An Incredible Story

Every other month I attend the North Central Ohio (NCO) pastor’s fellowship meeting. Today it was held at Grace Polaris, which is Grace Church’s mother church. That makes her my grand-mother churchJ. It’s an opportunity to reconnect with other pastor’s in our fellowship and hear updates of what God is doing from individual churches in our district and around the world. Today we heard a story from an African pastor named Francois Ngoumape about how he was kidnapped last November by rebels and how his life was miraculously spared. Tears fell from his eyes as he spoke of God’s protective hand actually inhibiting his captors from killing him with a machete and a machine gun. It was stunning to hear. Here is a picture of him telling his story.

When the meeting ended we all had a delicious lunch provided by our hosts. After that I attended the NCO District Missions meeting where I was asked to give an update on how things are going with Encounter Church. The last time I was at one of these meetings was five months ago and the minutes had down that I had said there were 7-8 families committed. Today I had the pleasure of reporting there are now 17 committed families and that we are having 19 people baptized on November 9 at the Powell YMCA. I also informed them that our Sunday morning launch team meetings will continue until mid-December and that we'll be onsite at Eli Pinney Elementary starting in January. Finally I told them that February and March '09 will be our eight weeks of practice/preview services leading up to April 2009 which will be our Grand Opening month.