MetaVision: Who We Are 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, welcome to week one of our MetaVision series.

If you're new with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

I'm so excited for these four weeks for everyone here and everyone else who is watching online.

Man, I want to really encourage you to get here for this series, especially on August 20th.

That is Vision Sunday.

So mark your calendars, cancel your other plans, get here on August 20th because we are almost five years old as Metachurch.

In January, we will be five.

God has done so many incredible things from actually just getting the ministry started.

You may not know this, but um it's like a huge percentage of church plants don't even make it to five years.

They don't last that long.

And so God has been so good to us.

Uh, we've started a youth ministry here that took over a hundred young people to camp.

We navigated COVID together.

God gave us this beautiful building, and most importantly, in less than five years, we have baptized over 400 individuals here at Metachurch.

This series is answering the question of what comes next?

Where do we go in the next five years?

And that is what we're gonna be unveiling, this big, audacious vision that God has given us here in a couple of weeks.

But I do think it's important for us to lay some context first.

And the first thing you need to know is like really who we are here at MetaCurch.

Some of you are really relatively new, some of you are brand new to Meta.

You don't know the ins and outs of our beliefs and how we operate.

And I want you to have an opportunity to know that before you get all excited and buy into a big vision.

Just for six months or six years down the road to be like, I didn't know y'all thought that, you know, when I signed up for this.

Um, the reason that we've been doing an event called Who We Are for the last couple of years is for this very reason.

So that people can come in and decide if MetaCurch is the local church for them to give their lives to.

And look, when we started this movement, we decided we will not be jealous for people.

Our desire is for people to meet Jesus and live out the purpose that God placed inside of them.

Um, I love that you're here, but more than wanting you here, I want you living out your purpose.

And if you can do that better somewhere else, I want you to be somewhere else.

That's what we believe here at MetaCurch.

So today we're gonna talk about who we are.

We're gonna go through three different categories: our history, our mission, and our strategy.

You've probably noticed we kept the band on stage.

They're gonna help me punctuate every one of these categories in a memorable way.

Um, but before we get to all that, let's pray.

Jesus, we love you.

And this is your church, this is your movement.

We're trying to uniquely organize here in San Antonio as metachurch to be as effective as possible in building your kingdom and reaching people to the ends of the earth.

We love you.

I ask that you'd give us open hearts and open minds, and that you would say something significant to us today.

We pray all these things in your name, Jesus, and everyone who's ready to find out exactly who we are say, Amen.

Amen.

We're gonna start with our history.

Now, next week we're gonna talk about where we've been and tell the narrative of the last five years.

But today I wanna talk about our spiritual and even our theological history of why we decided in a city that already has like a thousand churches in it that we needed to plant a new church.

Uh, I grew up in church, I believed in Jesus at a very young age.

And one thing I do want you to know as we start talking about the founding of MetaCurch is that every time I think about what I get to do here, that I had the opportunity to help found MetaCurch, and that I get to play a role in leading it, I cannot believe that this is what I get to do with my life.

And I need you to know that because a lot of people complain, a lot of people complain about their ministry jobs.

Um, it is the greatest honor of my life to be your pastor here.

I thank God for this opportunity.

There was a time though, as excited as I am about MetaCurch today, that I had really given up on the idea of local church altogether.

I was raised in the church, I loved Jesus, I had a lot of faith.

I started working with churches relatively young.

I was a musician.

The first time I ever got hired, contracted out by a church, I was 16 years old.

I started working at my local church at 17 years old, and when I started traveling and working with churches and working in my local church, I got to peek behind the curtain.

That's really what we do in our Who We Are event, is we just pull the curtain back and I got to see how decisions get made and how things were prioritized in the local church.

And what I saw was so disheartening that by the time I was 18, 19 years old, um, I had really decided that I would probably spend my life in love with Jesus, but just without a local church.

I would contract out and play music for people if they wanted me to, but I didn't believe in the way that it was run.

That was a massive moment in my life.

When I was seven years old, I was in a church service, and at the end of that service, something compelled me to walk down the aisle of our Baptist church and to tell the pastor that God was calling me to someday pastor a church at seven years old.

