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.

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!

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!