Lost in Faith

According to legend, chess was invented by Grand Vizier Sissa Ben Dahir, and given to King Shirham of India. The king offered him a reward, and he requested the following: “Just one grain of wheat on the first square of the    chessboard. Then put two on the second square, four on the next, then eight, and continue, doubling the number of grains on each successive square, until every square on the chessboard is reached.”

You may give me the wheat or its equal value on the 64th day. This is all I require for my services. The king agreed, but he lost his entire kingdom to Sissa Ben Dahir. Why?

In all, the king owed about 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of wheat. This was more than the worth of his entire kingdom! 18-quintillion—446-quadrillion—744-trillion, etc

The second half of the chessboard is a phrase, coined by Ray Kurzweil.  Raymond Kurzweil is an inventor and futurist. He is involved in fields as diverse as optical character recognition , text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments…

While the number of grains on the first half of the chessboard is large, the amount on the second half is vastly larger.

The number of grains of rice on the first half of the chessboard is 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + 64 + 128 + 256 + 512 + 1024 + … + 2,147,483,648, for a total of 2³² − 1 = 4,294,967,295 grains of rice, or about 100,000 kg of rice.  This amount is about 1/1,200,000^th of total rice production in India per annum (in 2005).

The number of grains of rice on the second half of the chessboard is 2³² + 2³³ + 2³⁴ … + 2⁶³, for a total of 2⁶⁴ − 2³² grains of rice, or the square of the number of grains on the first half of the board. On the 64th square of the chessboard alone there would be 2⁶³ = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains of rice, or more than two billion times as much on the first half of the chessboard.

On the entire chessboard there would be 2⁶⁴ − 1 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice, weighing 461,168,602,000 metric tons.

What does that have to do with ME? I believe that Shoal Creek is on the 2nd half of chess board.  In visual terms if you look at a growth chart, exponential growth starts slow but once the exponential factor hits growth is astronomical.

This is a populations growth chart.

It may be hard to pick out details but notice when the curve starts up the rate of growth continues to increase.

Let me apply this to Shoal Creek.  This Sunday about 1000 people hung out at Shoal Creek.  Imagine if 20% of them bring a friend next week.  1200 people the next week.  And if 20% bring a friend the next week 1440 people the 3rd week and so.  The graph lays long and flat for a while but when it turns up the climb is spectacular.

It took us 7.5 years to make it to 250.  It took another 7 years to get to 1000.  I am not mathematical genius but I see the hockey stick beginning to form!

Of course if these were just number then big whoop.  But they are lives being changed.  Men, women and children being brought into the family of God and learning to live out God’s mission.  Just today I was reminded of a friend whose been coming to the Creek who crossed the line of faith on a Sunday we were talking about J3 receiver to giver.  Wow!

This growth is going to cause us to talk about difficult things, a 3rd Service and When?  Planting new churches in areas where we already have people coming from.  Possibly exploring Satellite Campuses where put a portion of Sunday’s event on video.

But J3 and J5 are also going to cause us to explore taking the gospel to other parts of our city, the rural areas that many of you have come from or into extremely creative non-traditional forms of “church.”

I put church in quotes because church should be a synonym for God’s mission in this world and often it is only a representation of a religious social club.

I digress!  Non traditonal forms of church, like planting a church within a traveling sports team that tends to take families out of the natural weekend rhythm of weekend attendance.  Planting a church in  a workplace like Cerner or a school or even in a geographical location that has a number of Christians living or working close by, like downtown KC.

The hockey stick is forming and the I am going to do everything I can to put gas on the fire and see that everyone in Clay County, the Nortland, northwest Missouri and everywhere God lets us go has a chance to see and hear a clear understanding of the freedom found in Jesus.