You know what the pastor said?

I didn't ask that question.

You know, that wasn't even what the call was.

Just something got me out of my seat that day to go from that at seven to 17 having given up on the church was a massive, massive leap for me.

I saw things like people getting priority based on the size of check that they could write for the offering that week.

I saw judgmentalism baked into the DNA of church cultures.

What I saw I couldn't square with the movement that Jesus began in the pages of scripture.

In my 20s, I was hired to a church here in San Antonio called City Church, and uh a lot of people couldn't even believe I took a church job, my closest friends, but I saw a ministry that I felt like really reflected what Jesus was all about, and it became this safe environment for me to really begin to wrestle with what I believed about the church in general.

I joined a class where we were going through the book of First Thessalonians.

I could be wrong, but I think it's in the very first verse of the first chapter that the word church comes up.

And I got stuck on that word church for six months.

As a matter of fact, I had to drop out of the class because they had moved on to like the third chapter, and I was still on like the fifth word, you know.

I couldn't get over it, and I'm not the smartest person in the world, but I studied the word church as deeply as I've ever studied anything in my life.

And I didn't just study it, I studied it chronologically, which means I followed it throughout the timeline of scripture.

And one of the first things I learned is the first usage of the word church in scripture is actually spoken by Jesus himself.

We call this like the verse that built Metachurch.

It's in Matthew 16, 18.

Jesus said, and I say that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.

Such a significant promise that nothing can stand against what he calls his church, that nothing can come against it, nothing can diminish its power, nothing can overtake it, nothing can stop it.

Not even the power of hell itself.

But that verse didn't really help me.

It actually made me more confused because even all the powers and forces of darkness aren't supposed to be able to stop the church, and yet when I looked around, I saw that thousands and thousands of churches were closing their doors every single year.

That the church had lost all of its influence and significance in culture.

What I saw was a church that was deeply diminished.

And so here's one thing that you need to know is um I am convinced that scripture, as we have it, is the actual word of God to us.

And so when Jesus makes a declaration about his church, and what I observe in our world today in the West is in opposition to that, it isn't Jesus who's wrong.

Something about how we're organizing ourselves is missing the mark on this thing that Jesus said would be the most powerful force on earth.

Here's a few things I learned.

I learned that the Greek word that the New Testament was written in is the word ecclesia.

That's the word for church.

And ecclesia literally translated is the called out, but what it referred to culturally was a movement of people.

That the ecclesia is a movement of people.

I learned that over time we attached baggage to this word.

I say we, it actually predated us, it predated the English language.

When scripture was translated into German, they translated it, the word kirche, instead of a movement of people, that meant the house of the Lord.

Kirche became the English word church, and odds are, if you grew up in church, and even if you did not grow up in church, your understanding of what a church is, is the house of the Lord.

The church became a building, more specifically, a sacred place.

So we moved from Jesus' intention, which was a movement of powerful people, to an idea that the actual building is the church, and this changed everything.

Ecclesia is a movement of powerful people.

And these people are called to go out into the world and take the good news of Jesus.

But what religion has is religion always has a sacred place.

And over time, we took what was supposed to be a movement of people and we made it into a sacred space.

And you learned this growing up in church.

You can say it with me.

Here is the church, here is the steeple.

Open the doors and see all the people.

Close the doors, hear them pray, open the doors, they all go away, right?

What are we talking?

As children.

Here is the church.

And if you're confused about what the church is, here's the church's church is the building.

It's a sacred place.

It's a sanctuary.

Open the doors, and incidentally, there are the people.

The people are not the church.

The building's the church, and the fortunate few get to actually come inside of it.

You see, what happens when the church becomes the building is that the people are no longer moving out into the world.

Now the people have to prioritize back into the sacred space.

Now you have something to protect.

Now you create unwritten rules.

Now you put a dress code together.

Now you create your own language.

Now you have the insiders and the outsiders instead of all of us being the movement and the building just being the place that we come together every once in a while.

This one seemingly small change attaching the baggage of a sacred place onto the word ecclesia, the movement of people, has had massive implications.

