Surprise!

Sunday was another awesome day at The Crossroads. Attendance was down a little, but we saw some more new faces, and had some returnees as well. Our worship time was just incredible. Robby and the band did a terrific job, and everyone just seemed to have this really awesome spirit of surrender. The message was great, and I don't say that because I preached it, but because God really spoke to me during the message.

I just am always really touched when I consider the depth of what Christ did for us on the cross. The reality of his sacrifice on the cross should drive our lives of service and worship to God.

But, here's the cool/funny/frustrating/surprising thing that happened. Before the service, our worship dude, our church planting intern, and I got together to pray like we always do. I was preaching on how we are supposed to live our lives for an audience of one, so our prayers were really focused on God, on his majesty, and his sovereignty (all really good places to go in prayer). So, I felt impressed in that vein to pray that God would surprise us today, that he would do something totally unexpected, something that we didn't prepare for, that he would do something that was way beyond what we had planned for the day. Cool prayer, right?

Well, here's the thing. Even though I prayed that prayer, I had expectations about the way God would answer that prayer. I had a certain framework in which I thought would be reasonable for God to work in a way I didn't expect. Do you get the irony there? I had expectations about the unexpected thing I was asking God to do! I wanted God to surprise me, but not too much.

So, fifteen minutes before our service is going to start, I tell our team that one of my primary goals for the day is that we start on time. Five minutes before start time, we heard a loud thud from outside, where we do our children's ministry. We have canopies that we set up outside that our children meet under. We go outside, and a huge gust of wind has come along and totally lifted the canopies, and two of them are now on the roof of the building sixteen feet up in the air.

We all had a good laugh while we figured out how to get our now destroyed canopies down. We were thankful that no kids were under the canopies. And my awesome team did what I am always telling them to do. They were flexible, and they quickly relocated children's ministry and did a great job.

Needless to say, we did not get started on time. And, yes, God did surprise me, but so not in the way I thought he would. But maybe God showed us that it really is all about him, that we constantly walk in dependence on him, and that our ability to plant a church, to reach people, to have a worship service, to sing praises to him, is all completely dependent on his activity.

After all that, we had an awesome worship time. Maybe the fact that we had already seen God answer our prayers in a very unexpected but very quick way made us very ready to see him, fall before him, and hear from him. It was a great surprise!

Wow!

We had an incredible day yesterday with The Crossroads Community Church. Yesterday was our second Summer Preview Service. We had 46 people in attendance, and 25 of those were guests. So, over half our attendants were guests. We had an awesome worship service, and the preacher was pretty good!

We have had a lot of activity going on over the last month in preparation for the service. We sent out a saturation mailer to all of Anna advertising our community block party and our Preview Service. I have been making lots of good connections in Anna through the Greater Anna Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber hosted Anna's first citywide 4th of July celebration, and they asked us to help out with the children's area. We brought a bounce house and we gave away a weekend getaway on Lake Texoma. We made a lot of good connections, and really got our name out in the community through that event.

We also hosted a Family Movie Night in one of the communities in Anna. That idea was "money in the bank". We had come upon the idea as we thought through how to do a better block party. The problem with typical block parties is that you have a limited window of opportunity to connect with people (15-20 minutes, max). People come, get a snack, let their kids play games and they are gone. So, we decided we would try showing a movie, and see if that gave us longer to connect with people. We bought a giant, outdoor inflatable movie screen and showed Alvin and the Chipmunks. We did an abbreviated block party before the movie, and we had concessions both before and after the movie. It worked wonderfully. People came and stayed. Some of them were there for three hours. It was a great way for us to connect with people.

We've also been doing a lot of door to door surveying in the community, and we have done some service projects around town. Another great idea we had was we bought all the medium drinks at The Malt Shop one day, and gave away free drinks from 2 to 4. That gave us some great connections as well.

We are continuing to get an awareness about us in the community, and it is beginning it bear fruit.

Pray for strength for our team. Set up and take down is a lot of hard work, but it is definitely worth it. Also, pray for strength for my voice. I have been hoarse for about the last month. Four years ago, I was having a similar problem, and it turned out I had a cyst on my vocal cords. I really hope that is not the case this time. The last time, I had to have surgery and was out of commission for a while.

