Description
A GOD-MADE DECADE – U2
FEBRUARY 27, 2000
ED YOUNG
Each and every week we are literally bombarded with comments, calls, and letters from people who talk about life change and describe to us what God has done in their lives through Fellowship. I wish I had the time to stand up here and go through each and every one, but obviously we can’t do that. Last week was the first part of a two-week series called “A God-Made Decade.” Ten years ago, a small band of believers began Fellowship. It has been truly amazing to see what God has done over the years. Last week I talked about the past and the future. This week I want to talk about the present.
Our membership office told me several days ago that we have had some 3,000 new people integrate into the life of Fellowship over the last year. Three thousand! That is a big number; but behind the numbers are people, families, and individuals with stories. When you talk about Fellowship Church, you have got to say, “It’s a God thing,” but it is also about you, too. So we have called this session “U2” because we are going to hear from you, too. We have picked eight people, a kind of cross section of the 3,000 who have come into Fellowship Church over the last year, and they are going to share their story with you in an interview-type format.
Let’s welcome Mike and Wendy Van Norden, Derric Bonnot, Eric Orson, April Hulen, Kevin Holt, and bringing up the rear, Mike and Carmen Studer. Great to have you all. Welcome. Welcome. Have a seat. I like this up here. Leather sofas. Great.
I want to start with the Van Nordens. I love that last name. It sounds like Van Halen. Mike and Wendy, I know you guys were recently married. Tell us a little about your life stories and what God has done.
MIKE: About a year and a half ago we were invited by Wendy’s brother, Jeff, to come to the church. (I had been out of church for about ten years.) To be honest, I wasn’t real enthused about it. He said, “Come hear this guy, he is like the David Letterman of ministry. You ought to go.” So we decided to come. It was a Saturday night. We were enamored by your presentation and your stage antics. The message really hit home—what you were talking about. We decided to come regularly. We were engaged to be married at that point.
There is something I should interject here. We were living together outside of marriage and doing everything that comes with living together. Being fairly well grounded in Biblical scripture, I knew it was wrong. Wendy knew it was wrong. But we were living the way of the world. Everyone seems to think that is okay and we were just going along with what everyone else did.
We became a little bit more involved in the church. We needed a pastor. Someone had recommended Troy Page, the singles pastor here. We met with Troy.
ED: So he was actually going to do the wedding for you.
MIKE: Yes. We went to premarital counseling. On the first visit, one of the questions was, “Have you accepted Christ into your heart?” Well, I had at age twelve at Vacation Bible School, but I had not been living the life.
Wendy had not. She felt she was a Christian just by being a good person; but as time went on, she realized that she was missing something in her life. That very night she accepted Christ into her heart, and Troy prayed the sinner’s prayer with her. It was wonderful. It was very emotional.
ED: Wendy, how were you feeling at that point? Here you were engaged to Mike and just starting church, and then you made that commitment.
WENDY: I was excited when it happened, but before it happened, I always thought that if I believed in God and what the Bible says and go to church, then I am into heaven. But Troy was trying to get the history of us, which was important to him. If he was going to marry us, he wanted to make sure that he was doing the right thing. He wanted to know at what point in our lives we had made that decision. And I couldn’t tell him.
It broke my heart because I thought I was a Christian because I believed I was a Christian. Then I realized that was not how it worked and that I had to make that step and say that prayer and ask God to come into my life.
ED: I like to relate it to the marriage situation. You said, “I do” several months ago when you got married, and then once you make that decision, it is a process. The same is true in the Christian life. Tell me, from that point, what did you guys actually do as far as the living together thing went?
MIKE: On the second visit, Troy popped the big question. Are you living together? We nodded in the affirmative knowing what the ramifications were. At that point he said that if we wanted him to be our pastor, we knew what we had to do. So to make a long story short, Wendy packed her bags and left that very night. You know, emotionally it was hard, but we knew we were doing what was right in God’s eyes.
ED: I know there might be a lot of people here who are hearing this and might be involved sexually with the person they are going to marry. I would just encourage you, looking at the lives of Mike and Wendy and what God has done, to separate and abstain until marriage.
God is pro sex. He invented it, and He does not say “No,” He says, “Wait.” Elaborate on that a bit, and tell us how being obedient that way helped your relationship.
MIKE: Our relationship is phenomenal. Just today we were sitting in the bedroom and Wendy said, “Isn’t it amazing how these last few weeks have been perfect.” Now that is not to say it always is perfect, because it’s not. But everything about the relationship, the emotional, the physical, the spiritual, everything is there.