One of those implications is that when you have a sacred space, uh you also have to have a sacred person.

You know, these special spiritual professionals who can be in charge of the sacred place, your priests and your pastors, these people who are elevated above you, they're closer to God than you, they know more than you, they're better than you, you know, people like me.

I mean, y'all have problems, you know.

But us pastors, like you guys get a lot of things wrong.

Like all the time.

What's that like?

You know?

Like when y'all stub your toe, Jesus himself has to come wash your mouth out, you know?

And this is a fun fact.

A lot of people don't know this, but when pastors stub their toe, it goes like they go, ah, but Father, I craze you out of the dust.

You created my toe.

I'm a balanced person with a balanced spirit.

That's what we say when we stub our toes.

Because we're sacred people.

And y'all are here.

I mean, this is look how cute y'all are.

Sacred places need sacred people.

And too many of y'all know me.

And you know me.

My son's here.

He's like hurting stuff my tongue.

He's about to walk on stage, you know.

And this is religion.

All religions have a sacred place, and all religions have sacred people.

And typically the the strategy is this sacred person is in charge of all of the people and has to control every aspect of your life.

And many of you grew up Catholic, and so you know this.

Like, if you want to get to God, you actually have to go through them.

There's an interesting story in the Old Testament where Moses has just led an entire nation out of Egyptian slavery, and he's kind of seen now as this sacred person.

And every day from sunup to sundown, he sits and he helps every single person.

He's the only point of contact for a nation of a million people.

And his father-in-law comes and he gives him some uh unsolicited advice, which we love from our in-laws.

You know, he comes and lets him know what he's saying.

And he says, Surely you will burn yourself out.

Basically, he says, You have to begin giving power away.

It can't be all about you.

And the traditional religious model, which has become the traditional church model, one or a few sacred special people have to be in charge of the ministry of every single other person.

And you may not know this, but in the church world, there is an epidemic of pastor burnout.

It's only escalated post-COVID.

Pastors, especially lead pastors, founding pastors, are dropping like flies under the weight of feeling the pressure of every single person.

See, we believe in something here called the pastorhood of the believer.

Um we believe that it is all of our job to love and pastor each other.

Um, that it is not just up to the spiritual professionals.

We have a staff to keep us organized and on tracks, but in God's eyes, and at the bottom line of what makes this movement a movement, there is no distinction.

There aren't sacred special people, there is a sacred movement that was bought with the blood of our sacred Savior who calls ordinary jacked-up people like us to come and to be a part of it.

Can I tell you what an ecclesia actually was in Jesus' time?

It was not a religious term, it was a political term.

Uh, ecclesia means the called out.

How this would work is people would be called out of their normal rhythms of life, they would come together with a political issue, which just is an issue that affects their city.

They would be given instructions, and then they would go out and they would affect that change amongst their communities.

It hit me.

Several months into studying what church actually was, the simplest way, the bottom line of what Jesus created the church to be is normal people like me and like you who meet together so they can move together.

That's the bottom line.

People called out of the status quo of life for a specific hand when it comes to the church, the most significant purpose that exists to meet together.

That's what we do, so we can move together and make a difference in our world.

That was a seed of what the church actually is that was planted that would eventually lead to planting at a church.

There was a problem.

I had no intention of starting a church.

I was working for a very large church, I had a pretty cool role there, I was very comfortable.

At the end of 2016, everything went sideways, including my health.

I ended up being hospitalized for a couple of weeks.

It was actually quite scary.

Uh they couldn't figure out what was wrong with me, had some very intense moments, and I was a captive audience.

They didn't let me get out of bed.

For over a week, I did not eat, I did not drink, I was kept alive just by IVs, I was alone for like 21 or more hours a day.

And it was during that time that God unmistakably gave me a vision for the west side of San Antonio.

I didn't know what to make of this.

But all the things he'd been showing me about his original intention for his church and how to organize that and what it could actually be.

I knew there was a call there.

I didn't say anything for six months after I got out of the hospital.

Look, when I was in the hospital, they had me on some good drugs, you know.

I was just making sure, like, is this the Lord?

Six months later, I couldn't shake it.

