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After three and a half years of services, Encounter proudly introduced and commissioned a new church plant to be birthed in January 2013 in Hilliard, Ohio: Movement Church.
From the very first pre-launch meeting of Encounter Church in September of 2008, planting a church out of ourselves was one of our dreams. Tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of hours of praying and planning over the years now sees a five month journey for the Movement Church launch team until they begin holding church services of their own.
This morning I had the privilege of briefly explaining this journey and then allowed Mark Artrip to express his excitement and appreciation.
Rob Dubois and I prayed for the Movement Church launch team as next week begins their weekly pre-launch meetings where they will pray, dream, teach, plan and visit other local churches for the next five months.
We want to see them succeed in every way and are gifting them people resources as well as financial and prayer support.
Only God knows for sure what will become of this decision but we hope it will be the beginning of a mission to multiply churches over and over again for HIS Kingdoms sake.
To God Be The Glory!
More than 20 families came to the picnic after our church service today. The food was great and it was so fun to see all the relational connecting going on.
The tug-of-war competitions were a real hit too:-)
Click on this link to Encounter's FB page to see all the fun that was had: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=oa.10151096284909350&type=1
Can't believe summer is almost over!
For some of our families school starts this week others the week after. As a fun way to end the summer we're having an all church picnic Sunday, August 19th.
Burgers, dawgs, salads, sides and desserts - yum!
And for your entertainment there is horseshoes, a fishing pond, volleyball, basketball, corn hole and a classic tug-of-war competition:-)
These are such fun and easy times for us as the Body of Christ to connect relationally and spiritually all the while having a blast.
Hope you can make it:-)
The other night I had the pleasure of watching my wife Melissa lead our elementary schools PTO meeting. I'd say there were approx. 30 people in the room. Four men and the rest women. I'm proud of the leader she is in our church body and also in the public schools.
We transitioned our children from the Christian school system to the public when we started the church plant over three years ago and have never questioned the decision. Doesn't mean it's always been easy but we have the responsibility to raise our kids, not the school system.
Tomorrow morning Encounter has one of its quarterly leadership gatherings. We call it, Leadership Community (LC). Each is themed off of one of our four core values: Celebrate, Grow, Serve and Multiply.
Usually we have a guest speaker come in and cast vision to the group about the core value but tomorrow my wife Melissa & I are leading the talk. Recently her and I read the book, Sifted, by Wayne Corderio and also heard two different speakers on our vacation to Gull Lake Ministries in Michigan that spoke about Christ followers serving.
So tomorrow we will discuss why we serve and how we ought to serve biblically.
I really look forward to this time with our leaders because they are some of the greatest people the Lord has put in my life.
Tomorrow there will also be a time of worship, an elders Q & A, a small group and budget update as well as a ministry breakout time for our ministry coaches to get together with their teams for connecting, instruction/teaching and prayer.
To learn more about our past LC's, scroll down the page until you see "Categories" and click on the Leadership Community blog post label.
For the last 16 weeks we took a journey through the first nine chapters of the book of Acts. We will come back to Acts in the future but will now focus the next three weeks on Spiritual Gifts.
This Sunday we'll look at what spiritual gifts are and aren't and the next two will discuss their purpose and define what each is for. The series will end with the congregation receiving a questionnaire that will be a tool to help them discover what gifts they have for the building up of the Body. This will point folks in the right direction as to the best Encounter ministry position that fits their individual gifting.
