For anyone who isn’t able to make it early on Sunday mornings to participate in Rustin Rawling’s missional living group, we’re going to start posting weekly updates for you to be able to follow along. And of course, if anything sparks a question or thought in your mind, comment away! It’d be great to continue the conversation here on the blog.

FYI, this is from the group’s 4th week. If you’d like to get up to speed, email Rustin (rustin@kaleohouston.com) and he can get you the handouts from weeks 1-3. Enjoy!

Note from Rustin:

There are many opportunities within our days to live out our calling of being witness of Jesus (Matt. 28:19, Acts1:8, John 20:21). The trick is taking advantage of those opportunities and in order to do so we must intentionally respond to them. One way that we can begin doing so is through pursuing intentional conversations as Jesus did with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4). Culturally, Jesus would have been expected to despise this woman. And yet he purposefully travels directly to her. As a direct result of the conversation that followed, both she and many other Samaritans came to believe in Jesus as the Son of God (4:39).

Like Jesus, we must initiate intentional conversations with those around us in an effort to share life and faith with them. Here are three things to consider as we live out our calling:

Make the Most
It’s easy for us to settle for conversational mediocrity and wading in the shallow end of interaction with others. We look over to the deep end and see potential danger, fearing for our relationships, and fearing our own self-created inadequacies or self-consciousness. Instead, we need to be willing to engage in deep/meaningful conversations as we build relationships.

Keep it Real
Jesus never intended for our faith to be categorized or reserved for certain days of the week. Because our very identity is grounded in Jesus, sharing Jesus with others isn’t something that we can turn off. Being followers of Jesus means that living on mission is a natural consequence of being empowered by both the Holy Spirit and the fact that the truth has been revealed to us. Therefore, that mission can be the natural outworking of our everyday lives.

An Eternal Perspective
A tendency many of us have is to feel guilty or unaccomplished if we don’t explicitly share the Gospel every time we have a conversation with someone. While it is important for us to have the Gospel in mind, there is also great value in having intentional conversations for the sake of simply getting to know someone. In doing so, we will learn a great deal about the people we’re pursuing, providing invaluable opportunities to speak meaningfully about what Jesus has accomplished.

Unbelievable.  We are not a huge church community.  We are not a wealthy church community. We are a growing group of engineers, accountants, med students, stay-at-home moms, social workers, programmers, administrative assistants and more… and together we’re making the city of Houston a better place.  Here’s one way…

Last week, we announced our goal of raising $1000 for our team participating in SleepOut, an organized over-night fund-raiser at Sesquicentennial Park in downtown Houston to bring awareness to the homeless crisis in our city. Proceeds benefit the work ofSEARCH Homeless Services. Well, Kaleo, you stepped up.

We have exceeded our goal, raising almost $1400 in only ten days.

Thank you to everyone who generously contributed to the cause - we are all playing our own parts in helping fight homelessness in Houston.  Way to go!

If you are still interested in helping support Kaleo’s team, there is still time!  You can click below to make a donation and help us blow even farther past our goal. 

If you want to be a part of the volunteer team serving the kids in our church, leave a comment below and we’ll get you in contact with Sue Streger, our Kaleo Kids Director. If you’re not sure what the heck I’m talking about, check out the note Sue wrote up, explaining the new plans.

-Kyle M

COMING SOON—WORSHIP GUIDES FOR KALEO KIDS!   

From its formation, Kaleo has always believed that children are an important part of God’s kingdom and that their training is the primary responsibility of parents.   We believe it is important for children to be in worship and for families to worship together.  We also believe that as the family of God at Kaleo we all stand with parents and support them as they train their children.  Because we believe these things, Kaleo will soon offer worship guides for children geared for kids too old for Kaleo Kids nursery to kids in about the 3^rd or 4^th grade. 