This idea to take what he had shown me about the church became a dream to actually put it into practice.

A dream to create a gathering that does not prioritize the spiritual elite or the biggest check writers, a dream that there could be a movement of ordinary, jacked up, powerful, purposeful individuals, a dream to try and meet together and move together and really make a difference in our world.

Never quite a steam.

It's never quite a state.

I'm sure you've connected this dot, but I just want to make sure that you get it.

God gave us a big dream way back in 2018.

We started January 6th, 2019, the first Sunday of MetaCurch.

And what that means is that you are a part of that dream.

The Ecclesia, a movement of people.

We've looked at our history, and I want us to look at our mission.

And look, uh, when you start a business, you know, there are all kinds of consultants, and one of the things they'll help you do is they will help you establish your unique mission.

And it needs to be unique, it needs to set you apart from all of the other businesses that are kind of in your strata.

And what we feel like is, you know, churches get that exact same advice.

We don't feel like we get to make up our mission out of whole cloth as the church.

That seems like a mistake.

We are the movement of Jesus, and Jesus already gave us our mission.

He gave us our marching orders.

And so what we're focused on is making sure that mission reflects the heart of Jesus.

Like you see his heart in Luke chapter 5.

Luke 5 · chapter mention

It says, But the Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, why do you eat and drink with tax collectors, sinners?

And Jesus replied, It is not those who are healthy who need a doctor, but those who are sick.

I have not come to call the righteous, I've come to call sinners to repentance.

We believe that we're called to continue the mission of Jesus.

Um, and so we have a very simple way of writing this.

And kind of the way that we stay on track with each other as a staff and leadership team is through a lot of these really simple icons.

I want to draw another one for you.

It really is as simple as A, B, and C, just so you know, A is who we reach, B is what we do, and C is why we exist.

A is who we reach, B is what we do, and C is why we exist.

And so I want to show you how we think about this and make some important distinctions about maybe some of the church experience that you've had previously.

Let me remind you again, A is all about who we are trying to reach.

Now, there is what I believe a lie going around the church world that either you can reach churched believers or unchurched non-believers, but you can't reach both.

So either you have to be a church that's completely seeker-friendly, only focused on reaching non-believers, unchurched, or you gotta be a churchy church for church people.

We reject that.

We believe that you can reach the church and the unchurched, but we also believe that to reach them, you have to focus on the unchurched and invite people who are already believers to come and be a part of that journey.

We are very focused on who we are after.

And this comes right out of Luke chapter five.

We are focused in our programming, in our creative process, and everything we do on the unchurched, the dechurched, and even the anti-churched.

The unchurched are people, maybe like many of you, who just did not grow up in any kind of church or religious setting at all.

It is all foreign to you.

The dechurched are like maybe the majority of us who grew up in church, but at some point, for some reason, you left the church and maybe even walked away from your faith.

And then there are even the anti-churched people who are somewhat militant against the entire idea.

And we work to create a culture, to create programs and services here at MetaCurch, the unchurched D church, and even the anti-church, when they come in and their friend just begs them to come and they finally show up, they're overwhelmed by the love and the culture of grace that we have here.

That is who we are trying to reach.

B is what we are wanting to do with who we are trying to reach.

And the way that we think about this, we draw a very simple icon of a two-sided funnel.

It goes something like this.

B is what we do.

B is our programs, it's our services, in a very real sense, this is our strategy, and we're gonna talk about that in the next section.

Now, religion stops here.

The purpose of religion is the processes of religion.

If you can get them into the seats, if you can get them into the class, if you can get them in the church building, because remember, in religion, the church, the building is the church.

If you can get the processes right, then you're done.

But what we see in scripture is there's who we're trying to reach and what we're gonna do to reach them, and then there is why we are trying to reach them in the first place.

And our why is pretty simple.

We want people to meet Jesus and live out their purpose.

Spoiler alert, that's every sermon, every single Sunday.

We package it in different ways, but every single Sunday, the sermon is we want you to meet Jesus and we want you to live out your purpose.

A is who we're trying to reach.

We believe we can reach all people, the unchurched and the church.

