I know that for many of us, this story of what's taking place in Southern California, as Brett mentioned, is really personal for you. It's not just something you see in headlines. It's something that you're experiencing through friends and family, people that you care about.
And we have not just been praying about that. Hopefully, you've been doing that. But we also wanted to make sure that we're taking active steps.
Now, for a lot of churches, and there's nothing wrong with this, what they will do is they'll come together on a weekend like this one, in the midst of a crisis like this one, and they'll take a unique and special offering to address the needs that are taking place.
But for us here at Menlo, there's a group of people who have a plan to support what God is doing here at Menlo financially, and they give to make ministry happen. But when you give to Menlo, you're not just giving to help ministry take place in the regular kind of Sunday-through-Sunday experience, and you're not even just giving to support ministry partners around the Bay Area, but you're allowing us to be a part of the bigger Church around the world, and to proactively respond to crises just like this one in real time.
And so if you're a part of Menlo, you call Menlo Church home, and you give financially, you have actually already given $25,000 to Convoy of Hope to send more than a truckload of supplies into Southern California, where they are already delivering critical supplies to the people in greatest need right now.
And so if that's you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much that you allow together in just a few minutes for what's taking place in this reminder that as much as we feel like we're in control, whether you're a person of faith or not, moments like this, crises like these, remind us how little control we have and how much God longs to hear from us in the midst of the crisis.
Now, here at Menlo Church, we are beginning a new series in the new year that we've called Startup Faith. And last week, we began a conversation about how the ingredients for innovation and dreaming specifically were present in kind of the early Silicon Valley and how they can be present in our lives, too, to help us grow and expand our faith.
If you missed last week, I would highly encourage you to go catch up online. You'll get the context of the history where we live, if that's new information for you. You'll get ChatGPT's take on a stereotypical Silicon Valley person. That was fun, right? A little uncomfortably accurate.
The context of the early church and the implications of brain rot on dreaming. So it's worth a listen if you missed it.
We are a multi-site church, which means we have locations throughout the Bay Area. And I want to welcome Saratoga, Mountain View, Menlo Park, San Mateo, those of you joining us online. We're all kind of back in the regular routine of our lives with life and school and work. And I'm so honored that church is a part of what is normal for you. Maybe for some of you, the new normal in the new year. We are really thankful that you're here.
Last week, we talked about the ingredients of dreaming that have been true for innovating places and people in Silicon Valley, as well as the overlap of those ingredients with the early church in the New Testament of your Bible and the way that God used them to spark a dream of revealing a different kind of kingdom to the world that he is still revealing through the church today.
This week, we're going to talk about the design stage, a critical phase that we see for a new concept in many startups. And then we're going to dig into the design. The design of the early church and the aspects of the earliest followers of Jesus that they embraced for their lives to be full of hope.
But before we get started, I'm going to pray for us. And before I speak, I pray kneeling. If you've never been here before, part of the reason that I do that on a week like this one is that reminder that there are things we all face, big and small, that remind us how little control we have and how much God longs for us to share life with him and to depend on him.
And we certainly think about that now with the fires raging in Southern California. So, no matter what your journey of faith is today, would you join me as we pray together?
God, thank you so much. Thank you for the opportunity to come together today. Thank you for the unique responsibility that you give the church to be able to step in in crises, local and far from us.
God, we think about what's taking place in Southern California today. God, we are without words. People who have lost their lives. People who have lost their homes. People who have been evacuated. God, so many people living with the ongoing impact of what's taking place down there.
And God, really, we pray that the reports of winds increasing would be subsided. We pray for first responders who are taking their lives in their hands to go bring safety to others. Would you, God, keep them safe? We pray for a safe conclusion to this event, God. We pray for peace in the region.
We pray that the church would show up, not just locally, but around the world, to help meet the needs of so many that need it now. Thank you, God, for this community and their willingness to always be ready to step in and support the work. Thanks for partners like Convoy of Hope that are on the front lines, experts in doing this well.
God, would you be with us now? Would you help us to reframe the week ahead or the year ahead, not just in what we have in our minds for it, but God, by your grace, that what you have in mind for us would be what we live because of it. It's in Jesus' name, amen.
