Thursday, July 24, 2008

Why I Am PUMPED About Grace Church - Part 1

It was four years ago that Laura and I, along with our kids, moved to Lititz, PA in Lancaster County to be just the second Senior Pastor in the history of Grace Church. What a great four years it has been. I am so blown away at what God has been doing through our ministry. I am more excited about Grace Church than I was four years ago when I left a successful ministry in Indiana and a wonderful church full of people who loved and accepted me in order to launch a new chapter in my ministry here in Lititz. In short, I am absolutely pumped! So today and tomorrow I want to give you several reasons why I could not be more thrilled about the next three months of ministry here at Grace.

Auditorium Renovations – This week will complete the new floor being installed in our
multi-purpose building that is used as our auditorium and gymnasium. In the early weeks of August the new retractable basketball standards and brand new scoreboard will be put up on the walls and retractable bleachers will also be installed. Specially designed multi-media curtains will then be installed that will cover the basketball standards, bleachers and scoreboard in order for our worship and other special events to take place in a building that does not look like a gymnasium while allowing us to have an extremely professional and effective gym for sporting and other recreational events.

Just Say No – Over the five Sundays in August we will be studying a new series that we care calling, “Just Say No” in which each week we will see one individual from Scripture who personally faced temptation. We will see three examples who succeeded at resisting their temptation (Christ, Joseph, and Daniel) and two examples who failed (Eve and David). From these 5 example we will learn everything we can about how to resist the personal temptations that we face as followers of Christ every single day!

Pastor of Connections Visit – August 1-6 will see Steve Burghart and his family coming to Lititz to visit Grace Church as our potential candidate for our Pastor of Connections position. Steve is from Southern California where he is on staff at Saddleback Community Church which is pastored by Rick Warren, author of the best selling book, The Purpose Driven Life. Next week I will give you all of the details for this visit but for now be sure to mark 3:00-5:30 down on your calendar for Sunday, August 3, for a special “meet and greet” time in the church fellowship hall with refreshments and an informal time for you to meet Steve and his family and to ask him anything you would like to know of him.

Outdoor Youth-Led Communion – Sunday evening, August 3, at 6pm following the meet and greet time with our potential Pastor of Connection Candidate, our youth will lead us in what I believe is the greatest communion of the year as we all meet outside.

Core Class Sunday – Our next Core Class Sunday will be the afternoon of August 10 as we offer Class 101 which is an introduction to Grace Church taught by me for those who are new or somewhat new to Grace Church and Class 201 which deals with developing spiritual disciplines and is taught by Pastor Tim. Free lunch and childcare is provided.

No comments: