stop from time to time and look back on all that God has done for us in our past.

In Deuteronomy 6, Moses goes on to say, When the Lord your God brings you into the land, he swore to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that he would give you a land with large and beautiful cities that you did not build, houses full of every good thing that you did not fill them with, cisterns you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant.

And when you eat and when you are satisfied, be careful not to forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, who brought you out of the place of slavery.

Do not forget what you have seen, and do not forget where you've been.

I want to do like a quick show of hands.

How many of you started at MetaCurch back in the 151 saloon?

It's about half and half.

For those of you who never attended MetaCurch in the bar, you look at this building and you probably think it's nice.

Tilt wall construction, concrete floors.

Nothing crazy, you know?

It's just kind of a box with air conditioning.

It's fine.

For those of us who are at the saloon, you just need to know with our history, this is the freaking Taj Mahal.

This is Caesar's Palace.

The saloon, because half y'all weren't there, uh, the the saloon was um, well, okay, so I'm a pastor, so I never lied to, but but after COVID, you know, I I had to be like, y'all come back.

It's sanitary.

We had a fogger with bleach in it, right?

Somebody said that did something.

Well, when we first visited this building and I went into the restrooms, I fainted.

I I I know for a fact about 80% of the women who went to service in the bar would just not drink any liquids from Saturday night at 5 p.m.

until after service on Sunday because they weren't going to that bathroom.

Do not forget where you've been.

And the truth is, more than half of our congregation at this point was never in the bar.

And if you don't really know anything about that part of our history, that's not your fault.

That's my fault.

Don't forget where you've been.

What does Moses keep saying throughout Deuteronomy?

Tell the people, tell your children, tell your children's children.

Because if you miss it, then we might take for granted the miracle that we're all standing in right now.

I actually had this as a very visceral concern.

We're gonna look at a clip from the very last sermon I ever, ever preached at the 151 saloon, so you can see that this is not a new concern.

Y'all check this out.

We're two weeks away from opening up in a brand new building.

And so some of you are going to have kids in the next few years, and they're going to grow up never having attended a service in this bar, and we're gonna reach a whole bunch of new people in that community and in that area, and they will have no idea really about the history and all that God has done and the ways that He used a saloon on the west side of town and all of the history before that.

They won't know if we don't tell them.

And if we forget, if we rewrite our history with a limited scope that starts at a new fancy building, we will be removing from ourselves.

Part of the miracle of how God has made this movement.

It's our job to tell the story.

And briefly, I want to do just that.

Next week, we're walking into a new vision.

We're gonna close out these five years.

In January, we start our next five.

And what comes after that is big and audacious.

But before that, while we're here today, where did we come from?

Metachurch is five years old, but our congregational history goes back before that.

Back in about 2011, there were a group of leaders at City Church here in San Antonio who had a dream to put a church on the west side of town.

At that point, the west side was still kind of small, but it was like the fastest growing population area in the country.

So they knew there needed to be something over there to serve those people.

In 2012, they opened up in a location that was called the Cordy Marion.

And the Cordy Marion, if you don't know, it's off Culebra.

It is a cemetery and a nunnery.

If you don't know what a nunnery is, that's where the nuns live, okay?

This was not a great location for quite a few reasons.

In fact, about a year and a half later, uh, as a church, he was really struggling to survive.

They had some audacious leaders like Pastor Bobby Krim, who many of you know, who were not willing to give up.

And through a divine appointment at lunch one day, they met the new owners of a bar called the 151 Saloon.

And God put all the pieces in place.

In January of 2014, City Church West had their first service in the 151 Saloon.

I was a worship leader back then from City Church.

I was Almost exclusively at the Bandera Road campus, but it just so happened that I was out there leading worship on the very first day in this saloon, and things took off from there.

I shared last week, at the end of 2016, God put an unmistakable vision in my heart for the west side of town, and that dream came to fruition at the end of 2017 when I came out and became the lead pastor of City West.

In 2018, we grew so explosively we honestly didn't know what to do with it.

At one point that year, we were one of the fastest growing congregations in the entire United States.

It was obvious we needed to find a bigger space, a location that could be our own.

Now, at that point, City Church was not in a position to be able to sign a new lease, loan, or mortgage.

And so God made it very clear for us to have the impact that we need to have.

It was time for us to become our own movement.