So it's the new year, we're in January, and just a couple of days ago, if you didn't know this, just a couple of days ago was Quitter's Day. That's a real thing. It's the second Friday in January where roughly 25% of New Year's resolutions are abandoned. So if you are still doing that thing or not doing that thing or changing that thing, great job, amazing job. And even if you aren't, God still loves you and we are glad that you're here.
Now, one of the reasons that I think we struggle with New Year's resolutions and kind of achieving personal goals is that we often set unrealistic goals and we focus way more on the output than we do the habits that we can consistently and reasonably incorporate into our lives to get to those goals.
In his book, Atomic Habits, author James Clear highlights an underlying tension that we feel when he says, "You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall. You fall to the level of your systems."
See, the regular patterns, the regular habits, the choices that we make every day, those are the things that if we're unwilling to change those, our goals are almost irrelevant, right? That our lives are really being fed by those everyday choices.
One of the key tensions is that I think we sometimes aren't even aware in our life that our life has systems, that those systems are changeable, that we can design them. We have the capacity to redesign them. We have an idea maybe about what needs to be changed, but that's often where our aim at change ends.
Silicon Valley has hit this wall multiple times throughout its history. And there's this idea or a problem that can come up and sometimes a company, it gets too big and the bureaucracy becomes too complicated. As a result, they can't meaningfully change or innovate. That's usually when dreams and innovation stall.
At a company, they miss the bigger picture. As early as the 1970s, Xerox PARC had developed a graphical user interface, a GUI, like we use today to interact with computers. They had a mouse, even ethernet, but their core copier business was always their primary focus. And so they lost out on the business that companies like Apple and Microsoft seized on in the decades that followed.
Similarly, in the 1980s, IBM dominated the mainframe industry, but started to struggle to adopt this growing personal computer market and one that's still in the headlines today. Intel, at one time, had the chance to be the chip inside the iPhone, but not kidding, they were concerned that they wouldn't sell enough of them to make a profit. Oops, right?
Intel today still finds itself trying to pivot toward greater innovation to meet the needs of mobile computing and AI. In some ways, big tech companies need startups because they're not going to be able to do that. They can do things much faster and without the kind of red tape that they'd get out of the system that comes from larger organizations.
One of the key components of this that we sort of take a step back on and we look at in our moment is something called the lean startup approach. And as we begin our conversation, I think it's helpful to note what this is, not just in Silicon Valley, but what it can mean for you and me as we start or restart our faith.
A lot of times when tech companies or businesses in general build something, they have an idea and sort of in a black box behind the scenes, they'll build the idea or the concept. And then once it's built, they just release it. And then after a long time, they may choose to iterate on it.
Well, the lean startup approach basically says, "Hey, we are in a cycle where we are all the time learning and then building based on what we learn. And then we're measuring what we built. Like, did it do the thing that we thought it was going to do?"
And the way they know that is they measure the results and then they use those results. So learn, iterate, measure, learn, iterate, measure. This tool, this system is the way that the best startups have been doing it for a really long time.
As a matter of fact, it would be pretty difficult to describe and delineate all the different companies that either use this approach or have used this approach in their history because it's companies like Dropbox and Airbnb and Uber and LinkedIn and Yelp and Zoom, Robinhood. All of them have used this approach in their history because it's companies like Dropbox and Airbnb and Uber and LinkedIn.
And I think that if we were really trying to wonder what might it look like in my life, this approach could be really, really helpful. Ultimately, we see something in Silicon Valley that we also see in the early church and in our lives if we want to start or restart our faith in 2025.
Our routine rules our results. Maybe even as I say that, you can think about some aspects of your routine that you know need to change. You can think about some aspects of your routine that you know need to change. You've been resistant to it. You haven't wanted to do it, but you know that they do.
And before you move on to those, before you disconnect from our conversation to just jot those down, let's look at what the early church did. Last week, we started a short series in the book of Acts, which is a biography of sorts about the early church.
And immediately following the moment when Jesus went back to heaven after coming back from the dead, he told his disciples to wait. They were supposed to stick around and wait for the Holy Spirit to arrive.
Now, they had walked with Jesus for three years every day, and they walked away for three days after he died. And now all the dots were connected. They understood this new kingdom of heaven that Jesus wanted to reveal through them. They understood that they had seen Jesus and all the confusion that they had was falling away after the resurrection.
