The Beginning: intotheFlame.com
intotheFlame.com has come a long, long way since its conception in 1996. At the time, I was merely looking for an outlet to the creative overflow that God placed in my life when I followed His lead and stepped away from my comfort zone. I went off to college five hundred miles from home, in a city that frightened me terribly and a culture shock that sent me reeling. In the middle of all that, I found myself writing more than I ever had before. This tumult of material, coupled with an interest in learning how to code HTML, led to me putting my first site online in 1996. The site was very different then, and it would change many times over the next six years; from a treatise on philosophy, to a rant about the Church, to briefly an ill-fated commercial enterprise, to a collection of written, poetic, and musical works, and yet again to the birthing pains of an actual local and online ministry.
This most recent change involves yet another distillation of the central philosophy of Into the Flame Ministries. I was reading G.K. Chesterton, and a single phrase leaped out at me and took ahold of my heart: "the furious love of God." At once an image entered my mind of a flame rising from a whirlwind: I caught a glimpse of God moving and working change within us and through us by His unassailable, unchanging furious love — furious not in anger, but furious in action. His furious love is unstoppable. It is like a mighty whirlwind, exciting the flame, feeding the refining fire.
I can see the furious love of God working its way into us through our earnest seeking of His will. I can see His furious love working out through us in the gifts that He gives each of us, and this has become the central facet of this website. We have been given gifts of technology that allow us to host rich content and broadcast it to the world, and we are passing these gifts onward to you.
God is constantly changing us, and this website will continue to change and grow as He continues to reveal His plan for us.
Dive: Passion Prayer Praise
Dive! is our small group model, borne out of experiences in small prayer groups that I have both led and participated in. Ideally, Dive groups are heavily concentrated small groups where members are held accountable to each other through prayer, confession, and regular worship. From time to time, we organize Prayer Walks on and Concerts of Prayer: concentrated prayer gatherings organized in cooperation with local churches and other ministries. We worship God together and lift up each other, our cities, counties, states, country, and world in prayer.
For more information about starting up a Dive! group in your area, please contact Jason.
