It's A Wonderful Life @ Grace

Our Worship Arts Director at Grace, Bryan Nelson will soon be following the yellow brick road to embark on a new ministry. In George Bailey fashion, what if God's plan didn't include Bryan Nelson crossing paths with Grace Church?

-With no Crosswalk Show, Lititz would have an additional food establishment featuring Chinese cuisine... The CrossWOK restaurant.

-Without the Ultimate Guitar Jam, over 100 guitarists would've gathered for an Electric Guitar Jam with special guest Gene Simmons that culminated in a mass guitar smashing at the end of the concert.

-Without the Brass Spectacular, the local shopping mall featured a Bras Spectacular. Maybe that was just a typo, but they did like 6 of them!

It's clear that God used Bryan "for such a time as this" in the life of Grace Church. He's led us in realizing some unique and incredible God-ordained opportunities and I'm excited to see how God uses him in Topeka. Just keep following the yellow brick road, Bryan.

Church Clean-up Day

Maybe it's revisionist history, but my perception is that in years past, churches in America benefited greatly from church clean-up days and similar volunteer armies descending upon the facility to fix things up. Maybe my perception is off base, but for a few, the church clean-up day is fading. Stubborn as I can be, we still schedule them.

This past Saturday eight adults and 12 teenagers worked the morning at Grace to spruce the facility up in preparation for this Saturday's Egg Hunt and the Easter services on April 8. While 20 people amounts to a smidgen of a percentage of our total attenders, I greatly appreciate their sacrifice to make the exterior of our church look good. They planted 576 pansies and put down more than a dump truck full of mulch. Did you notice how nice the flower beds looked yesterday?

What happened to Pastor Scott's blog?

If you are a regular reader of Pastor Scott's blog, Folks, Listen!, you noticed that we experienced some technical difficulties over the past few days. I'm not entirely sure what went down. What I do know is that we were unable to publish posts or make changes to the blog. But the change was part of a bigger issue that I've been navigating.

The host of lgbc.org recently contacted me to inform that the church website had reached a size of some 2 gigabytes of data. That's compared with the 250 megabyte limit of our current web host plan. In other words, our website was way over our limit. Working with Elaine, we've been trimming the church site of out of date information and other superfluous files, but even that didn't remove enough data to get us to the 250 megabyte level. It was then that I realized the Folks, Listen! blog was in the mix too.

When Pastor Scott launched Folks, Listen!, I was of the mindset that as the Senior Pastor's blog, it should be on the church's main website. But I'm no longer convinced that having it at that location generated any new traffic to the church website. So, with the blog taking up additional disk space, and with blogging services offering to host a blog for free, it seemed logical to move.

The move occurred much faster than I had planned, which didn't give us the option of advanced warning. If you can't find Pastor Scott's blog after all of this, here are the links.

Baptism - poll

The two-baptismal pool approach seemed to work this past Sunday, in fact, several times I felt like Pastor Scott and the worship team was realizing they had more time left in the service than they expected. Regardless of those technicalities, it was a great service.

Even the casual observer recognizes that in spite of all the attempts, most people aren't able to get fully immersed in the 30" inches of water the hot tub and inflatable pool hold. That makes me curious, do you see baptism and the significance of a full immersion as a high enough priority, that you'd encourage the church to consider a more permanent baptismal setup...

-in our current facility, recognizing that it could come at a substantial expense to retrofit existing structures?

-in any future facility, should God lead us in that direction at some point in the future?

This isn't any formal vote or study, I'm just curious for my own knowledge. I welcome your response via comments to this post.

More snow, more neighbors

Sure enough, while shoveling the latest snowfall Saturday morning, I had the chance to meet another neighbor in our development. He actually used his snow blower to clear our the end of our driveway, establishing what Filipino's call an utang na loob, a debt of gratitude. Though not as strong in US culture, it does open the door for us to do something in return for them which hopefully will lead to building another bridge with them. Clearing 6-8 inches off of our short, single-car driveway is knocked out in a few hours, the church on the other hand...

A lot of us probably don't realize the time and effort required to prep the church lot on snow days and the lengths we go to, to have it ready with as little disruption to the church's regular schedule. Take this last storm for example. As soon as the storm had passed, our snow clearing team started work almost immediately. That had them starting to work at 12:30am on Saturday morning. They had the lot cleared by around 8-9am. There's nothing like seeing the high contrast of several inches of snow against the black ashpalt of a driveway and parking lot.

As I've posted previously, we try to leave the cancellation of Sunday services as our absolute last option. So when it takes upwards of 8-9 hours to clear our parking lot, there will be Sundays when the lot is not completely cleared. We accept that, figuring that we can all wear boots to church if we have too and if ever someone doesn't feel comfortable being out in snowy weather, we highly encourage them to follow their intuition and stay home that week.

Fortunately, we have a dedicated snow clearing crew and most Sundays that I can remember, the lot has been as good as it could be in light of the circumstances. I appreciate the service and sleepless nights the team puts in as service to our church.