They'd been with him for weeks in his resurrected form. And now after all of that, he ascends to heaven. And they're like, ready for the orders. Jesus, what do you want us to do? And he says, "Wait."
And I'm like, what are they, like, are they playing cards? Like, this must have been a very strange wait. Like, I've waited in waiting rooms for a while, but it would have felt a lot worse than that, right?
Now, 50 days after Easter is something that we call Pentecost. And on Pentecost, the church coincides this moment where the earliest disciples were probably huddled together in a room celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. And they're like, "Oh, my God, we're going to do something."
And they're the Jewish people called the Feast of Weeks. And in the midst of that, Jesus, after his resurrection, has ascended, and he sends the Holy Spirit, exactly what he said he would do.
And Luke, in the book of Acts, in the second chapter, describes it this way. He says, "When the day of Pentecost, this is 50 days after Easter, arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly, I'm sure it felt sudden after waiting for a long time, there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house."
There's a reason that Jesus wanted them to be together. He wanted them to experience this together, where they were sitting and divided tongues as a fire approached to them and rested on each one of them.
And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues as the Spirit, the one that they were waiting for, the one that God said, "Wait here for," gave them utterance.
Now, this moment, this kind of unique moment for the early church was so critical. The disciples, they had continued to run the routine, like the play of their life was normal for them. They were together, likely celebrating this Feast of Weeks. They were praying together. They're probably sharing important moments with the most important people in their lives.
This was normal for them until it wasn't normal, until everything changed. And the Holy Spirit, he said, gave them utterance. Now, this moment, this kind of unique moment for the early God himself, who for them, they had thought about in the history books of the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament.
They had memory of learning about how the Holy Spirit of God, God himself, had indwelled and empowered royalty, like the hall of fame leaders of their faith, that now it was in them. And that same person and that same power was promised for all of us.
Not only that, but they began speaking in other tongues. And if you're not a church person, you're dipping your toes back in faith, you were like, "I knew you were going to get to this part, Phil. This is the weird part," right?
And so I want to spend just a few minutes talking about what it means to speak in tongues and give you three different distinctions. Because sometimes we talk about speaking in tongues like it's one thing, but we know it's at least three things that we see in the New Testament of the Bible.
You're also going to get some fun vocab to ask ChatGPT about later or to talk about at lunch. The first one that we see is called xenolalia, which is what we see in this passage where people are given the ability to speak in foreign languages that they've never learned.
And in a moment later on in this passage, Peter seems like he preaches in his language and that everyone hears it simultaneously in their language, and they didn't even have AI, right? That's pretty impressive.
The second type of tongues that we see in the New Testament is called glotholalia, which is sometimes referred to as a personalized tongue. And that's what we see in the New Testament. And that's what we see prayer language, where God uses words you don't know as you pray to him as a way of the Holy Spirit of God talking to God the Father, interceding on your and my behalf.
One passage says, "With groanings too deep for words." That's this kind of connection we see in that. And then the third one is just often called prophetic, which the New Testament gives specific instructions about to use correctly with someone who is called to interpret your prayer language.
And that's what we see in the New Testament. And that's what we see in the prophetic tongues. And then there's also specific instructions about the way to use it or not use it in public spaces.
At Menlo, we're a place that holds to something we call generous orthodoxy, like we're a big tent place. There are people that believe tongues are used all three of these different ways right now, presently. We also have people that are what are called cessationists, and what that means is that they believe that these miraculous gifts, or sometimes called sign gifts, were used in the early church to help establish the church, but then as the church was established, God no longer uses these gifts today.
Whichever one of those you are, I just want to make sure you kind of understand the conversation. I'm not trying to impress you with big words. I want you to understand the power of God that is flowing through every follower of Jesus today, whether you're speaking in tongues or not.
This power is inside of you, and if you're not a follower of Jesus yet, the power is available to you. God used this moment to spark the church. God used this moment to spark the church. The greatest expansion of the church in a single day that they had ever seen.
