Weekly Update from the Senior Pastor

 

July 12, 2006

Dear Family and Friends,

Thanks for great feed-back on last week’s message about finding our life’s purpose. Mainly, folks have affirmed their determination not to be mental “ mirror-gazers ,” growing into smaller and smaller packages wrapped up in self. We all want our lives to count.

The alternative to the self-absorbed scenario is realizing that at the center of my life: it’s not about me!We have to begin with God. Though I have a vital part to play in a great story, I am not the defining or central character in that eternal story. While that might prick my pride, it also lifts my burdens: I don’t have to be anyone’s Messiah—I can just serve and share Him. And trust Him—for He is at work in all things.

A belated thank you to Brett’s musicians and creative arts folks for a truly outstanding July 4 th service celebrating the fact that without the spiritual force of the colonial churches there never would have been an American revolution, or a United States. Remember—wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is increasing freedom at every level of existence.

Great news!

After an EXTENSIVE review process and site visits, we have settled on a design-build firm for our new facility: Building God’s Way . They are a national firm that specializes in church structures and in significant savings—hopefully around 40% over the first approach we considered. We are negotiating the contract now, and need to have a congregational town-hall meeting in August to explain what we are thinking about concerning the whole mixture of building size, site work, permitting process and costs.

Jumping over the whole rationale of how we got here, we believe we can build a 50,000 square foot building in phase one in which 30,000 square ft is finished when we move in (which gives us the equivalent of all the space we have now in our children’s ministry, main worship center and office spaces, plus an additional 10,000 square feet of space—which is equal to 2.5 more children’s ministry centers); with an additional 20,000 square ft of unfinished area [walls, roof and floor] that we can build out and expand into as we grow. At first guess, this will allow us at least a 600 seat sanctuary that could expand into a 1000 seat worship center and the potential for a gymnasium.

It will be so good to have a permanent place to call our congregational home— a Light on a hill .

But the church is not the building—the church is those who gather to serve and grow in the building.

And God has a purpose for each of us in His church. We don’t know yet what all those purposes are as we build homes of Light by the power of the Lord Jesus Christ—but we know five I reviewed last week.

We are called to be a congregation that:

  • Loves and values children and youth as key representatives of the Kingdom of God , already significant players on God’s team that we can equip, encourage and release to serve in love.
  • Serves as a Haven to special needs children , youth and adults and their families—that our church will be a place that is always accepting of those who have handicaps of any kind.
  • Provides open hearts and an open spiritual home to recovering addicts —whether their addiction is one of the body or soul; substance or sexual, mental or physical. Our congregation will be a place where anyone with any struggle, who has drawn a line in the sand for Jesus and stepped over into submission to Him can find support, love, accountability and acceptance.
  • We are to be a strong mission-church with a reach that literally extends around the world.
  • A church where men can wrestle to the ground what it means for them to be men of God .

I love this vision of godly men from Isaiah 32:1-8:

Behold, the King will reign in righteousness,

AND EACH MAN WILL BE LIKE:

  1. A shelter from the wind.
  2. A refuge from the storm
  3. A stream of water in the desert
  4. The shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land…[all descriptions of JESUS]—

For the noble man makes noble plans, and by noble deeds he stands.

That is our call, men, to increasingly be like JESUS as protectors, providers, refreshers and noble planners and actors.

Next Sunday Bob continues our summer series by exploring our need to pace our lives in a way that nourishes our soul, mind and body. The Fredericks-gang will see you all in a couple of weeks. This is our time to retreat and renew as a family unit, so we can come back better able to serve.

August kicks off with the Leadership Summit and lots of planning for our transition back to the future as we return to Damascus High School (where this congregation began) on September 24; even as we begin the permitting process for building on our land. Just ahead of that, on September 17 th we will have a good-bye celebration in our current facility. Start now thinking about the ways God has changed and grown your life during our time here—and that day we will write our testimonies on the walls and windows of our facility as a memorial to all God has done.

When we move into the High School, we will all gather in one unified service from 10:30 a.m. — noon . This will allow us to plan some in-depth discipling classes on marriage, finance, Bible study and other topics from 9:00-10:00 Sunday mornings.

Our youth ministry will be uniting with, and providing leadership to, the youth ministry of Redeemer Lutheran on Sunday evenings—and Redeemer is offering to us the use of their facility free. We also have free office, meeting and practice space on the corner of Route 27 and Gue Road (thank God—and thank the Catrons!) during this interim In the High School we’ll go lean and mean on set-up—with the same level of excellence—for all our Sunday programming. We’ll have our land to retreat to, picnic on, dream on, prayer-walk and watch the tangible evidence of our future permanent ‘Light on a hill’ rise up!

In short—I am excited.

God is giving us so much opportunity to serve Him and because Jesus is our risen Lord, the best is yet to come!

In the Lamb,
Richard

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