Matt Roberts - The God of New Beginnings: How the Power of Relationship Brings Hope and Redeems Lives

CONTENTS

PRAISE FOR THE GOD OF NEW BEGINNINGS

The more Im around the Genesis Project guys, the more impressed I am with how theyre applying the love and grace of Christ to salvage messed-up people (the kind whose worried relatives and friends call my daily radio program, New Life Live!, every day). Ive even made the effort to travel to see this work in action. It ties directly into a heart concern of mine, which is transforming lives through Gods truth in redemptive relationships.

STEPHEN ARTERBURN, NEW LIFE MINISTRIES FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN

Raw, gritty, practical, and inspirational, this is essential reading for anyone with a passion to bring the beautiful news to the broken. Highly recommended!

JEFF LUCAS, INTERNATIONAL AUTHOR, SPEAKER, BROADCASTER

The God of New Beginnings is a piercing documentary of desperate people in desperate places who are transformed by Jesus Christ. Nothing is held back. It builds on story after story, truth after truth, faith to faith, and glory to glory. What Rob and Matt show us is raw and real. It took my breath away and challenged me to believe each day for more of Gods power in my own life!

RICHARD FOTH, SPEAKER AND AUTHOR, KNOWN

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2018 Rob Cowles and Matt Roberts

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Epub Edition October 2018 9780785220428

ISBN 978-0-7852-2042-8 (eBook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cowles, Rob, 1965- author. | Roberts, Matt, 1978- author. | Merrill, Dean, author.

Title: The God of new beginnings : how the power of relationship brings hope and redeems lives / Rob Cowles and Matt Roberts with Dean Merrill.

Description: Nashville, Tennessee : W Publishing, an imprint of Thomas Nelson, [2018]

Identifiers: LCCN 2018022540| ISBN 9780785220350 | ISBN 9780785220428 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: Non-church-affiliated people. | Evangelistic work.

Classification: LCC BV4921.3 .C69 2018 | DDC 248.4dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022540

Printed in the United States of America

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If you follow the various best-places-to-live-in-America rankings, you would not imagine that a city as classy, beautiful, and educated as Fort Collins, Colorado, would even have a strip club. Nestled up against the majestic Rocky Mountains, with world-class ski slopes less than two hours away, its 160,000 residents enjoy more than 300 days of sunshine a year. Biking trails are everywhere, much to the delight of the 33,000 students at Colorado State University, the citys intellectual anchor.

My family and I have enjoyed the Fort Collins culture ever since 2005, when I (Rob) became executive pastor of Timberline Church, the citys largest, with more than five thousand attenders and a beautiful, expansive campus. I loved the opportunity to speak in the midweek services (as well as some weekends) while also managing a staff of a hundred. My wife, Joy, was a devoted mom to our two sons, the younger of whom was still in junior high, coming up through an excellent school system. We hardly noticed the seedy industrial area on the northeast side of town called the Mulberry Corridor (along Mulberry Street) near Interstate 25.

One day in the spring of 2013, I got a text from our senior pastor, Dary Northrop. He mentioned a guy named Aaron, who had come around saying he had given his life to Jesus and wanted to get out of the strip club business he and his two brothers had inherited from their father. Aaron Bekkela called again and is asking me to come over and at least see the property, Dary wrote. I agreed to meet him there tomorrow afternoon. Want to come with me? I texted back a yes, not really knowing what I was getting myself into. I had never been to a strip club before, and the only time I had even passed by the Hunt Club was when I was dropping off my kids at the curiously placed roller-skating rink next door.

The next day after lunch, the two of us plus another staff pastor made our way to the establishment. There we saw a nondescript, low-slung building with a small parking lot and a dingy sign out front that read

Hunt ClubGIRLSGIRLS. Open Daily @ 4:00 pm. Open Friday @ Noon.

Up and down the block were various auto repair shops, a heating and plumbing contractor, and a tattoo parlor; directly behind the club was a trailer park.

Aaron, a fortyish man with red hair and a goatee, was waiting in his standard jeans and T-shirt to meet us. His personal story, I found out later, was no charade; he had been affected years before by a brief conversation one night at the end of a shift when one of his dancers had stopped by his office before leaving. Hanging around the door frame, she said, Um, my mother asked me to give you a message.

Aaron had braced himself. Hearing from a dancers mother could never go well, he assumed. But to his great surprise, the dancer had meekly said, She just said to tell you, she and her friends [who happened to be Timberline women] are praying for you. This was a seed that would germinate in Aarons life for years.

More recently, a random flyer had shown up in his mailbox promoting a Christian conference. He decided to go and ended up making a commitment to Jesus at that conference. His new life as a Christ follower prodded him to try to convince his two brothers that they should sell. He was tired of living with the tension of doing a mens Bible study in the morning and opening the club at night. He had approached several northern Colorado churches to step up and repurpose the property. He was desperate to extricate himself from this wretched livelihood. Maybe this building could even be redeemed for something positive.