Peter would go on to preach an incredible sermon that everyone heard in their own language simultaneously, where he wove in the predictions about Jesus from centuries before Jesus' earthly ministry. If you don't know Peter's story before he delivered this sermon that led 3,000 people to meet Jesus in a single day, it's worth looking at his story.
He went from being a fisherman, likely sort of not selected from an early age for religious service because he wasn't seen as smart enough or good enough or mature enough, to all of a sudden getting selected by Jesus and becoming the most outspoken follower of Jesus in the New Testament, to denying Jesus when Jesus needed him the most.
And now, after all of that, Jesus would use Peter to spark a move in the early church. Now, Peter, he had been consistently studying the Hebrew Bible, and he had been studying the Hebrew Bible, and he had been studying the Hebrew Bible, his entire life.
And then he was walking with Jesus every day for three years, and he was soaking it all in. See, for Peter, like for us, his routine ruled his results. And in Peter's case, God used his routine to supercharge his results. He didn't even fully understand the way they would get used at the time. He just stayed faithful.
So if you're trying to think about ways to start or restart your faith this year, think about the place where you do have a routine and how that routine has served you. Maybe you are somebody who's like really diligent with your finances. You're like, "I have great routines in that space of my life."
Or maybe you're amazing with your routines with work, or you're super consistent at the gym. I would ask, how can you bring that kind of consistency, that type of faithful routine to your faith?
At this point in the early church, it would have been so easy to start segmenting leadership, right? You think about the people that experienced that, and then 3,000 more that become followers of Jesus that weren't there at this moment.
And you go, the kind of haves and the have-nots, the group of people that you were pushing away socially or in terms of the resources you made available. And this growing group of people that were trying to survive and follow Jesus, it would have been very easy to segment different groups.
Now, I think we can all think about times that there were places, that maybe you experienced a company that was really small. And when they were really small, one of their calling cards was that they were amazing at customer service. Like, they went above and beyond. It was irrational.
Maybe even as a customer, you thought, "You're going, like, this is too far. You should not do this for me." It's what made you love that company. They did whatever they could to make a situation right.
And I'm not going to, like, call out any specific companies, but some of those same companies got big and bad at the same time. And all that care and thoughtfulness that they had early on sort of got reduced.
And now that they're large, the bottom line is the only thing they seem to care about. And they now live with overly restrictive policies. And it feels like the help you got so freely before is nowhere to be found. That's what we expect.
But that's not what happened with the early church. As a matter of fact, after 3,000 people meet Jesus from that sermon, and there's this amazing move of God where the early group of followers of Jesus is growing rapidly, Luke describes the moment that follows at the end of chapter 2 this way, when he says, "And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to the prayers."
Right? This is, we call this kind of the input. This is the routine that they committed to. And then he said, "And awe came upon every soul." Again, this isn't like just the cool kids, just the popular ones, just the people that maybe had the things that other people would benefit from.
Every soul was filled with awe, and many wonders and signs were being done throughout the apostles. And all, remember, all who believed were together and had all things in common. This was an allscape.
And then he continues and says, "And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds." Again, here's that word, all, everybody, everybody, as any had need. Just not the people that deserved it. Not the people who felt like they were going to be good with the stuff that you gave them. To everyone, anybody that had need.
And day by day, this was not a weekly habit for them. This was every day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes. They were sharing life together. They received their food with glad and generous hearts.
I read this and think, this sounds to me like a daily potluck, which actually, for me, is kind of a nightmare. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But you get the idea. Like, it's just this very thoughtful time where they're sharing relationship together, praising God.
And here's something to note, having favor with all the people. That anybody that looked at this early group of followers of Jesus would go, "I'm not sure I believe what you believe. I'm pretty sure I don't. But everywhere you go, you make things better. You make the school better. You make your work better. You make your neighborhood better. Like, you are finding favor with people because of your regular routine of pursuing differently."
And the Lord added to their number, not Sunday by Sunday, day by day. And not those who were interested, those who were being saved.
Now, this can be pretty intimidating, right? And every time I look at this passage, I always remind people that there is a difference when we look at the early church between what is descriptive of what happened and what is prescriptive, like you and I must do this as our first step.
And there are aspects of the early church that are different. And there are aspects of the early church that were amazing. They had incredible results. But the results came from consistent and diligent routine investments in one another. That's what we see.
