What a day…

I've said before that I get the chance to serve in the greatest church in the country. MVBC is an exciting place where God is doing amazing things. I've also said that I believe that our church has possibly the most amazing, dynamic worship experience for any church in the country under 250 in worship. We have a team of people who really work hard to make our worship excellent. Today was no exception. It was a passionate, exciting worship service from beginning to end. One thing I love about our church is that I literally sing at the top of my lungs, as loud as I possibly can, and no one else hears me because everyone else's voices drown me out. It's an amazing thing to experience. The message today was one that I was excited about because God really moved my heart this week in a particular way while studying but it was one I was slightly concerned about as well because my preparation time was moved until later in the week than normal due to an unusally busy schedule. Having said that, however, God was faithful to work in my weakness and after the message for the first time in my 4.5 years at MVBC, the altar was completely full with people responding to God's movement in their lives, and we even had people kneeling behind them due to lack of space. It was a powerful thing to watch. We also had the privilege of watching as a couple joined our church. In fact, I'm really excited because this coming Sunday we'll be hosting our quarterly NewComers Class and we anticipate close to 20 people attending. That's amazing for our church and very, very exciting!

We then ate a quick lunch together at the church and we took a group of almost 30 people (most were teenagers) and spent 2 hours cleaning the highway over a 3 mile stretch as an act of service to our community and then we finished the evening at our monthly ministry to the residents of a local nursing home, which was attended by more people than ever before. It's exciting to me to watch as God is moving our people from attendance to service and engaging them in the process of ministry.

I hope this hasn't bored you but I had to share my excitement. If it's not too boring, I'll be posting the first edition of lifeLessons soon and we'll look in more detail at where our church in particular has come from in hope's that it may be beneficial to you in your current context.

**If you are interested, the sermon audio (though somewhat distorted) is now available online here.**