04/16/07 UPDATE

Man, what a week! I had several firsts, or some firsts in a long time:

I took my first trip to New York City. If you haven't done that before, it's an experience unlike anything you've been through before. My meeting was in Manhattan. When you are in Manhattan, you see nothing but delivery vehicles, taxis, and limo's and hear nothing but car horns. I also had authentic New York pizza!

Another first was that I had serious travel difficulties. I sat on the tarmac (in the plane) for over an hour and a half before leaving for Chicago. My plane there was canceled, so I had to fly to Manchester, NH and then NY. On the way back, high winds kept planes from leaving La Guardia so I missed my connecting flight from Chicago to Omaha and had to spend the night in Chicago. Definitely not fun. One cool part of that was that I flew over our old house and ministry field leaving Manchester. i could see all the familiar sights and prayed for God to work there.

A first in a long time was that I preached in a tie on Sunday!:( It was a traditional SBC church and we had some really funny stories of things that happened because we have adapted to non-traditional church and forgotten how things work in traditional circles:)

The reason I went to NY was for a church planter's coaching meeting. I met with 11 other church planters around the country at The Journey Church (www.nyjourney.com). They (Nelson Searcy and Kerrick Thomas) planted Jouney in NY in 2001 with a situation similar to ours. They felt called to NY and went with no help, people, etc. Rather than gathering a core group of believers, slowly cultivating them and then reaching out to the unchurched with them, they started going directly for the unchurched and didn't waste time trying to gather, motivate, and argue with :) Christians. Starting with a core usually leads to a smaller, longer start, which increases the chances of failure. Their goal is to launch with a "large" crowd, which increases your chances of success. This takes place by conducting monthly services for 3-6 months which are used to gather interested people. Along with these services, you use servant evangelism projects, mission teams, and advertising to gather people. Then you have a big launch service which begins your weekly services.

For us, it looks like this: we will have a monthly service on June 10, July 22, and August 19. In addition, we have 3 mission teams coming up during June and July to help us. Our Launch will be on September 16. There is a terrifying element to this approach - what if we do all the stuff and nobody shows up? In that case, September is going to be a very depressing time. Please pray for God to use these events to gather the people He has chosen to put in Redeemer Church. We walk by faith, not by sight, right?

Also, pray for several other things:
1. I am overwhelmed with the amount of things that have to be done . . . yesterday.
2. We have a ton of decisions to make - i need wisdom as I make them.
3. We need someone to lead worship.
4. We need locations to have block parties and other servant evangelism opportunities.
5. We need a location for our monthly services.
6. We need money to provide for advertising, materials for the servant evangelism projects, and equipment.