Starving Jesus

Watershed will be hosting the Starving Jesus "40 Days of Nothing" Tour on August 31st at our usual 7:30 pm time. To see the blog about the Cedar Rapids date, click here.

As I have started sharing this announcement with people, I have gotten a few questions. I think the Starving Jesus website can answer most of the questions I've gotten, but some have wondered how in the world Cedar Rapids, of all places, landed a stop on the tour.

First, it's probably because Craig Gross and J.R. Mahon, the guys who authored the book and will be speaking on the tour, are now living in Grand Rapids, MI, and "Grand Rapids" has two words and "Cedar Rapids" has two words and they both have the same second word, and the first word in both city names has 5 letters, 3 of which they hold in common, and this is one horribly long grammatically incorrect sentence, but I digress.

Naw, I doubt that the reason at all, but here's how it did happen.

I have known about the ministry of XXXChurch.com for some time now. I've referred guys struggling with porn-addictions or temptations to their free accountability software. When they put out a Mac version, I immediately downloaded it so I could tell these guys I'm counselling "yeah, my wife and best friend get my accountability emails" so that they would feel like someone else had led the way for them to place such a safety net in their lives. When I downloaded the Mac version, I selected to receive XXXChurch's free newsletter.

One month the newsletter talked about Craig Gross's new book (Craig is the co-founder of XXXChurch). The book was entitled "Starving Jesus". The title was slightly offensive, but I was used to that "line" being walked due to other things I've seen XXXChurch do to engage people in honest conversation about faith, Jesus, sexuality, masturbation, marriage, etc. To promote the book (or more importantly the message within the book), Craig and the co-author J.R. Mahon (a key staff member of XXXChurch) were going on a "40 Days of Nothing" Tour. One of the cities listed was Cedar Rapids.

I was curious, so I emailed to find out where in CR the event was going to be held. Craig emailed me back and said "could you host us?" After a couple of emails back and forth, we nailed down the August 31st date and made Craig and J.R. the official speakers for Watershed's Worship Gathering that night.

So that is the story of how "Starving Jesus" is coming to humble Cedar Rapids. I'm excited that the young adults from Watershed and other area ministries are going to be challenged in this way, and I'm praying for the Holy Spirit to speak to our hearts in an amazing way. I think the other questions you might have (like "Why the title "Starving Jesus?" "Why 40 Days of Nothing?" "Why is Jesus holding a mailbox post?") will be answered by the main Starving Jesus website (well, they probably won't answer the last question, but someone did just ask me that Thursday night when they saw the announcement for the first time).