Category Archives: Church Planting

Developing Elders

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What are elders? Sounds kind of creepy, but in scripture they are described as men who take the spiritual leadership of the local church. Throughout history leadership has been abused and neglected and as a result people have mixed emotions towards leadership, however, when it is looked at through a biblical lens it can be really powerful. As of now we are working through a document on discovering the role of an elder. It is a simple document that walks through their description in 1 Timothy 3.

Here is a list of some of the topics we are going through:

How to Stay Strong Spiritually
How to Lead Our Families
How to Lead Incarnationally
Biblical Passages on Eldering
Working With Other Elders
Guarding Our Doctrine & Vision
Confronting Sin In The Body (Church Discipline)
Reproducing Leaders

September 13

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August 23On September 13 we are going to start meeting weekly as a church. We are really excited! Jesus has been so good to us to gather a group of people who desire to see more than just a church we can attend on Sunday. Our hope is that he will continue to gather people to himself to see more of him and reflect him to this city / community.

Day 9, Spiritual Journey

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Our church is going through a spiritual journey for the next 35 days and the theme is “Partnership” from Philippians when the Apostle Paul admonishes them for their partnership in the gospel. This week our focus is on prayer.

Have you ever felt like asking God why you should pray? What is the point? Does it make a difference? When life seems unbearable, when emotionally we feel empty, and the future doesn’t look so bright; how could prayer help our situation? It is in prayer that we find a hope and a solution for every problem we face:

• Prayer readjusts the focus of our hearts and minds. In times of crisis, it is natural to focus on the darkness of the prevailing situation. But prayer moves us to look to a source of help that will never fail us. When we focus our minds on Christ and His ability to move mightily in our situation, our hearts will cease to be anxious. Peace will reign.

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Trailer Packing

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Trailer PIctureThis is our trailer for when we set up church on Sunday mornings. We met today to have a packing party and we pulled it all out and packed it all again. We shuffled the boxes around and tried to identify what goes where and hopefully we will be able to keep it organized.

The hardest part is when we break everything down on Sunday morning and new people want to help us pack up and clean up. Which is awesome, but usually things just get thrown into a random box and overtime we are back to chaos. However, now we have lists, better labels, pictures, and specific tasks.

In the end it really isn’t that much and for only having a 12′ trailer we have a lot of extra space.

Spiritual Journey

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Over the next 35 days we will enter a spiritual journey with Jesus and with one another. It will be a time to read through scripture together and fast from areas of our life that are distractions. Not only remove distractions but replace them with spiritual disciplines. Some of us will fast from food and some will fast from technology. It will be different from everyone, but the focus is to draw close to Jesus and one another.

We do this because we believe all of us at our core are spiritual beings, but we have so many distractions that we are able to connect with Jesus and hear from him and see what he is doing. This morning we read from Colossians 2 and were reminded that when we place our faith in Jesus we are made alive. Made alive to his purpose and through him we have been given a new identity.

Living Lives of Influence

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What if we lived with influence in our lives? A simple way to begin to move into this role is to examine our time, talent, and treasures.

Time: What if we set aside time to pray for the spiritual and physical needs of our neighbors, friends, family? What if we asked them if there was anything specific we could pray for them about and actually set aside time to pray for them? Then after 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, or whatever feels comfortable we go back and ask them about what we were praying for? For some of us it might feel awkward but if we want to live lives of influence then we are going to need to take some risks. We can play it safe, have surface conversations, and never see anything exciting happen, but we will miss out on influence.

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3rd Preview Gathering

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Group ShotOn Sunday we gathered for our 3rd preview. Starting a new church is a little like going on a blind date because you are still learning each other, learning about yourself, and people are learning about you. Which kind of creates those awkward moments, but we just embraced them and had fun.

In September we will start meeting weekly and we are really excited. For us our weekly gathering on Sunday isn’t our focus. It is important and we want to do it well but it isn’t our focus. We hope it becomes a gathering for people to come together, be encouraged, and then work together to meet physical and spiritual needs in the community. Our next focus is a supplies drive for Lucy Read.