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!

Update

Lots of stuff going on right now with The Crossroads. Last week we secured a meeting place! Hurray and thank you, God! We will be meeting at the Tiger Cat Tumble and Cheer Gymnasium. It is located just west of US-75 and just south of FM 455. It is a really great location, and it comes at an awesome price. In addition, the owner has some build-out she wants to do and would be willing to allow us to help her with that and apply that toward the cost of the lease. Awesome!!

LaRissa has created a baby registry at Target for the nursery. If you are interested or you know of someone who is interested, this is a very real and practical way to help support The Crossroads.

I have been having several conversations with pastors trying to secure support for The Crossroads. So far, most of those conversations have been very positive and productive, although there have been no definite commitments yet. So please be very much in prayer for funding. If you know of anyone I need to talk to (churches, individuals, corporations) who might be interested in supporting The Crossroads, please let me know. I will be happy to talk to them and share the vision God has given us.

We are scheduling dates for pre-launch events right now. I will post those as soon as we have them in stone. If you would be interested in helping out with door-to-door surveys, service projects, block parties, or coming to a preview service, please let me know.

I have a friend who is working on a logo design for us, and I am working on getting our website up and running.

Please, please, be in prayer for our family. I will be without my current job at the end of this month. I'm kind of feeling like I can't breathe right now when I consider that. I'm serious. Pray for us. Stop what you are doing right now and pray for us.

Pray for the Peace of the City

Each year for the last four years, twice a year, mission teams from our church have traveled to Juarez, Mexico, to help with Vacation Bible Schools, to assist new church plants, to help with evangelistic worship services and to deliver blankets and toys to offer relief to impoverished families at Christmas time.

An advance team from our church was preparing to travel to Juarez this weekend to make preparations for our annual summer trip, but they received word yesterday that they should not come. Our summer trip has been cancelled due to violence that has broken out in Juarez.

Rival drug lords are engaged in warfare to gain control of the city's drug trafficking network. One hundred people were killed in the month of March alone. Police who have tried to gain control of the situation have been killed. Two thousand Mexican troops are currently on their way to Juarez to try to regain order in the city. More information is available here.

Please be in prayer for the peace of Juarez. Pray for the police and militia trying to regain order. Pray that the responsible parties would be brought to justice. Pray for the citizens of Juarez. And please, please, be in prayer for the churches and for our friends who are in Juarez.

Stuff for Prayer

I have been trying to set up a meeting with a potential worship leader for a couple of weeks now. I got an e-mail from him this morning saying he didn't think this was what he was supposed to be doing at this time. Please continue to be in prayer for a worship leader.

I am continuing to try to secure a meeting place. Pray that God would open up a place for us.

I am lining up meetings with area pastors to get their churches involved in supporting The Crossroads, so be in prayer for those meetings.

Please continue to pray for the sale of our house. We have had lots of people look at the house, but no offers so far.

Arrrrrgh!

I posted this at Walk the Trail, but I wanted to really ask you to pray for us. I feel like Satan is really attacking us through sickness right now. Preparing our house for moving is tough enough on the kids. They are wrestling with moving away from their friends, the only school they have ever gone to, and the church they have been a part of for the past seven years, so being sick just seems to compound things. LaRissa and I also are just exhausted because we don't get much sleep when the kids are sick. Please be in intense prayer for us. Pray for God to deliver us from Satan's attacks and to restore us all to health.

I am feeling a bit like Charlie Brown right now.

My wife informs me that someone has been sick at our house since September. There are six of us, and when one of us gets something, it just seems to make its rounds. I can't remember all of the sickness, but I do know that I came down with some sort of respiratory infection the week before Christmas, and I am pretty sure it turned into pneumonia. I broke a rib from coughing so hard. Not fun.

My oldest daughter, Grace, had pneumonia, and it took about three weeks for her to recover from that. Now, my middle daughter, Katie, has had a cough for about three weeks. This weekend, my son, James, ran fever and complained of a sore throat; and yesterday, the baby, Abby, started running a fever.

On top of all that, we are trying to get our house ready to put on the market. So, we are pretty exhausted right now. Be in prayer for the Kemp family.