We see in scripture, there's like no part of scripture where one of the apostles says, here's what we're gonna do, we're just gonna be a church for church people.

Or here's what we're gonna do, we're just gonna be a church for 25 to 45-year-old parents of children.

There's none of that really niche demographic work done.

It's to reach the entire world, and so that's who we're after.

But we are focusing on the unchurch D-Curch and the anti-church.

We want them to go through a process and become people who know Jesus and live out their purpose, which brings us to be.

And I'm gonna use a word that if you have any kind of business sense, I know is a very bad word.

When it comes to what we do here at MetaCurch, we micromanage it.

We micromanage it.

Nothing you see happening here in this Sunday service has happened on accident.

We don't write our sermons Saturday night before Sunday.

Our weekends start anywhere from five to eight weeks in advance before we finally get here.

Our programs and classes, we edit and evaluate and implement and evaluate and edit and implement.

We want them to be effective.

When it comes to the process, we micromanage it.

Can I maybe help this make sense to you?

Remember when we talked about what the church isn't, it isn't a sacred person who feels like they have to control every other person.

The problem that the church has made, it's a problem that all religions make, is instead of trying to manage what they do, they instead try to control who they have.

And if you're spending all of your time and all your effort and all your energy trying to control every aspect of every person's life and checking in on them and looking at their Facebook and all up in their Kool-Aid all day, every day, you'll end up with almost zero percent energy to actually put into what you're doing.

And so we have churches where the church leaders are chasing down congregants Monday through Sunday, and their sermons are made up on the fly, and their classes are ineffective, and their programs are never full.

We choose to focus and control what we do in order to completely set free who is coming.

Here's how it works.

When we get what we do right, it is attractive enough to bring A who we're trying to reach in, and it is effective enough to help A become C over time.

To help an unchurched, de-churched, anti-churched person go through the processes that we have, and on the other side of that have met Jesus, discovered they've been given a God-given purpose, and begin to discover that purpose and live it out.

And here's what's really cool.

If you were to zoom out on this, what you would see is that both A and C exist together in the real world.

A and C live next door to each other.

A and C work in the cubicles across from one another.

And the most powerful way to attract someone who is unchurched church or anti-church into our movement is for C to tell A what God is doing in their life.

For C to give a simple invitation like, why don't you come and sit with me next Sunday?

A to B and to C.

It is that simple and it is effective.

And the most obvious form of effectiveness we've seen is hundreds of lives of people who have been baptized.

Hundreds of people who have met Jesus and are now on tracks to live out their purpose.

All of this comes together to give us our official mission statement.

Again, we don't get to make up our own mission.

We just put language to it to help it make sense to us.

This is what we say.

We do whatever it takes to get people to Jesus.

We do whatever it takes to get people to Jesus because Jesus did whatever it took to get to us.

This series is leading to August 20th.

We're gonna unfold a big, audacious vision to show whatever it takes and how that looks in this new season.

Our mission is not about the spiritual elite, it's not about the rich and wealthy, it's about those who are let down by the church, those who are confused, heartbroken, angry, bitter, addicted.

We exist to lay down our lives.

We exist to do whatever it takes for the sake of a world that is desperate for the hope of a world that is inside of us.

For the sake of the world, burn like a fire in me.

For the sake of the world, we do whatever it takes.

That that's who we are.

Our mission is what we do, but our strategy is how we do what we do.

Our strategy at Meta is built around two pillars.

Number one, keep it simple.

Number two, make it applicable.

Keep it simple and make it applicable.

Um, everything in life, if left alone, drifts towards complexity.

Uh, I get real nervous when I go to a restaurant and I look through the menu, and there's like Cajun food and surf and turf and Mexican food and sushi.

Like the only place on earth that must be blessed by God that can pull that off is Cheesecake Factory.

I don't know how all those categories normally, if they have that much complexity, they're serving a lot of kinds of food, and none of them are very good.

When I walk into a restaurant and there are two things on the menu, I'm like, this is about to be fire, you know?

They do two things, they better do it really, really well.

The same thing is true of ministries.

There are ministries because the people who are actually in control are the people who write the biggest checks, or you know, there's not a really clear sense of mission.