This was a group of people who were patterning their lives around a common set of habits and rhythms together. These are the simple things that they chose to do regularly together. They learned together, they fellowshiped together, they broke bread together, and they prayed together.
And when they did that, all of the rest of it came to pass. And I just think in our lives, we often want the rest of it, but we don't want the routine of it.
See, this group of people, they looked different than the culture around them, but not in a judgmental or mean-spirited way, but in a faithful and loving way that trusted the results to God.
These routines, by the way, for them were not entirely new. For those following Jewish traditions, which most of the people at this time were not following, choosing to follow Jesus had been previously Jewish, these rhythms, they represented adjustments, not additions, to their habits.
And actually, brain science shows us that it is way easier to adjust a current habit or routine than to begin a brand new one. And so it may be that this year, the thing that God's calling you to do is to look at some areas or patterns or habits that you have and adjust or augment them to be more in step with what God has for you, rather than to try to do something brand new.
It could add massive fuel to your faith this year. Something worth noting is that this kind of community is compelling. Luke records that it not only gave them favor with people in their community, but more and more people we saw are joining and becoming followers of Jesus every single day.
That's the power of following Jesus together as our routine, when it's not just a service we attend, when we're not just spectators on the side, but we are really invested in that. This daily pursuit of following Jesus.
Because these rhythms were simple, they could be scaled. As the early church grew, it could replicate these commitments into new regions as the message of Jesus spread throughout the known world in the centuries to come.
Now, startup culture, it has a term for this too, especially in a lean startup approach. It's called an MVP, and it doesn't stand for most valuable player. It stands for minimum viable product.
And it's core to many of the companies that we talked about earlier, that was this idea of starting with something small and building it from there. You may not know this, but Uber actually started as Uber Cab, and it was a luxury car service in San Francisco. How far it has fallen.
And Facebook was limited to Harvard and had very basic functionality limited to just that school. The reason that these could rapidly expand from simple ideas is because those simple ideas could be repeated quickly, and they knew that they worked.
As you think about designing your own startup or restarted faith, what would an MVP look like for you? Now, I'm not suggesting that you dive into the next augmented reality or AI push. Many of you are doing that with your day job anyway.
I'm suggesting a sustainable and repeatable change in your routine to pattern your life more and more after the way of Jesus. Specifically, I want to encourage you to think about an MVP of new spiritual rhythms of connecting with God in your life.
Not new ways of doing everything, but three types of rhythms to examine how you connect with God on a regular basis. What can you do maybe every day in your life that you think, "This could really make a meaningful difference every single day?"
What can you do every week, and what can you do every year? Maybe for you, every day is something really simple. It's pulling out your Bible app and listening to scripture on a walk, or maybe you start listening to a daily podcast that's like a devotional to orient or set your day differently.
Maybe for some of you, it's like on your commute. Instead of listening to 49ers news that's sad and depressing, you just spend some time praying. You can pray for them too, that's fine, but just pray a little.
Just one thing every day, not a hundred things you're not going to keep doing, one thing you'll do over and over and over and over again. That's something every week.
Here at Menlo, we actually have a rhythm like this. We call it life groups. And actually, life groups at Menlo do a whole lot of what we just saw highlighted in Acts chapter 2. It's a group of people that you get to know over time, that you invest in their life, and they invest in you.
And I'm telling you, it can make a massive, massive difference. Maybe for some of you, your weekly routine is that you're going to pick a day and put your phone away and not work. I know. Heart palpitations start too, right?
But followers of Jesus have been doing this for a really long time. As a matter of fact, for millennia. And before followers of Jesus did this, they got the habit from the Jewish people who did it for millennia before that.
And so it is worth thinking about. We are not designed to operate at the pace that we are running at now. And operating at the pace we're running at now is actually undermining our capacity to dream. We talked about that last week.
Now, every year, maybe for you, it means that you're going to take an intentional trip or a vacation that isn't just about, "How much fun can I have?" Which, great, have fun. But what does it look like for you to provide space in an annual way on a trip like that for reflection, for study, for discussion with close friends about the intentional ways that you want to follow God over the next year?
