Announcing...

T

he word "story" has been on my mind lately. Mostly wondering if I am "writing" the story that is all God intends. Certainly God is the Author. And yet, amazingly, He allows us to participate in "penning our portion."

To have an exciting story line in a book or movie, there must be an obstacle to overcome, a challenge to be met. Is it scary? Most certainly.

As Tom and I have prayed and considered what challenge to tackle next, we both decided that the next chapter in our lives would involve planting a church. Not because we are disgruntled with our home church; we're not. Not because we think we can create something good or even better than church we have experienced.

We simply know that there are many, many people who are either not Christians in America or who aren't involved in a church. According to John Piper, 80% of all Christians accepted the Lord in a church that is two years old or younger. Simply put, new churches reach new people.

In addition, there are almost 200 million unchurched people in America, making it one of the four largest unchurched nations in the world. About 3,500 existing churches close their doors permanently each year. Of the 350,000 churches in America, four out of every five have either plateaued or are declining.

So, here we are; beginning a new chapter in our lives! Scary for sure. And exciting.

Our church web site is here. It has been exciting for our children to help with so many details of the preparation for this. 14 year old Gabriel built the web site (with some help from our friend Rick. Thanks Rick and Gabe!).

If you are in our area, our first "preview" service is this Sunday, February 7 at10:00am. Please pray for us, and if you don't have other commitments and would like to stop by, we'd love to have you!

::just had to throw in this picture from our snow today... I think we got more than 8" of very fluffy snow here~ so, so pretty. Three times I went out to walk back in our woods... I just couldn't get enough of it.

susan