They've got 1,072 different ministries, different programs that you can be a part of.

Hardly anyone goes to any of them, and most of them are not effective.

And so we decided we will keep it simple.

And instead of starting the church with the question of like, what are our favorite programs?

Or what let's put out a straw pole of what we want to offer.

Instead, we asked a question kind of like, what are the fewest possible things that we could do to get us from A to C who we want to reach and what we want to see happen in their lives.

We've kept it very simple.

And number two, we've made it applicable.

One of the great tricks of religion is it has convinced you that true faith isn't about moving and making a difference in the world.

Uh, true spiritual maturity is just about how much information and knowledge you can gather.

And so a religious person has all the information.

They can quote all of the scriptures, they know the words to all of the songs, but with all that information inside of them, they can't walk across a job site to show the love of God to somebody.

We focus on application, and everything we do is geared toward application.

At Meta, we have a very simple three-circle strategy.

I'm gonna try to draw that for you guys.

Some of you have seen this.

For some of you, this will be new.

This is how we think about ministry, this is what we do, and really, this is all that we do.

Um, our first circle is our Sunday services.

And if you don't know what that is, welcome to Sunday service.

You're here right now doing it.

Um, in our Sunday services, our goal is to inspire, and enlighten.

That's our goal here.

Um, you know, Hebrews says to people who are going through actual persecution, do not neglect meeting together.

It matters for the body of Christ to come together, it matters for us to see each other, it matters for us to lift our voices together.

Um, but our goal in Sunday service, while I always try to make my sermons applicable, application doesn't happen to 200 people at a time.

Application happens in smaller circles.

Our second circle, these are our life teams.

One of the things that we became convinced of looking in the New Testament is that in order for someone to not just meet Jesus, but actually live out their purpose, following Jesus, making an impact in the world, they need Christian community.

It is, according to scripture, essential for your life.

And so some people are already in community with other like-minded believers.

We don't want to pull you out of that.

We just want you to live in that and apply the word into your life.

But for those who don't have that available, we have life teams.

And our life teams are where application happens.

We don't have small groups.

Words matter to me.

The word group, by definition, once you've gathered in a space, you have accomplished the goal of a group.

We call them teams because a team implies that once you are gathered together, your work has just begun.

And so our life teams are focused on application.

You do three things in a life team.

You review Sunday sermon.

You don't need more information.

You just need to apply the information given.

After you've reviewed that, you then, in this small, safe group, commit to how you're going to apply the truths you've learned into your life and then you pray together.

We call it the rap sheet.

You review, you apply, and you pray.

Life teams were started with the idea there are hundreds of millions of people who sit in church services every Sunday.

What if everyone did one thing about what they heard that week?

We would change the world in a month.

If we actually applied what we were learning.

Our third circle is about individual development.

We believe that for you to really live out your purpose, you need to be spiritual.

Emotionally, financially, and relationally healthy.

And so we have classes and programs to help you do that very thing.

Here's another way of thinking about this.

If these three circles became three-dimensional, right here at this smallest circle, it became three-dimensional and stretched out towards you.

Can you picture that?

And then we turned it sideways.

It might look something like this.

Our first circle, our second circle, and our third circle.

We see these as a funnel towards application.

And in a very real sense, these three circles are B.

This is what we do.

We keep it simple and we focus on application.

And we believe there's great precedent for that in scripture.

James, the half-brother of Jesus, he said, this is another one of our like foundational texts here.

But be doers of the word and not hearers only.

Deceiving yourself.

Religion conflates the process with the purpose.

If you just do religious things, if you just attend, and then you go to a small group where you hear another sermon, and then you go to a Bible study where you hear another sermon, and then you go to a class where you hear another sermon, then maybe if you get enough knowledge and information, you'll finally become one of these sacred super Christians.

And scripture says that's actually not how it works.

Hear the word, do the word.

And so we meet together in Sundays.

We come, we get inspired and enlightened.

We meet together in community with one another, where we love each other and hold each other accountable, and when needed, we meet together for individual growth, development, spiritual advancement, and maturity.