It is an incredible feeling to know that you have God in your life. The people we are around, the people in the church, in our home team, show us the disparity between people who are nonbelievers and people who are believers. Believers have confidence and faith, and being around those kinds of people is incredible.
ED: Mike, tell me about your home team.
Home teams, folks, are small groups of people who meet together regularly in homes and apartments across the Metroplex. What has that done in your life?
WENDY: It has helped me out a lot since there is a lot in the Bible that I don’t know. I knew that once I made that step I would have a lot of studying and catching up to do—a lot to learn. We have started going through a booklet each meeting, and we are held accountable for the studies. Everybody has done the studies, and we talk about it. And if you haven’t done the studies, you are going to feel lost. But it helps you out. Those people in our home team are holding us accountable for what we should be doing in our walk.
ED: Mike and I work out in the same gym. You can tell Mike has worked out more than I have. I know you were telling me about the surgery that Wendy had and how your home team stepped in.
MIKE: We were sitting there one day and heard a knock on the door. It was Susan Harris from our home team, and she had made us soup. The next day we had a casserole. It is amazing that from some people we have know for a long time, we got not even a phone call, but yet people we have known just a few months are bringing over food and calling. These are good Christian people who truly care about other people. There is no facade; they truly care.
ED: Sometimes people say that they can’t go to a home team because they don’t know enough about the Bible. What would you say to that?
MIKE: I would say that I didn’t know much either to be quite honest. I was lost.
ED: But no one asked you to recite Romans 3 from memory. OK.
WENDY: We all need to learn.
ED: In our home team that Lisa and I lead, there are varying degrees of people. Some have been Christians for a long, long time—like ourselves. Others have just made the decision. One, in fact, is not a believer yet.
MIKE: I would say, if anyone out there is not in a home team, please get in one. It has changed our lives. We know we have true friends. If something happens, we have some folks that we can go to and talk with who genuinely care.
ED: Well, Mike and Wendy, thanks. Let me move it over to this ninth-grader from Coppell—Derric. I want to call you Derric “Bono” because I like that group, U2. Can you believe we have someone from ninth grade up here talking? I am impressed. Tell me a little bit about your spiritual pilgrimage.
DERRIC: I accepted Christ at about age 11. I took everything, basically, in vain. I didn’t pay attention to anything that I should start paying attention to. We were asked to attend Fellowship because my brother’s friends attended here. We came and my whole family was hooked except for me. I didn’t like this place. I couldn’t believe this could be church.
We started attending weekly, and we haven’t missed a service since. I was wondering how I was actually able to stay awake during the message. For my whole life, I was always falling asleep because the pastor made no sense to me. When we started coming here, everything you said just clicked. Everything in the youth ministry, it all just clicked. My mom wanted to get me in the youth program. She talked to Paris Wallace, the junior high pastor. They asked me if I wanted to play with the band since I play the guitar. I started playing.
ED: Derric, let me stop you for a second. What you are referring to would be the Wednesday night gig that we do for our junior high and high school students. We have some 600 come here each Wednesday for a time of music, worship, and a time of teaching. Here is a ninth-grader who obviously has a gift with the guitar and singing, and he is using it within the context of a Biblically-functioning community, which is thrilling.
DERRIC: I just kept going. They started a program called the “Dad’s Ring,” which is a reminder to stay sexually pure. I got that, and wanted everybody to know that I was not going to slip and have sex before I got married. I got baptized in March. Things were starting to go good for me.
I had always been afraid of baptism. I wanted to take the step, but I was afraid of everybody seeing me. So finally, I knew I had to take that step and show that Christ was important to me in my life. I got baptized. Then my friends started talking about Beach Retreat, which is a camp held during the summer.
ED: For those of you who don’t know, we carve out two weeks of every summer and take who knows how many Greyhound busloads of students and workers. I go also and lead during the nightly sessions. In the morning sessions, we have our youth leaders. It is just a wonderful time of bonding with the young people for me. I have learned so much from them. So that is what he is talking about when he mentions “Beach Retreat.”
DERRIC: We got there. I had expected to go just for social reasons. I was going to have fun with my friends. But that week changed my life. That week opened up my eyes, and I never felt so close to God. I came home and my parents immediately noticed the change. But as weeks went by, I started to slip and get back into my bad habits. I had been asked to come back in and play with the band for senior high. I started playing weekly, and that was a real fun experience. Then I was asked to come on full-time as the junior high music director.