Marketing

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Honestly I am not a big fan of marketing. It feels a little pretentious, but this week we are making our first attempt at putting door hangers out. Different people have different opinions. Some will say avoid marketing because it will come across corporate and it is simply targeting “churched” people and if our goal is to see church be something different it won’t be effective. Others I have talked to encouraged me to spend 25-30K in marketing and if we didn’t we were wasting our time. Well, sense we don’t have 25K-30K set aside for anything, much less marketing, we knew we couldn’t go that route.

In the end we decided to do a little marketing. Most of our focus has been through relationships and word of mouth, but we also wanted to create some type of awareness for people to at least know we are out there. In the end we don’t expect a tremendous amount of people to respond to a door hanger, but we do want to begin to create an awareness and maybe just a little marketing will help move us in that direction.

Laundry Love

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On Saturday we got to serve over 30 families by helping them with their laundry. It was really easy and they were greatly appreciative. It was also a lot of fun. We were able to network with a number of families that need assistance with children’s clothing and other tangible needs that we are in process of following up with.

If you would like to help we have set up some coin jars at Amy’s Ice Cream and Hey Cupcake or you can join us next month for a little laundry love.

It is getting hot in Texas

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carcookies2It seems like it has been over a 100 degrees for over a month now and it is really hot. Not like the kind of hot where a nice breeze is appreciated, but the kind of hot that makes it hard to breathe at times. Honestly, I almost pass out walking from my car to the coffee shop.

I was looking through a blog the other day and noticed a way to make the most of a hot day. Bake cookies! Who doesn’t love cookies. Beat the heat this summer by setting a tray of raw cookies on your dashboard to bake in the stifling heat inside your car while you work — you get a tray of warm, fresh-baked cookies to eat on the return commute!

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Second Practice Gathering Review

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July 12 Gathering BLast Sunday we got to have a practice gathering at Lucy Read. It was a lot of fun. Our goal is to keep it as simple as possible. Our set up and format is fairly basic because the sum of who we are as a church is more than an 1-2 hours on Sunday. This is just one part.

Overall it went really well. I think everyone had a really good time and it was fun to look at scripture with one another and sing out in worship. Thanks to everyone who helped out!

Second Practice Gathering

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This Sunday we will be meeting at Lucy Read for the second time as a core team and we are going to try to provide for the children, sing a little, and maybe, just maybe look at some scripture. We are going to set up sound, speakers, and even have a trailer. It is a small step for our core team but a huge step for North Village Church. It will be messy, unorganized, and maybe even chaotic but it will be fun.

As a group we challenged one another to invite some friends to share the experience. At first, we have some hesitation because we aren’t really sure “what we are inviting them to” because we are still making this up as we go.

Our second hesitation is that it can feel a little awkward inviting a friend to church because it can feel like “church” is the end goal in mind. However, church isn’t the end and honestly church isn’t just something we do on Sundays. Church is something that takes place throughout the week and what we do on Sunday is just one part of it. Therefore, we are inviting our friends to come and experience one part of our lives with them.

If we hadn’t invited them to lunch, a movie, over for dinner, etc., then, well they are probably not really friends, but if they are then this is just another part of our life as we look to share our lives with others.

In the end, it will be a lot of fun. All of our equipment is either used or has been given to us and could possibly break down in the next 3 months but I feel like we are a part of something special and hopefully a new church will start we will continue to see something different

New Logo

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FB LogoLooks like we finally decided on a logo…mostly because of time restraints. My goal was to have a logo by June 1 and after weeks and months and multiple graphic artists and tons of options we finally landed on one. Most of the difficulty is even knowing what we are looking for, which is my fault.

The other part of it is that we are starting a church in a community that is diverse and eclectic and that we are still learning. So we have landed on one of our main lessons we have learned in starting a church: just start. Sometimes it can be really easy to want to have everything ironed out, feel 100%, and then make a decision, however, if we waited until we were 100% we probably wouldn’t have started this project.