Children learn to read one step at a time.  They learn to play soccer one step at a time.  They learn to swim one step at a time.  Mastering each step to these reach these goals takes teaching, practice, support, and encouragement.  To teach a child to play soccer you don’t just sit them on the sidelines an hour a week, give them a book to look at, a paper to draw on and tell them to be quiet.  The same is true of learning to worship.  Children need to be taught about worship, they need to practice worshiping, they need to be supported and encouraged as they worship.  This is hard work and is not a quick and easy job. The goal of these worship guides is to support parents and give them a tool to help them with this job.   These guides will also give all of Kaleo a way to support and encourage the children as they are learning.

Each Sunday the children will pick up their guide book and the morning’s special worship sheet.  The sheet will have specific things for the children to focus on during the gathering.

The first step is simply to help the children be aware of their physical surroundings and to learn to be active listeners.  As they master this and mature, they can begin to listen for content.  Once they are listening for content they can begin to understand it and apply it.

These guides will give parents suggestions to use as they work to help their children take steps.  With parents help, these sheets will be simple enough for the younger children to respond to with pictures and yet challenging enough for older children to respond to in writing. 

At the end of the gathering, children will be encouraged to share their books with not only parents but with others at Kaleo.  This will allow all of Kaleo to encourage and support the children.  After sharing their books, the children will return them for safe keeping until the next week.

This is where you come in: we will need a team of volunteers to coordinate the weekly distribution and collection of the notebooks starting in two Sundays on Nov. 23rd. It won’t be strenuous work, but the impact you can add to the kids’ morning will be huge. If you would like to be a part of this team, leave a comment here on the blog by this Friday and I’ll be able to get you up to speed with a brief training session after worship on Sunday the 16th.

Thanks to all of you for already loving the children of Kaleo and creating a warm environment for them to grow up in, I’m looking forward to making our efforts even better in the coming weeks!

- Sue Streger, Kaleo Kids Director

10,000 people are chronically homeless in Houston, with thousands of those being children. It seems like an overwhelming problem to address, but working together with others throughout our city you can make a difference!  

Kaleo is proud to be a part of Houston SleepOut - an organized over-night fund-raiser at Sesquicentennial Park in downtown Houston to bring awareness to the homeless crisis in our city.  Participants are raising funds by asking friends, family and others in their community to sponsor their commitment to the project as “Sleepers”, those who will actually spend the night at the event. 

All proceeds benefit SEARCH Homeless Services, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping homeless men, women and children get off the streets and into jobs and affordable housing.

Our own Jake Umbriaco is a part of the team that has pulled this event together, and our Outreach Intern Rustin Rawlings is heading up the team from Kaleo that will be spending the night in the park.  There are two ways you can be involved:

1. Become a part of the team.  Click here to sign to go, spend the night with hundreds of others, and raise awareness for this important cause in our city.
2. Make a donation.  Our goal is to raise at least $1000 for Kaleo’s team.  In the past few days we’ve seen $350 come in towards that goal - great job so far!  Whether you’re able to give $10 or $100, we can all come together and make this happen. Make a donation to Kaleo’s Sleep Out team!

You’ve probably heard or read something about the SleepOut event over the past couple weeks… we’ve been talking it up because we believe it’s a fantastic cause and is a great way to practically love our neighbors. In case you weren’t at theGathering yesterday morning, Jake Umbriaco explained that the goal of this event is to raise awareness for the plight of the homeless in our city while raising funds to benefit the work of SEARCH Homeless Services.

Here at Kaleo our goal is to contribute towards this work through two ways. First, we’re assembling a team of “sleepers” who will attend the event on Nov. 15th at Sesquicentennial Park in downtown Houston (5pm-8am the next morning). If you’d like to be a part of that team, contact Rustin Rawlings (rustinrawlings@gmail.com). Second, we are going to raise $1000 in sponsorship of our team. This will sponsor a team of up to 10 sleepers ($100 minimum per person).

