Meeting this Saturday

This Friday (May 8, 2009) Joan and I will be traveling to the Albany area to attend a meeting on Saturday at the Eastern NY headquarters. At this meeting the district board will be discussing various ways that we could be used in ministry. Eventually we will be planting a church somewhere around Clifton Park, NY, but we might be able to help the district out in some other places along the way. I will post specifics once we have them.

We are very excited about the upcoming transition to the Eastern NY district. I am not saying anything bad about the Central NY district, I have felt very well supported and accepted in this district. It is just exciting to be taking on a new challenge and a new opportunity to be used by God.

In my next post I will be talking about our current church Community Wesleyan Church in Horseheads, NY, but I will just state now that I feel the same way about Community Wesleyan, I have really enjoy our 13 years here and it has been a joy to be part of God's work in the church and through the church.

A few years ago a family came to our church and I was so excited that they chose to join the church. They came for several months and then one Sunday the father came to me and said that they were leaving the church to go help at a church plant in the area. I was really thrown because this did not fit my idea for my church. I said all the right things to him, but inside I was frustrated. He basically told me that Community did not need his family and the other church did. As I struggled through those emotions over the next weeks I realized that I needed to develop more of a Kingdom mindset. The church plant did need that family more than we did and the family wanted to be an integral part of a church's ministry.

Just a few years later I find myself explaining the same thing to many different people about our family. Yes, I love this church, but we sense that there are other people in other places that God is calling us to. Hard to explain, hard to understand, but once God makes something clear there is only one reasonable response. "Here am I, send me."