I was attending every weekend and going to Wild Side and to The Mix. Lives were beginning to open up, and I was beginning to see what my priorities needed to be. I became real stable with God.
This winter was the Winter Retreat. I went. Pace, our senior high pastor, gave a message on dating. That was my hardest struggle. Dating and lust. I decided I needed to give it up to God. Now I am living a great life under the eyes of God. It is really cool. My friends come up to me for guidance because they know I am really stable in my walk with Christ.
When I came here I couldn’t believe this was a church. Now, that church which I didn’t like at first has been one of the biggest life changes in my life.
ED: Well, Derric, we appreciate you standing up and what God is doing. We look forward to seeing great things from you.
Derric was speaking of dating. I am starting a brand new series “Finding the Ulti-mate.” I want to talk to Eric right here. Eric Orson recently joined our church. He is a great Christian guy and probably the most eligible bachelor at Fellowship. I wouldn’t want to embarrass anybody or anything. But, in fact, we thought about sending Eric on a date next weekend, if anyone would like to go out with him. You could have Owen Goff chaperone. Eric, I am kidding you.
Tell us a little bit about your life. I love this guy’s voice. Doesn’t he have a great voice? Unbelievable.
ERIC: I was raised in a pretty good Christian family, a great loving Christian family. I became a Christian when I was about 14 years old. I went to Baylor University, and graduated from there. I came to Dallas to work about four or five years ago. I had been attending church.
In Dallas, I started to get plugged in and ran into some good churches, but there was always something kind of missing for me. My family, along with being a Christian family, was also extremely musical. I had been singing all my life, so music was a big part of my worship within the church. Some of the churches that I had been attending didn’t quite click.
A friend of mine—luckily, by the grace of God—brought me out here one time. I live over in Addison, so it is kind of a long trek for me. I thought I would never attend a church so far away regularly. I was absolutely blown away. It clicked for me. It was an amazing experience. The music team was just perfect. It was right down my alley, and I knew that right off the bat. I wanted to audition and get involved just as soon as possible. At that point in my life, I really wanted to plug in a worship atmosphere.
ED: Eric, to sing here, I believe some people might think that you have a great voice and you just had to come up here and start singing. But it is not that easy. We take anyone who is in a public format very, very seriously as far as talking to them about their relationship with Christ, their lifestyle, and some of their priorities. So there are phases that you have to go through to actually walk on stage as part of our musical team or our drama team.
ERIC: Right. When I got so turned on to the music team, I just went out to the information booth and asked how I could get more information on it. I signed up. I was called, and an audition was set up. The audition was a great change for me. Coming from where I came from, I had never really served a lot in a church. That was the difference for me here. I am really plugged into something, using something that I love to do.
So I started serving here. It changed everything for me. I think that God blesses when we are serving. Jesus Christ led a life of servitude. If we copy that, we are blessed. For me, it gave me a wonderful place to be and a type of ministry. We all individually have a ministry, whether it is doing something in the church or in the world. We are always an example. I was just lucky to be able to plug in here and do something I love to do.
ED: The Bible says, too, that the church is the body of Christ. It says that every part of the body is important. What if the finger said to the nose, “I want to be a nose,” and the nose said that it wanted to be a finger? You would run into problems. It doesn’t matter if you are up here singing great songs or if you are over in the Peaceful Kingdom helping children or if you are coaching a children’s basketball game or on the Beach Retreat mentoring junior high boys. Whatever it is that you do for the glory of God, it is all important.
And speaking of using gifts in our church, I want to get over to April. April I know that you got involved in Fellowship Church because of a program that is very near and dear to my heart—sports. Now how in the world could someone like yourself, a single lady, get involved in Fellowship Church because of sports?
APRIL: Well, I enjoy volleyball. I played with a company team out at Lone Star Country Club which is where the church has been playing. One night, it was kind of bad weather and half of my team did not show up. So I had myself and one other girl to play a six-man team. (You can’t have other people who play in the same league sub in for you.) One of the referees said there was a church league and to ask one of them. I went over. Barry Ford, who is the Sports Pastor, was one of the ones playing. He and a couple of the other guys came and played. I don’t even remember if we won or lost. It doesn’t even matter at this point.
After we played, we got to talking. Barry said, “Why don’t you come to check out the church.” I thought, “OK, whatever.” During the week, I thought about it and thought about it and decided that I should just go. I went and Barry saw me and said, “Hey, we are having a golf tournament today. Want to come help out?”