Just Add Water - Logistics, Part 2

As of Thursday, we're up to 102 who've asked to be baptized on Sunday, amazing. Sheri's had quite the week keeping everything organized. Note that the 102 doesn't include the applications that were received from:
- Ima Believer
- Needa Bath
- Duncan Water

Baptism Flashback

As I sit in my office reconciling the church bank statements the voices of Pastor Scott, Pastor Andy, our Youth Director, Doug, Scott's assistant Sheri, our Facility Director, Jay and Dot and Carl are carrying out of the conference room into my office. They're coordinating Sunday's baptism service.

I wonder if the disciples went through a similar process in the midst of Pentecost?
I wonder if they worked through the issues of water temp, tank/tub capacity, what the people should wear, who was dunking who...?

It's a fun time to be at Grace, though reconciling bank statements is all wet.

Ordinance

The messages the last two Sundays have been an interesting re-gripping of what baptism is all about. Upon further review I was struck by the contrast in ordinances. In the New Testament, Scripture mandates two practices to be regularly practiced by the local church: communion and baptism.

In kind of a "duh" moment, the contrast between the two caught my attention. Through His various scribes, God gave us detailed information about communion... what it symbolizes, who we're to remember each time we partake, who should practice it, when it should be practiced, who should not practice it, what happens to those who practiced it when they weren't supposed to, etcetera, etcetera. Lots of detail. Contrast that with what's recorded about baptism.

It's explained, but not in terms as specific as communion is explained. We're told what it symbolizes and who should practice it. But as I reflect on what I know and remember about the Bible, I don't recall reading anything that specifies who should not practice it. Nor do I recall reading anything about what happens, if anything, to those who are baptized who shouldn't have been. In fact, there's something to be said for the amount of stuff not written about baptism. Just an interesting observation.

This just in, there are now upwards of 90 people who want to be baptized on Sunday; unbelievable. Be praying for these 80+ people who are taking that next step in their relationship with Christ.

Just Add Water - Logistics

As Pastor Scott mentioned yesterday, there are some 50 people signed up to be baptized this coming Sunday. While Just Adding Water seems simple enough, doing so when we don't have a permanent baptismal presents some challenges. But as I shared with the staff in last week's staff meeting (using John's account of the feeding of the 5000), we can't allow logistics to get in the way of how God is moving in the hearts and minds of His children.

Through the late 1990s, Grace was content to hold baptismal services outside of the regular Sunday morning worship times and to hold the services in the original Chapel which has a built-in baptistery. But it didn't seem the appropriate atmosphere for celebrating one of the ordinances of the church. The timing didn't mesh with the schedule shifts of our culture, near the end all of 10 people were showing up for baptisms. At the same time the capacity of the Chapel doesn't hold the Sunday morning attendances. So we went with a temporary solution to accommodate baptisms on Sunday mornings - a hot tub!

That's served okay for the past four plus years (not everyone was fully immersed, in some cases only the front half of their head was plunged - the water height is all of 30"). But with us anticipating 50+ baptisms this week we're faced with a couple of issues:

Time - it takes a while to get people in and out of a baptistery, not an issue John the Baptist probably faced in the Jordan. In that forum, they were probably able to line everyone up in the river and just walk down the line. Unfortunately, Scripture doesn't give us the specifics of how they baptized at Pentecost - that would've been an interesting read. Our time-driven culture pressures us to get the 50+ people baptized in such a way that we can still get home (or beat the restaurant rush) as close to 12 noon as possible.

Water - when you start talking about mass baptisms, you have to think about how much water you'll need. Between what will spill out of the tub and what will walk about in the drenched clothing, there's a good chance we'll loose a good amount of water out of the tub.

I'm not in the loop, but from what I understand a couple of options are being considered. For one, we've ordered another makeshift baptistery. Having two tubs gives the option of doing near simultaneous baptisms. Plus, the newly ordered tub, being a bigger one, will be able to hold more water. You'll have to come Sunday to celebrate what God's doing in these people's lives and for side interest, how we navigate the logistics.

Where the M&M's came in

On Monday, December 4th we moved from creating the statement to communicating the statement. If you think the ideas were flying around during our first meetings, these were ideas on steroids. I mean, I'm talking about ideas of having the congregation sitting in specially constructed bleachers with Pastor Scott preaching from center court and giving each attender a basketball and all sorts of stuff that never made the cut. In the end we hit on the M&M concept and the other elements that you witness throughout the series.

But in all of this, what's been most gratifying to me is to see a group of people take hold of a simple statement and see it motivate them to take a next step in their walk with Christ. I've listened to professors talk about purpose statements in the isolation of a classroom setting, but I had never been a part of implementing the process from scratch. I've read the purpose statements of other organizations and been personally inspired, but never seen up close how they can transform a group of people.

It's been very satisfying to have had the opportunity to have a seat at the table were all of this was composed, to be a part of the process, to see it implemented and to see how it's energizing us to meet people where they are and move people to where God wants them to be.