Personal – Page 3 – John Markum

What I’m Currently Learning

Posted on June 7, 2013 by johnmarkum

The current season of my life is one of flux and transition. I’m preparing for the biggest step of faith in my life: starting a church and relocating my family to a new area thousands of miles away. I’ve been busy traveling, honing and sharing our vision, preparing my family for the move, raising funds, building our Launch Team, and working hard to finish strong with my sending church. Getting stretched in such definitive ways has been an incredible education! Here are a few of the things that God has been teaching me lately:

You can never out-give God. Ever. God has never once asked for more from me than He planned on giving back. We measure our generosity to God in hand-fulls – God measures His generosity to us in ocean-fulls.He’s proven that to me repeatedly over the last year.
Trials are opportunities to see God show up. There has never been a trial I’ve experienced that God has not come through for me faithfully as always. But I also get to know Him in more intimate ways than before as I endure hardship and lean into His grace.
My wife is the epitome of grace under pressure. Her confidence in me and God’s calling on my life is both inspiring, and gut-check. She honestly has more faith than me sometimes, and I genuinely look up to her more often than she can know. I’m so blessed!
I have the best friends in the world. Anything that creates high tension in a persons’ life reveals who their truest friends are. This is true of a death in the family, job loss, or other major life change. And I’ve come to realize that I have been greatly blessed with friends who are willing to stand with us. I’m grateful beyond words for each of you. You know who you are.
When you trust God, He blesses in secondary ways. The benefits to submitting to God are seen in the obedience itself. However, God also seems to consistently bless my life in peripheral areas to my obedience to Him.
Be confident. The most repeated command in all of Scripture is “fear not.” I constantly remind myself of the promises I alone have heard from God.
Stay teachable. I’ve discovered a tension between presenting myself as “I’m confident and thorough,” and “I’m arrogant and full of myself – you couldn’t possibly teach me anything.” But the truth is, I am acutely aware of my deficiencies and want to learn everything I can from those whom I can learn from. I’ve read more in the last six months than the previous two years. I’ve joined a coaching network. I’ve been to multiple conferences. And I regularly connect with other leaders who know me and have access to speak over my life and ministry.

That’s a little of what God is teaching me very directly right now. There’s nothing like learning on the job!

Blessings,
Pastor John

Dear people of the South Bay…

Posted on April 22, 2013 by johnmarkum

I’m writing this to the approximately 2 million people who live in the South Bay area whom we are compelled to relocate to this summer for the sake of bringing the Gospel. It is now three months away from the time that we will be moving into your communities, integrating into your busy streets, and sharing our lives with you. As I watch these words appear on the screen before me, I am acutely aware that these thoughts are largely meaningless to most of you at the time of my writing them. And yet I must share my heart with you in hopes that, one day, what I say here will have profound significance for many of you.
Unlike so many of your residents, we are not relocating because of the promise of a new career opportunity. Rather, we are coming because of you. You see, I have looked into the eyes of so many of you, and have listened to your stories, and have seen myself… apart from Christ. Ambitious. Driven. Opinionated, yet tolerant. Socially active, and yet somehow kind of lonely and empty when you thought no one else was watching.

But I’ve watched. And prayed. And even fasted for you. And as the vast majority of you continue to do life far from the grace that God would have for you, you have not gone unnoticed by Him, and therefore by me. I’ve always been a “big-picture” kind of guy, so here’s how I currently seen things…

I am 31 years of age as I come to you. I am old enough to have made enough youthful mistakes and have grown through them, yet young enough to still take risks. I am strong, strategic, and in my prime. I am offering to you the very best years I have to give. This is not simply the “next step” in a career path that I’ve chosen. You’re it for me. There is nowhere else I intend to go. They will bury my body in your soil one day, hopefully a long time from now. I, my family, and the several people coming with us, are laying our lives down for the Gospel… for you.

Even now, as I sit 2,004 miles from where you are, my heart is with you. I am committed to you. And I will stop at nothing to reach you. I don’t expect most of you to understand this yet, but we love you. You matter to us. The Bible tells us of a God who moved Heaven and earth to get to humanity to save us. That same God is sending me to you, not because I am somehow special in any way, but because you are special to Him in every way.

One day, as I stand before you as your pastor and watch hundreds, or maybe even thousands of you worshiping Jesus passionately, and responding in faith to the Son of God, and as I get to see Him heal relationships, and restore identities in Himself, and break addictions, and you begin to love others as He has loved you, and whole communities are renewed by God’s work through you – I will remember this moment. The moment when God breathed into my life a vision of what He would do in you and through you, and I believed Him enough to commit it to writing.

Between now and then, I’m still thinking about you and praying for you. Every one of you I get the privilege to meet is a divine appointment from my perspective. I cannot wait to see you begin to fully experience life in Christ together!

So, hi. My name is John. I’ll be your new neighbor in July. I follow Jesus, and I believe that greater things are coming here. I can’t wait to meet you! See you soon.

Blessings,
Pastor John

Our Big Announcement…

Posted on January 27, 2013 by johnmarkum

This past weekend, my wife and I announced to our church family at Edgewood that this July we will be leaving to launch a new church in the South Bay area of San Jose, CA.

This has been a day that Tiffany and I have been looking forward to with great anticipation for many years. We told our church that when we began in ministry, we knew two things: that God had called me to lead a church one day as the Lead Pastor, and that the church I would lead would not be an existing church, but a church plant. Continue reading “Our Big Announcement…”