ED: This was the first time you ever attended?
APRIL: I said I had never been on a golf course, but OK. I went and it turned into a 12-hour day. Then we went to play flag football, too. One of the teams was short a player, so I played flag football that day, too. And then back to golf.
Ever since then, I have come every week. It has completely changed my life. I had faith in God before, but didn’t think I needed church. Being part of the sport’s ministry has allowed me to meet a lot of other people and to bring people in. I have a best friend who I have known since second grade. She went to a Catholic church. I invited her. She came and all the messages just planted seeds in her life, so she began asking me questions. It really opened doors for me to talk to her about Christ.
It was kind of hard because she knew me before I was a Christian, and it is hard to come back and say, “I have changed.” It is hard to know what to say to reach them. So all of your messages reached her. She moved back to Dallas from Lubbock in August and started attending regularly. Shortly after that, you did the Las Vegas sermon.
ED: That is a message we did when we took our camera crew to Las Vegas, and we asked people on the streets of Las Vegas how to get into heaven. Every single person we talked to had no idea.
APRIL: We were sitting right over there. There was a couple sitting next to us who we did not know. It was an amazing service, and the message was great. It scared her.
Through the friends I had made and the athletics and her attending sports functions with me, she had started to wonder and question. You asked for everybody to bow their heads and for those who wanted to accept Christ to raise their hand. You said no one else would look, but I looked to see if she did because I wanted to know. And she did.
I couldn’t hold back the emotion because I was able to help her in that process. It was the biggest decision in her life. You called everybody forward, and she got up and went. That was very unlike her. She would never get up and go somewhere by herself. She is really shy. After she walked up, the man of the couple sitting next to me said he had been praying for her. He added that his wife had come from a Catholic background, too, and had recently been saved and baptized. Cathy became a member of the church and got baptized right away.
ED: Is she here now? Cathy, where are you? Would you mind standing? Cathy, I want you to stand for just one second. She is into the kingdom because of April, and that is so thrilling. And April is because of Barry.
Don’t you see how God has used this supernatural dynamo effect, if you will, for people to get into the Kingdom? That is what it is all about, to see people know Christ personally and discover the implications of following Him. Thanks, April
Let’s talk to you, Kevin. Kevin has a story. Tell me about your pilgrimage.
KEVIN: I had never been to a church before. I had never known God or Christ personally. I had a pretty troubled childhood, like most people these days. My parents were divorced when I was young. I struggled a lot with that. I moved back and forth and never felt at home anywhere. I started using drugs when I was fifteen. I dropped out of high school. I was going nowhere in life.
Last year, in May, I came to visit my Mom here in Texas and visited the church. You were in Israel and Randy Draper was speaking. The message really touched me. I asked my Mom for a Bible. I went back to Arizona, and that was about as far as that went. There was no life change.
In July, I was pulled over with a DUI. I spent a couple of nights in the Tulsa County jail. I called my Mom, and she bailed me out. She made me promise to come to Dallas and live with her until it was resolved. I visited the church one Sunday, and I have been here ever since. It grabbed hold of me.
ED: Tell me, how did you actually come to the point where you made your faith decision? Tell me how that happened.
KEVIN: When I first came back to Texas, I got involved with some old friends that I had here—doing drugs and stuff. God was telling me that I didn’t need to be doing that. I had to drop my friends. I pretty much made a decision to start my life over. With the Home Team and Connection Class and your sermons, I learned about Christ. I invited him into my heart. I was baptized last October. Since then I have been growing in my walk.
ED: You said something very important. Friends have a huge pull in all of our lives. The Bible says that we should have friends who don’t know Christ but there are many times in a person’s life, like in yours, where you sometimes have to totally pull away because temptation is too strong. That is until you meet Christ and know Him and He becomes fully formed, and then you can go back and bring those people in and minister to those people and help them. So now you are a leader or a co-leader in a Home Team.
KEVIN: I am a co-leader/apprentice in the under-25 Hurst Home Team. I think this ministry to those under 25 is going to boom.
ED: You know something, too. I know your Mom, Deb. Talk about the powerful prayers of a mom who sought God for years and years. Look at the result of her prayers. Sometimes we feel that God cannot do something in a certain situation or dilemma. Is Deb here? Will you stand? Deb, also, is very involved in the life of our church.
KEVIN: I don’t know what I would do without her.
