Monday Reflections

I had a great weekend.  Here’s a quick recap:

Church Camp

Friday night, I traveled with Scattered, our young adult praise team to a little Methodist church camp near the Tennessee/Virginia state line.  They had invited us to come lead the service one night at their camp.  We had a little trouble finding it, so they had to come find us, but we made it there and had an incredible night of worship and teaching.

  • In the short time we were there, I felt we connected with the teens.  I wish we would have had more time just to hang out and get to know them, but I am glad they felt safe enough to respond.
  • And respond they did, we had a number of youth come forward during the invitation to talk with counselors.  God’s spirit was moving and working in their lives. I prayed with an older teen who God was really dealing with.  I will continue to pray that this camp will be a turning point in his life.
  • And finally, it was pretty funny to see all the younger girls go crazy over our band.  Not sure that their minds were focused on Christ after the service, because they were flirting pretty hard with our guys.   And here’s the best quote of the night from the girls, “the guys in the band were good and cute, and the pastor, he was good, but not cute :-)”

One Prayer: God is Love

We continued the One Prayer series by showing a video from Craig Groeschel, pastor of Lifechurch.tv.  He has ministered to me through his books (I’ve read them all), and through his messages.  I listen in to their online church services every week, and I have heard Craig speak at Catalyst as well.  I have a huge amount of respect and gratitude for their church as they develop and utilize new technologies for sharing the message of Christ.  From YouVersion to babelwith.me to ChurchMetrics to sharing their graphic resources for free, Lifechurch.tv has been a huge example of a church that is Kingdom minded. Craig’s message was powerful and it really connected with our church.  If there are those that doubt the effectiveness of a video sermon, then they should reconsider.  It’s not something that I would want to do every week, but for our church, this One Prayer series has shown that it works.  After the first few minutes, people don’t even realize they are watching a message instead of hearing it live.

Baptism

And finally, we concluded the weekend, by having a baptism celebration on our church property.  It was a great day, the rain held off, and we were able to baptize six people. It’s always special when you baptize the parent of a teen. I have seen so many examples over the years of teenagers bringing their parents to Christ.   I’m looking forward to many more baptism services in the future.   I’m excited about preaching next week, and I am definitely on a “spiritual” high right now.  I see evidence of God moving and working all around, and it both excites and scares me.  Our God is an awesome God!

Mike

I am a former design engineer who now pastors Cornerstone Community Church in Galax, Virginia. I'm passionate about following Jesus and I love technology. I've been married to Jennifer for 28 years, and we have three adult children.

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