Not a hundred things. What does it look like to develop your faith MVP for the year? Something that's pretty important to recognize is that the early church didn't know that these simple rhythms of routine, their faith MVP, would result in these kinds of miraculous results that we see outlined in the passage and the rest of the book of Acts.
They trusted God with the results and they focused on their routine. We would be wise to do the same. I was talking to a startup founder this week, and he told me that in startup world, you don't really know the end result. You have a picture of what you hope it will be, but it's pretty fuzzy.
And oftentimes what happens as you take each next step, the potential next steps reveal themselves. And that's what we're talking about. And that's in real time. Our faith is kind of like that. God knows the destination, but it's only revealed to us a piece at a time in small steps.
I think that's one reason for passages that we find like this. Maybe you've heard this before: "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." I don't know if you've held a lamp on a path, but it doesn't shine very far down the path. It shows you your next step and your next step and your next step and your next step.
See, I think that there's clarity God wants to give us in the moment that we're in. And that clarity is the only thing where we're not alone. We're not alone. We're not alone. We're not alone. We're not alone.
I want way more details, personally, way more details. But if I'm honest, if God gave me the details that I'm after, I would probably mess them up, right?
Now, I recommended a book last week, and if it was helpful for you or you're interested in continuing this conversation about what this journey with God can look like, I'd recommend you check out a book called Invitation to a Journey by Robert Mulholland. It's a great book that breaks down this idea that your journey with God really is one step at a time that you discern as you grow.
You might just hear all of this and you go, "I'm going to try one new thing," and I'm saying that would be perfect. It would be way better than trying a hundred new things. My encouragement is just don't stand still.
For a lot of us, I think what we end up doing is we end up in a place where we will sort of settle for dysfunction in our life, and we're blaming everyone. But when I don't choose to change, I'm choosing my dysfunction.
And I would just say, this is an opportunity, even if it's a faith MVP, even if it's a simple single step, it's a chance to change it.
As we wrap up, I want you to think about this. When Airbnb started, it wasn't the global empire that we think about it as today. It began, whether you know this or not, with two guys renting out air mattresses in their living room and offering breakfast, which I find hilarious because I would give that place a terrible review on Airbnb.
But that was their MVP, right? It's an MVP so small, it's hard to imagine. They didn't know that it would grow into what it is now, but they focused on simple, repeatable rhythms, listened to users, made improvements, and kept showing up.
Over time, those small steps led to the extraordinary results we think about today. Your faith can work the same way. Start with an MVP, a daily prayer, a weekly life group, an annual time of reflection.
Trust God with the long-term vision of your life that you want to know now, but you couldn't handle it if he gave it to you anyway. Focus on the next step in front of you. Just like the early church, they didn't know what the global impact would be in those early years of struggle.
You don't need to know the entire plan. God knows the plan, and he's leading you and me one step at a time along the path.
So as you design your spiritual rhythms this year, don't aim for perfection. Don't overcomplicate it. Aim for faithfulness. And let's trust God to take our routine and turn it into the results that only he can deliver, both in us and through us.
Would you pray with me?
God, thank you so much. Thank you for the unique way that you show up in our lives, that even in times and places where it's easy to give up, it's easy to assume that I can't or that I never will or that it will always be like this.
God, things really can change. God, things really can change. God, things really can change. God, things really can change. You're in the life change business.
And so would you help us as we think about the routines in our life that feel settled or that feel stale or it feels like we're stuck in them? God, just shake us out of the complacency of those things and remind us that the same Holy Spirit, that God, you yourself live inside of every follower of Jesus, whether we've been a follower of you for a few days or decades.
God, you are empowering us. Help us to walk in that power this week. And for those who don't know you yet, God, that their envy, their envy, their envy, their envy would set them on a path of discovery to know how great, how wide, and how deep your love for them is.
God, we are so thankful, so thankful for the work you're doing in us. Help us to continue to be aware and praying for all the needs around the world.
God, we do continue to pray for what's going on in Southern California right now, that your hand of peace, your hand of grace would be on those suffering and struggling, and that the courage, conviction to be able to push forward as first responders work to battle those flames, that you would give that to them as well.
God, we thank you so much for the gifts you give us in this life. Would you help us to live in light of that gratitude today? It's in Jesus' name, amen.
on Jan 12, 2025
