Monday, June 30, 2008

Impact

I had a really neat conversation with our landlord from Tiger Cat last week. Gina told me that she is inviting everyone she sees to come to The Crossroads. She was so impressed with our setup and our attitude that she is getting the word out about us. She has hundreds of parents come through her gym each week, and she is telling them all about us.

She also told me that she wanted us to know that we were already having an impact on her life. She said that the excitement and joy that we have and the love that we have for each other and that we have already shown to her has inspired her and that she wants to come check us out at one of our services! Yahooo!

Update

Ugh! I have not done a very good job of keeping this updated.

Things are going really awesome right now. We had our first preview service on June 15 at the Tiger Cat Gym in Anna. I was totally amazed at how our team worked and how they were able to convert the space into a worship center.

When you came in the door, we set up a cafe area with coffee and pastry bar and three cafe tables. It was super cool, and a really neat space for people to gather and greet each other. We also had our Welcome Center next to that.

The really neat thing was what we were able to do with the floor that we actually meet on. As many of you know, we are actually meeting on the tumbling floor of the gym. We were able to remove the thick foam matting, and meet on the plywood subfloor. There are still springs under this, so the floor still has some bounce to it, but that just really makes worship fun. We used a lot of black drapery and some lattice to convert the space to make it more our own.

Our worship band did an incredible job. Robby Thompson is our worship leader. We actually just found Robby about less than two weeks before our preview service, but he is an incredible musician. He is just what we had been praying for in a worship leader: a man who was humble, who understood what it means to bring people into God's presence, and who knew what it was like to be set free. Robby is all of those things, and he is a really gifted musician.

We used some of the mats from the gym to create an enclosed nursery. We had found folding rocking chairs at Target the week before. That was a really nice touch. We set up our children's ministry area, Kids' Cove, outside. From what I hear, that went really well.

Oh yeah, and the sermon was just awesome.

We had about 40-45 people in attendance, including all the children and workers.

Overall, it was an awesome day and a great practice for our team!

Thursday, June 12, 2008

It's Almost Here

I have been busy, busy, busy over the last several weeks, so that explains my long absence from putting anything up on the blog. We are in full gear with planting The Crossroads right now.

This past Sunday, we had our first community block party in the Oak Hollow community. We had about 150 people show up, and worked ourselves to death. It was great, and my team did such an awesome job. We are evaluating some of the things we do at the block party, and I will post more on that later. But, overall, it was a great experience.

This Sunday we are having our very first preview service at the Tiger Cat Tumble and Cheer Gym. I picked up our truck and sound equipment yesterday, and tonight we are loading up the truck to get it ready to go.

Here's the big thing you can do right now. Pray! Pray for every aspect of our first preview service. Pray for our set-up and take-down. Pray for strength and good attitudes from our team. Pray for our children's ministry. Pray for the worship service. Pray for our band. Satan attacked this week and broke the guitar of our guitarist, a phenomenally gifted young man who will be playing for worship for the first time. Pray people to come.

We have worked hard and prepared for this day, but really, what happens is up to God. God will have to move for this service to be a success. We want to do this in God's power, so pray, pray, pray!