Kids, Home, and Fellowship with God

A personal note – we would appreciate your prayers for our family. There’s nothing going on except that for a couple of weeks our kids have always been out-of-sync, off-schedule, and generally a major handful. This places quite a bit of pressure on our home and our ministry responsibilities. So we would appreciate your prayers for God’s grace to mature and change us, and give us the strength (and time!) to keep up with our ministry opportunities.

Maturing

As I’m considering what update I should give, I can’t get away from the word “maturing.” That seems to be the main theme in the ministry right now. We are learning lessons, changing, and maturing in regard to our Sunday night fellowship groups. We are maturing and learning and developing our music program. We are maturing in our understanding of people and how to help people and handle problems. The church is reaching new steps of maturity: the self-supporting step at the beginning of October, and by the end of the year we should be appointing our first 2 elders.
Does all of this mean that we are becoming increasingly inward-focused? I hope not! We are planning a special emphasis for 2007 on personal ministry. We have dozens of ideas of ways to equip and encourage our people toward personal ministry (discipleship, counseling, prayer, evangelism, missions, etc.). I’m enjoying the end of 2006, but I can’t wait for 2007!

Celebration Service testimonies

Here are some excerpts from the testimonies on Celebration Sunday:

“a church that comes together from so many different backgrounds, so many different places, and yet everybody meshes just beautifully.”

“one of the biggest things we can be thankful for is just focus … with a million things going on in our lives, a good church home was the one thing that was missing…. Bringing us closer together, bringing our entire family closer together with a brand new [church] family, and the blessings have just been multiplying ever since…”

“our family just has been so overwhelmed by the love of the body of Christ here”

“we feel like we’re family with you all … each of you have been a big part in our lives … you have the one-anothering thing down really well by God’s grace.”

“a tremendous leadership among the women”

“God put us here”

“it’s a miracle that God has brought all of us together”

“a pastor who unabashedly preaches the word of God in a culture that is contrary to that”

“our family is extremely encouraged … church used to be an obligation … I knew that churches like this existed … to understand what it’s like to have a real church family, one who lifts one another up, it’s just one big family. Understanding and feeling that is different from anything we’ve had before…. The love that’s here is unbelievable.”

“I think the love of everybody … I’ve never been to a church where, when I had a need, people called me … it blew me away, how supportive everyone was … I’ve learned so much about God. I’ve been to church a long time and I never really knew God until I came here. It’s opened my eyes and my heart to a lot of things. … Now I actually pray, something I’ve never really done.”

Millions, megacities, and America’s coasts

Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that “more than half the population [of the USA] lives within 50 miles of the coasts. In the next decade, an additional 25 million people will join them. That concentration of population is likely to result in megacities of 25 million or more…”

A good routine

Now that we are past the special events related to being self-supporting, we’re back to a regular church routine. Those special events were a blessing, but it’s great to be back to the regular routine. Yesterday was a weighty Sunday: in adult Bible study we covered Jesus’ difficult words in Matthew 5:33-42, and in the worship service we meditated on the overwhelming type in Genesis 22.
By the way, you can see some pictures from the recent baptism and picnic at www.findhope.net (on the picture galleries page). Here are a couple pictures of our girls, and a Menifee sunrise:

Do we want our own building?

I read today of a church planter in North Carolina who was just given 13 acres of land adjacent to the freeway! This reminded me that some of you might be confused about our perspective on land and a building. Here are a few of my thoughts:

1) Do we want land and our own building? Of course.

2) Is that financially possible? No. Land in Menifee right now averages $200,000 per usable acre, up to $1,000,000 per acre in prime locations. A church needs a minimum of 3 -4 usable acres, so just the land cost would be well near a million dollars. The California building climate is so difficult, that it would cost at least another million dollars to create county-approved building, parking, and landscaping. In general, you can estimate that we would need at least two million dollars.

3) God could do what is humanly impossible, and provide land and a building for us.

4) America has been rapidly urbanizing, suburbanizing, and mega-churching. These factors combine to make it increasingly difficult for a church plant to follow the normal pattern of buying land and building a building. Many of the neediest areas in the U.S.A. are also areas where it is highly unlikely that a church plant will ever own their own facility. These factors lead me to think that fundamental church planting is going to go through a rough stage where we have to learn a lot of hard lessons about how to “do church” without owning our own facility. Maybe it isn’t God’s will for our church to own our facility – maybe we will walk that rough road of learning how to do without, and be able to help others that come along after us.

5) In addition to the urbanizing, suburbanizing, and mega-churching factors mentioned above, we also have to remember that America is becoming increasingly hostile toward Christianity. If this continues, we will reach a point where it is very difficult (or even illegal) for churches to own their own facilities. Of course, it is already this way in many other parts of the world, and it was this way for the church after Pentecost!

Do we want to own our own building? Of course. But we want God’s will even more!