I LOVE My Church

If any of you have been involved in church ministry for very long, you are well aware of the dreaded "committee meetings" that are often many hours of wasted time.  How I hate going to meetings at church.  They have a way of just sucking time out of your life and seem to accomplish very little compared to the minutes spent discussing/debating/arguing/or just telling of irrelevant stories.

I suppose that you can now imagine how I was dreading a Sunday afternoon filled with two meetings, followed by a Sunday evening post-service business meeting.  One might think that dealing with the inefficiency of working for the Federal government would prepare me for such things, but the truth is the government could learn a lot about wasting time from most baptist churches.

However, that was not the case today!

Actually, as Hopedale has continued to grow, the staff has become much more aware of how precious time is and they have made every effort to keep things streamlined when it comes to the resource of volunteers' time. Both of today's meetings were very much worth the time spent at church.

The first was a planning meeting for next year's kids' camp.  New leadership, some changes in scheduling and policies could have been met with opposition--but wasn't.  I think that everybody was able to address some concerns, give input to possible changes and come away feeling excited about next year's camp.  In reality, this was really more of a pre-planning meeting and I think that there is a real sense of next year's camp being our best yet!  I think that we will have more kids and more parent-helpers than we've ever had.

After a short break and a side trip to Starbucks (5-shot venti Americano), it was time for meeting number two--the monthly Sunday School teachers' meeting. We have been going through The Master Plan of Evangelism, discussing how we can minister and evangelize through our Sunday school classes.  I thought that the meeting was well planned; the discussion was meaningful and helpful; and, once again, well worth the time spent at church this afternoon.

Major kudos to Rich and Ryan for making the meetings a very good use of your volunteer workers' time on a Sunday afternoon.

The post-worship business meeting was pretty much business as usual.  There were a couple of items that I think will be of great benefit to the way we are able to do ministry and the meeting was kept short (as it generally is).

I don't know if I've mentioned it lately, but I really do love my church!  Apparently, I'm not the only one as we had several people make decisions to join our fellowship today and a 24/7 promise by our pastor to be available to baptize any new believers.

How awesome is that!  If your friend/family member/coworker/neighbor makes a profession of faith at two o'clock in the morning...call Pastor Terry and he'll meet you at the church as soon as he can get there to baptize your friend.  He'll even bring church members with him to witness and celebrate their profession of faith!

In the Book of Acts, the believers were devoted to one another. They met together in public places. They ate in each others' homes.  They took care of one another. They told the story of the Gospel of salvation.

And the Bible tells us that God added to their number daily!

Pastor Terry is confident that if we will model the behavior of the first century believers, God will add to our numbers as He did in the past. I think it's pretty stinkin' cool that he is ready to be there for us (and willing to make a commitment for others to be there) anytime God calls a new believer into the Kingdom!

Did I mention that I love my church?

John <><