ED: There is nothing like the prayers of a mom. We appreciate you coming up here and sharing your life with us. We will now talk to an old married couple with kids—Mike and Carmen Studer. Mike I want you to share about your whole process of meeting Christ and how that actually occurred.
MIKE: Neither one of us had a real stellar spiritual background, so you could classify us as the seekers/searchers. Especially when we started having a family, we were looking at what kind of framework we wanted to raise our children in. We were talking to friends who were finding their spirituality.
We lived next door to the Fearings, who are an extraordinary family. We would see them pile into their suburban every weekend and go to the church. We decided that we needed to start, so we attended several churches. A friend of mine said we should come witness this show. So we came.
ED: You were with us before we moved into this place. Carmen, how many times would you say you came that first year?
CARMEN: Perhaps twelve times. It was mostly the last two months that you were at MacArthur, we were there just about every week.
ED: Tell me how, Mike, in your life personally, did the lights turn on. And how did you come to a point where you moved from being a seeker, the tire-kicker, into being a Christ-follower, the buyer. How did that happen?
MIKE: Gosh, Ed, it took awhile. I kind of equate it to an empty glass. I moved very slowly into this. I didn’t have a revelation. I didn’t fall to my knees. I was struck a few times, but it was not by lightning. I just started thinking it through. We started attending regularly. That was when we started meeting a lot of outstanding and astonishing people. And you are who you hang with. We started talking and having a lot of interaction, and the glass started building up.
ED: I would say, too, that there are a lot of people hearing your story who find that it resonates with them. We have hundreds every weekend who are doing the glass thing. They are just kind of filling up with information, checking it out. So go ahead.
MIKE: This is the real deal. It did survive the test of time. A little slice of heaven is when your 7- and 3-year-olds stop dinner to say grace. Oops. We are in the toddler stage, and we were apparently acting like one. So when they had to stop, now we knew that they were getting impacted by this operation here.
ED: (To Carmen) How would you describe your pilgrimage?
CARMEN: Yeah, we are a little bit different. He has been a little slower. I have some very good friends who I would say are further along in their walk who helped me along. I got my first Bible for a birthday present when I was 32. That was the beginning of my journey. I resonated a little bit quicker with you and took it into my heart. He is there, and I love Jesus, and I am so thankful to be a part of all of this.
ED: You told me earlier when we were talking that you had actually made this step when we were still over in MacArthur High School. Then, Mike, tell us when you actually stepped over the line.
MIKE: About the last five yards happened since October of last year. We recently joined in the January new member’s class. Just speaking for me for a second, that was when it was time for me to invite Christ into my life. She is right. I was a little slower. But that was my style, to take that particular amount of time.
ED: Everybody has different styles, and we want to always be sensitive to people at different points along the path to Christ. Becoming a Christian is an event, but it is also a process. One needs to ask some questions, do some seeking, and then you come to a point when you make that faith decision. It is not an intellectual thing. You don’t check your intellect at the door to become a Christian. You need to figure out the whole deal, the program, and then once you make the decision, that’s it. Then you discover, like in a marriage, the implications of following Christ.
Talk to me, too, how your friends have helped you in your new found faith. I am sure folks who come to our church wonder how you meet people, etc.
CARMEN: Well, we quite often have our date night after church on Saturday evening, and a lot of times, it will be that we go out with the Fearings or the Brewers or somebody like that. We just enjoy the people that we are around so much. They know where we are coming from, and they can help us along if we have questions.
MIKE: It is so easy to meet people here. All you have to do is reach your hand out and introduce yourself and chat. It is great. There is really and truly a great group of folks here. In fact, it is inspirational when you see the volunteerism that happens here.
ED: Mike, tell us, too, about your other involvement. What are you guys involved in? I know you have mentioned to me the importance of your children and the future of our church.
MIKE: It is amazing when you pick your children up after children’s church and see the excitement level they have. It is very important for us that we raise them biblically through this program here. The people that they are meeting means that they are making lifelong friends here. So it is very important that we support Fellowship Church in all the ways that we can. This is not a theory about a life change. We can talk about it in our family, how we have changed from seekers to finders. This is happening with us. This is a worthwhile place in which to spend your time and resources.
ED: I have talked so many times to people about how there is no better place to invest your time, your talents, and even your finances than a local church. It is the best investment going.
I want to thank all of you. This has been a special time for me to sit back and to see what God has done. You know, Fellowship Church is a deal about changed lives. We serve a great God, and God has done great things. He is doing great things. The next decade, I truly believe, is going to be even more exciting than the last.