One more way to think about your circles here is that this represents the individual.

And life teams are made up of progressively healthier and healthier individuals.

And our Sunday services are comprised of all of these different pockets of Christian community made up of healthy individuals making up the body of Christ that we call Metachurch.

We announced last week, we're so excited when it comes to our third circle, we're getting very organized and very intentional.

We told you there's something coming.

It's called the Meta Movement Academy.

A very intentional process to help you get spiritually, emotionally, relationally, and financially healthy so nothing can sabotage the significant purpose that God has placed in your life.

Over the fall, we're gonna do like a small sample group, a focus group, beta test, whatever you want to call it, so we can launch this church-wide in January or February.

The history of meta is why we started it in the first place.

The mission is what we do here, and the strategy is how we do it effectively.

And none of this is new for us.

We've been preaching the same message from day one.

We've had the same mission since day one.

We've believed in this same strategy since day one.

In fact, we have a clip from January 6th, 2019, our very first weekend at Metachurch.

That was day one, and we look back and see how God moved.

But don't miss this because today God is starting a new work, and there is a new day one, which means that when we look back in seven years, in ten years, in twenty years, and we talk about day one, that you were there, you were in the seats, and you are the living stones that will give testament to all the ways that God parts the waters and lifts the clouds and knocks down the walls to make a way when there seems to be no way.

We will look back and you will give testimony to what God has done at Mediterranean.

That all we really did was meet together and move together and do whatever it takes to get people to Jesus.

Would you pray with me?

Everybody praying for the end of time.

Everybody hopin' they could be the one.

I spawned to run, I spawned for this.

Whip, whip, pull me like a race book.

Pull me like a rip course.

Put me down and build me up.

I wanna be the flip flip.

Word upon your lip.

Better let you rip, rip.

Break me down and build me up, whatever it's pay.

Whatever it's paying for whatever it's pay.

I always gotta fear being difficult.

Looking at my body, feeling visible.

I always spend a fest with a physical.

I wanna be invisible.

Looking at my ears like a modern thumb.

Everyone needs to be a body.

I spot the run, I spoke for lip, whip, whip, pull me like a rip or me like a rip or freak me down and build me up.

I wanna be the flip.

Bring me down and build me up, whatever it's whatever.

I'm ready for whatever day.

Critical, egotistical, don't wanna be the parenthetical, hypothetical, looking on something that I'm proud of.

Out of the box, an epoxy to the world and the vision we lost.

I'm an apostrophe, I'm just a symbol to remind you that this wanna speak.

I'm just a product of this trophy, I get a masterpiece, I get a masterpiece.

And when I am to see, I'll leave some out to the I have a beat, I'll leave my body and must be all with me.

I do what it takes.

We do whatever it takes, whatever we gotta do, whatever to get through it, whatever to get some people here, whatever to tell our testimony, whatever to be brave, to be courageous, to invest.

In two weeks, we're gonna unleash a vision that is baffling to us.

I feel like God gave me this vision several years ago.

It took me a couple of years to be courageous enough to even tell anybody.

And when we say it's our vision, you should know after today's message.

That doesn't mean it's a vision.

The pastor's vision.

The building's vision.

The church's vision means this is your vision.

If you don't buy in, the reason we do who we are eventually is to give you a real opportunity to see how we're thinking about things.

What we believe at a core level.

And I want to repeat what I said earlier.

We don't think metachurch is the only church.

As a matter of fact, we think God to be in a city full of all kinds of diverse churches with different methods and different specific callings.

We want you to be where God can most unlock and unleash your purpose.

And if that isn't metachurch, make it a priority.

Get in community, get healthy.

Make coming together as the body of Christ a priority in your life.

And make sure that you're here on August 20th.

Let me pray for us.

Jesus, we love you.

We thank you for a vision that you've placed on our hearts.

I thank you for just the people you brought that make up this movement.

We see it clearly in the ecclesia, the movement of your people.

We thank you for tools and resources like a building, like a band, like speakers, like classes.

But let us never forget that you have not called a building, you've not called a class, you've called a people.

And we're here and we're ready to give our lives to you.

We love you.

We pray these things 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.