Super Center Savior: The Joy of Living Between Sundays

By Jeff Noble

There are few areas of the country that have not been affected by Wal-Mart stores. In many communities, these stores serve not only as retail hubs but also as community centers. In Super Center Savior, Pastor Jeff Noble explores the similarities between the church and Wal-Mart and suggests how the church can become more influential in our lives and communities.

Using stories, personal examples, and cultural events, Noble helps Christians connect their mission and identity with creative analogies to Wal-Mart. He issues a thoughtful challenge for Christians to rethink, reinvest, and repent of selfishness and nudges the western consumer to commit to a faith-filled, dynamic, and influential lifestyle.

Super Center Savior shows what stores get right, what churches get wrong, and vice versa. It communicates how our world needs churches in which ministry happens 24/7 and the contagious joy that is revealed when Christians quit going to church and start being the church. When believers begin to live for Christ and others every day, and not just Sundays, our churches become as influential and important to our communities as Wal-Mart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Aug 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490887050

Jeff Noble

Jeff Noble earned a Masters of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He served as a campus minister for eight years and a pastor/church planter for six years in Arkansas. Noble currently serves as pastor of Northstar Church in Blacksburg, Virginia. He and his wife, Carolyn, have two children, Sam and Adelyn.

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Copyright © 2015 Jeff Noble.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

WestBow Press

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-8704-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-8705-0 (e)

WestBow Press rev. date: 07/30/2015

Contents

Introduction

The Wal-Mart Analogy

In-Between Sunday Living

Keeping It Ready

Wal-Church

24 Hours a Day

You’re Not Always Right

Customer Service

The Voice

How Jesus Shops

Fighting Wal-Mart

Conclusion

Endnotes

404653C.psd Introduction

Super Center Savior is written for multiple audiences. I believe the person that will most resonate with it is the church attender. I hope that in the pages to follow, the attender will move from the idea of simply being present in church on Sunday to discover the radical joy of reflecting His presence while living between Sundays.

This book is also written for church leaders. The overall message in these pages has been a refining call for self-review as a reminder to myself as a leader and influencer in the church. My earnest hope is for this message to remind church leaders that church isn’t for us. As hard as we work to ensure health and growth of an organization, all our hard work amounts to nothing if we aren’t helping and modeling for others the joy of living and loving like Jesus between Sundays.

Finally, there are two chapters in particular written for those whom Sundays are just the final day of the weekend before the beginning of the work week. You’re Not Always Right and Customer Service both speak to the importance of discovering the ultimate joy of real life in Jesus Christ. If you are not a Christian and don’t want to wade through this little tome, I’d simply and humbly ask you to skip to those two chapters for reading and evaluation. I’d love to hear your comments on them.

I’ve found the irrepressible joy of living between Sundays in my own life. My family is caught up in the experience as well. I hope this book will lead you to inescapable conclusion that every day of your life can be super when centered on the Savior.

I’ve wrestled with this book for more than four years. I love to write. I owe a lot of people for that. My mom is one of those. Dr. Williams Downs at Ouachita Baptist University is another. While there have been many other influences, I’m grateful for the creativity of Christ. He defines my identity. I’ve also had a love-hate relationship with His bride, the church, for almost 20 years.

When you combine these influences, you get a guy in love with Christ who blogs with publication aspirations, I suppose. I began blogging in 2005 at journeyguy.com, shortly after the blogosphere’s popular inception. I wanted to write about the human journey and the paths of faith and joy that are so often overgrown or hard to find along the way.

Somewhere on my blogging journey, the genesis for leaving a more lasting contribution in the form of a book came to mind. I’ve always had subtle disdain for pastors who write books - particularly big church pastors. Whether from jealousy or discernment, I disliked a megachurch pastor using his mega influence to write a mini book. That was until I tried doing it.

With all my love for writing and even experience doing so, it’s incredibly difficult to create a cohesive string of thoughts that would hold together well enough to be a book. Add to that the scriptural admonition in Ecclesiastes 12.11-12:

"The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails—given by one shepherd. Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body."

As this book began to gel in my head and heart, I wondered if I really had anything useful to contribute? I could certainly not claim that mine are the words of the wise. My wife would agree, for the most part. In addition, does American Christian subculture really need another book?

I came to terms - perhaps unjustifiably - with my desire to write for encouragement, admonition and even influence when I began to internalize the theme of telling the next generation found in many Old Testament passages. Each Christian generation is responsible for effectively passing on lessons learned and hope found in their days as they’ve followed God in faith.

"Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth! I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old, things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might, and the wonders that he has done." (Psalm 78:1-4 ESV)

So this project began with that hope. In some small way, I want this book to be a testimony to the ways and works of God that will provoke thought in my generation and will be a signpost for the next. God is magnificently huge, and no one person can adequately describe His will, works or ways. We need every voice to paint a picture of His majesty and to encourage us toward a more accurate reflection of His beauty - even if the voice, like mine, is sometimes tinny and mistaken at drive-thrus for a woman’s.

404653C.psd The Wal-Mart Analogy

There are two Sams that have played a huge role in most Americans’ lives in the 20th and 21st centuries. For me, there are three Sams. My son’s name is Sam, and he is actually the most important one to me. For the rest of you, there is Uncle Sam who is the icon of patriotism, and then there is Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. It’s this last Sam that we can learn so much from in relation to the church, and it’s why this book is called Super Center Savior. After all, there are few areas of our country that have not been impacted by Wal-Mart.

As a young seminary graduate, I began my first full-time ministry position in the glorious, pine woods enshrouded community of Monticello, Arkansas (pop. 10,000). In it and others like it, Wal-Mart plays