In January of 2019, with their blessing, we left the City Church Network and we started a brand new work that we called MetaCurch.

MetaChurch took off.

We started navigating all kinds of things like COVID and all throughout it, we were raising funds.

And so many of you in this room, and some of you watching online, you were giving so generously, believing for something just like this building that we're standing in.

Many buildings came and went.

And what happened is as we were fighting through COVID and we were fighting for this Kmart, we got to some really difficult moments in our movement.

I can just speak for myself and tell you that God was using that season to break me down and to humble me in some very specific ways.

In the meantime, we were overflowing in this bar, and if I'm honest, I got very discontent with the saloon.

I started grumbling and complaining a lot about our space.

Now remember, that very same saloon that was now the source of my discontent had been the answer to prayers of leaders in the Cordimerian.

Anything can become Egypt.

All we have to do is forget.

That I had forgotten all the miracles that God had already done among us.

And because of it, I'd lost gratitude and I was in danger of losing faith.

I knew I needed to repent.

Repent means to change your mind.

I did that first to my staff and made sure all of us had changed our mind about how we were thinking about the saloon and God's provision for our movement.

And then I did it publicly and let all of you know that if God had us in the 151 saloon for the next five years or 20 years or 50 years, that we were going to thank God for his provision of that saloon and do the absolute best ministry we possibly could while we were there.

And here's what I believe happened.

I believe that when we were willing to look back and remember what God had done, then we were ready to move into the vision that God had for our future.

And I don't think it's any coincidence that shortly after we went public, that we had changed our mind with how we were thinking about our space, a new building came for sale.

The Taj Mahal.

Lucky draw bingo in this very building at 1207 Richland Hills Drive.

It was incredible.

I mean, the first time I visited this, I could picture all of it.

There was one problem, it was way out of our price range.

So we prayed and we cast vision and you guys continued to give generously and we pulled our money.

We signed a 90-day contract.

We had 90 days to get all of our finances in order.

And man, we knocked on every door and we begged everybody that we knew and we cast vision and we gave generously.

On day 89, some of you remember this.

On day 89, we were$450,000 short.

Now, if we went past day 90, we lost$50,000 in earnest money that was being held by a third party.

And so on day 89, we did the prudent thing.

We had our lawyers sign up a termination of contract, and I let them know you do not send that in until 4 59 p.m.

on day nine.

We're gonna give God all the room in the world to part these waters.

They sent it in early.

By 9 a.m., my email was blowing up.

The business side of their group was very unhappy with me.

Felt like we had wasted their time.

But the owners of Lucky Draw Bingo saw it very differently.

And they actually asked if in a few days we could sit down and meet and try to work something out.

And I had two responses.

Number one, bet I will be there.

Number two, I need you guys to know we're not like five grand short.

We're half a million short.

Like if you think a car wash is gonna fix this, and they said, it's fine, it's worth sitting down and figuring something out all weekend long, man.

We prayed and we sought wise counsel and we talked to the bank and I talked to every good business person that I know, and we came up with a plan.

And our banker said, This plan is not going to work.

And our broker said, there's about a 0% chance they're gonna go for this.

I liked our odds.

So we sat down at a table right over here in this corner, and they said, What do you got for us?

I said, Okay, check this out.

You guys give us$450,000.

And then don't worry, we have the rest of it, and then we'll give you our money and your money, and then we'll own the building.

And we told them that since bingo was going pretty well, they could continue to operate free of charge until they made back the difference.

We just needed the building Sundays and one other day during the week.

And they looked at each other and they stretched out their hand, and we had a deal.

$450,000 miracle.

And you know what we had been praying for was not just to get a building, not just to get a base of operations for this movement.

We were praying that it would happen in a way where only God could possibly get the credit for it.

God gifted us this.

He parted$450,000 for us to walk through and to walk into this building.

In one week, I'm gonna share a vision that I could not be more excited about, and transparently, that scares me to death.

A big, audacious vision for expanding our impact.

And here's what I believe our capacity to have the kind of faith we will need to see this vision through will be in direct proportion to our ability to look back and remember all the things that God has already done for us to get us to this point.

The very first Sunday at MetaCurch, my big idea was if we forget what God has done, we may forfeit what God is doing.

And I don't know about you, but I don't want to miss out on what God has for us in our future.

There's one more reminder I want us to look at.

