08/20/07 UPDATE

Yesterday went really well. We were able to get everything set up in plenty of time and it worked pretty well. We had a meeting to discuss changes/improvements and the general consensus was that we could have easily handled a lot more people. Which brings us to the numbers - we had 31 total (19 adults, 2 youth, and 10 children). The good news is that all of those are locals who we may see again. We had some people who were at last month's service and some new ones. The good news is that the pool of "prospects" keeps growning. Hopefully, we'll be able to get more of them in attendance once things stabilize. I would really like to see more people attending, but I think we will see more once we begin meeting weekly.

One cool "its a small world" thing - there was a young couple that came Sunday. They are in school at Creighton. The way they found out about the church is that a young lady who was in our church in Florida (and has now moved on) was in Sunday School at a church in Mobile, AL. She found out they went to school in O and got their email. She sent it to me and I contacted them. They showed up Sunday and said they'd be back!

One concern is leadership. So far, things have gone really well, however, we have two very vital families that will be leaving after September 9th. One fulfilled their commitment to help us through the summer. The other (Jeff and Kelly) are deploying until January. Basically, everybody is doing something, so when anyone leaves, there is a hole. Pray for God to provide other leaders. He has added great people along the process and there are others who are potentials, but we need more.

The other big concern is continuing to meet new people. We no longer have mission teams to come and contact a large number of people at once. We are limited in the numbers of people we can contact ourselves. We are planning two direct mail campaigns to contact almost 12,000 homes each time, but I'm not sure if we will have the funds to do both of them. Pray for God to provide the money and for the contacts to be profitable. Also pray that He will continue drawing those that we have contacted.

Another big item last week was that the boys began school. They loved it. We haven't noticed a lot of problems with them being the "new kids" (Jackson was the only new student in his class). They've started to make friends and seem to be thriving.