Honestly, we don’t have much time before the event happens. Our goal is to have the $1000 by next Thursday Nov. 13th. So we’ve set up an online page for you to donate directly from your home, just click the link at the bottom of this post.

The bottom line is simple: we all need to be sacrificially loving each other and people around us. The possibility of what that can look like on an individual level is incredibly diverse. This one is a no-brainer, though. Obviously not everyone will be able to participate on the 15th, but see what you can give and join with us as we support the work of SEARCH and love the people of Houston. 

Make a donation to Kaleo’s Sleep Out team!

This past weekend we found out some bittersweet news from the Nicholas family. Nolan, Tiffany, and their girls have been closely involved in the life of Kaleo for years now, but they will soon be moving to West Virginia as Nolan has been offered a fantastic job over there. So while we’re really excited for this new opportunity for their family, it’s definitely sad to see them leave.

We don’t want them to go without getting a chance to wish them well and say a proper goodbye though, so we’ll be having an open house Sunday the 9th at the Strom’s place in Pearland. The details are short, sweet, and listed below… I hope you all can make it!

-Kyle M

When: Sunday, November 9th, from 3:00-5:30, come and go as you please
Where: Strom’s house, Pearland; email me for address and directions if needed (kyle@kaleohouston.com)
What to Bring: if you’d like to help with food you can contact Jody Strom at k.j.strom@gmail.com, but most everything is already covered.

During the message on Sunday, we talked about why truth (particularly truth about God) is so vital in the life of a Christian.  In a time when tolerance and pluralism are the wisdom of the day, this isn’t always a popular stance.  But it is central to living the Christian life, as we’ve seen throughout our time in 1 John.

Time was running a bit short on Sunday, so I wasn’t able to share this great quote from Eugene Peterson with you.  That’s the beauty of the Kaleo blog - there’s no time limit on the internet.  Take some time to reflect on these wise words:

Our age has developed a loose geniality about what people say they believe. We are especially tolerant in matters of religion. But much of the vaunted tolerance is only indifference. We don’t care because we don’t think it matters. My tolerance disappears quickly if a person’s belief interferes with my life. I am not tolerant of persons who believe that they have as much right to my possessions as I do and proceed to help themselves. I am not tolerant of businesses that believe that their only obligation is to make a profit and that pollute our environment and deliver poorly made products in the process. And John is not tolerant when people he loves are deceived about God, because he knows that such lies will reduce their lives, impair the vitality of their spirits, imprison them in old guilt, and cripple them with anxieties and fears.

That is John’s position: a lie about God is a lie about life, and he will not have it. Nothing counts more in the way we live than what we believe about God. A failure to get it right in our minds becomes a failure to get it right in our lives. A wrong idea of God translates into sloppiness and cowardice, fearful minds and sickly emotions.

One of the wickedest things we can do is to tell people that God is an arbitrarily angry tyrant, because the person who believes it will defensively avoid him if they can. It is equally wicked to tell others that God is a senile grandfather. The person who believes it will live carelessly and trivially with no sense of transcendent purpose. It is wicked to tell a person a lie about God because, if we come to believe the wrong things about God, we will think wrong things about ourselves, and we will live meanly or badly. Telling a person a lie about God distorts reality, perverts life and damages all the processes of living. 

Many of you have heard by now that Kendra Glaser’s grandmother Geraldine Robinson has recently passed away. While we want to celebrate the long life Geraldine was able to live, we also want to come alongside the Glaser family during this time of loss. This Saturday (Oct. 18th) we will have the opportunity to do just that as they hold a memorial service in Geraldine’s honor at St. Mark Lutheran Church. The service will begin at 4:00pm for anyone who would like to attend.

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If you’d like a resource to follow up on last week’s message on Dealing with Sin, I highly recommend the book below.  It’s written by John Owen, a puritan pastor who has been gone for hundreds of years… but his words are as wise and helpful today as they were then.  It isn’t light reading, but it is absolutely life-changing, God-centered wisdom.  Click the picture and grab a copy today.