In Deuteronomy 8, Moses says, carefully follow every command I'm giving you today, so that you may live and increase and enter and take possession of the land the Lord swore to your ancestors.

And that is what I'm interested in with this new vision.

I don't want to just enter, I want to enter, I want to take possession, I want to live, but not just live, I want to increase our impact.

So he says, remember that the Lord your God led you on the entire journey, these 40 years in the wilderness, so that he might humble you and test you and know what's in your heart and whether or not you would keep his commands.

Remember that the Lord your God led you, so he might humble you and test what is in your heart.

We cannot forget what our eyes have seen.

And we cannot forget where our movement has been.

And we cannot forget what God has done in our own lives.

Some of us lack faith in what God will do next in our life simply because we fail to remember on a daily basis that we were once dead, and then Jesus died so we could live.

And there are many miracles you can look back and reflect on in all the ways God has protected you and moved you and brought you to this point today.

But the greatest miracle of all and the greatest gift of all is the grace of our Lord and eternal life that comes through faith in Jesus Christ.

You know, Moses was preparing his nation for their next moment, their next vision, their next promise.

What we're trying to do in this series, these two weeks of context, is to prepare us for a new vision, a new promise, a new step forward.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus sat in an upper room and he prepared a generation of leaders for a new vision, the most significant vision in human history.

These would be the men who would start the movement called church.

In 1 Corinthians 11, this is how Jesus prepared them.

Paul recalls, I received from the Lord what I passed on to you.

On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread, and we had when he had given things, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

So do this in remembrance of me.

And in the same way, he took the cup after supper and said, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this, and as often as you drink it, remember me for the men and women who would start the church movement to hold on to their faith through trial and persecution and imprisonment and abandonment and impoverishment and starvation.

They would have to remember what they had seen, where they had been, and what Jesus had done in their life.

With big vision comes big responsibility.

Nothing significant in this life is ever built outside of struggle.

One of my favorite quotes is from C.I.

Schofield.

He says, the child of God will be involved with conflict, with evil, and Satan himself if he earnestly undertakes to possess all that God has promised him on the earth.

If you actually want to live out your purpose, if you want to experience the fullness of the power of the Holy Spirit inside of you, if you want to lay claim to everything that God has put in your path, there will be struggle, there will be responsibility.

And when suffering comes, will you have the gratitude to move forward?

When suffering comes, will you have the faith to move forward?

When struggle comes, will you retain your hope?

And that answer really depends on whether or not you will remember what God has done in your life.

If we forget what God has done, we might just forfeit what God is doing in our future.

And so we're gonna close practicing remembrance.

I'm gonna invite the band to join me back on stage.

And together as a church, we're gonna take communion.

Jesus gathered his closest followers, preparing them for this massive vision in front of them, and said, This bread represents my body that will be broken for you.

This cup represents my blood, which will be spilled for you.

Eat it.

And when you eat it, remember what I have done.

You know this, meta church.

We believe that God created you on purpose.

It's no accident that you're here on earth.

And God created you with purpose.

And for you to fully live that out, you must remember.

So here's how this is gonna work.

We're gonna try to do this in an organized fashion.

Just to make sure we're all on the same page.

Um, I want everyone to point to their left.

It's a meta church IQ test.

You guys did fantastic.

When the time comes, you're gonna all stand, you're gonna exit your row to the left.

Your station in this section is right here on the side of the stage.

The middle section is right here in front of me.

You guys will come right here.

You'll go out the left, down your aisle, take communion, and go back to the right.

So everything should be operating in a very smooth circle.

The way we're gonna take communion is a style called intinction.

You're gonna take a small piece of bread representing the body of Christ, you're gonna dip it in the juice, just a little bit of it in the juice representing the blood of Christ, and then you will eat.

And as you eat, remember.

Be intentional.

Reflect on a perfect God who stepped out of heaven and into our brokenness, who lived a perfect life only to sacrifice the truly innocent life for mine and for yours.

Remember, and by remembering, you will be centering your faith and the miracles of the past, preparing yourself for the vision in the future.

Let me pray for you.

Jesus, we come to you remembering what you've done.

I pray that we would be a movement who looks back, who remembers what we've seen, who remembers where we've been, who intentionally remembers what you've done and how you've changed our lives.

We love you, and we do this in remembrance of you.

In your name, Jesus.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

You can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.