Category: tapestry

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so what does a church planter do?

i have no idea!

but i can tell you what i am doing in the name of church planting … meeting as many people as i possibly can. this means going to kiwanis meetings, going out to uwsp faculty get togethers, eating lunch with people and today it meant joining a bi-weekly pickup basketball game with a group uwsp faculty, alumni, and students. it may not sound like much but my body is telling me that it was a big deal. i haven’t seriously played basketball in years. yes, i play a little bit of basketball every year when we go to nicaragua and do our “basketball clinic” but anyone whose ever seen that knows it involves very little serious play. this group plays a good bit better than the nicaraguans (though the nicaraguans kick serious butt in soccer). it was a lot of fun. of course, i’m in very serious “old age” soreness and pain at this moment. nobody ever told me feeling like this was a part of planting a church.

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a few days more

my time at parkview is winding down quickly. sunday is my last day. it’s all pretty freaky to me. not just because i’m leaving people i love nor the fact that about all i have done this week is pack up my study at the church. not just because of all the changes involved in moving to wisconsin nor the thought of having to start over again. all of those are important and a wee bit stressful but the thing that is freaking me out is that i am about to be through with my direct involvement within ministry to and with youth for at least a few years. working with teens is fun and challenging.

it’s fun because what other group would be cool with and connect with such a wide range of things? what other group would have thought an mp3 worship service was awesome? or be okay with a labyrinth and a food fight at the same retreat? ministry with teens is just plain fun.

it’s challenging because adolescents haven’t learned how to politely leave their questions unsaid. teens aren’t afraid to challenge you when they don’t understand or agree with you. they haven’t learned what adults have that sometimes you are just supposed to fain interest. so if you say something that doesn’t make sense or you teach in a boring manner then they will have no problems whipping out their phones and text messaging people or passing notes during your well prepared message. when you’ve hit it with teens then you’ve treated GOD’s word well.

for the next several years we will probably not have many teens in tapestry other than my own. that’s not youth ministry, it’s parenting (which i also love). i’m going to miss working with youth for awhile.

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wierd ministry day

today was a good & bad day that had allot of different ministry aspects within it.

  • i visited with the 15 year old grandson of a church member who has a malignant tumor in his brain. the visit was actually a time of celebration because they now know what’s wrong after two weeks of struggling with what could be wrong. for two weeks jonathan was passed from doctor to doctor and diagnosis to diagnosis until someone finally said “we have to get you to the hospital now.” the great news is that the tumor is very treatable and after four to six weeks of radiation the tumor should be gone and because of the type of cancer he should be perfectly fine. he will be going to st. jude’s within the next week to begin his treatment. his name is jonathan. please remember him in your prayers.
  • i’m the emergency minister for parkview for the week. tonight a lady who said her name was shirley (not her real name) called saying she was going to kill herself. after allot of discussion it came out that she is manic depressive and her medicine had stopped working (or she was off it). she is not in the baton rouge area and just randomly found the church’s number on the internet and called. she promised me that she would go to the emergency room but i have no way of checking up on her. please keep her in your prayers and ask that she will call back tomorrow like she promised she would.
  • i was able to leech off some great equipment for tapestry. i spoke with red (our minister of music) today to find out if parkview might have any sound equipment sitting around not being used that i could snag for tapestry. he talked to the right people and tapestry now has a barely used sound board, mic stands, and a good bit of other miscellaneous equipment. thank you parkview.
  • after two years of not taking my guitar to get it’s preamp fixed i finally brought it to a technician today. i had feared it would cost $200 or so to fix the preamp. it actually turns out that it was just a ground that was bad and it only cost me $15 to get it fixed.

my run for the day
distance – 1.56 miles
time – 17:30
pace – 11:13/miles

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the continued progress of the house

i haven’t blogged in awhile because the whole family has been working on our house. we had some great help that arrived various times throughout the weekend. we couldn’t have completed near as much work without these wonderful people. so to give thanks where thanks is due i want to say a big “THANK YOU” to:

  • debbie haltom
  • evelyn terrell (my mom)
  • floyd terrell (my dad)
  • rachel walters
  • sharron walters
  • norm warren

pam and i are very appreciative of the work these wonderful friends accomplished around our home. because of them we are much closer to having our house on the market. this should happen within the next week.

SIDE NOTE – pam’s best friend in life (outside of me of course) emailed the other day to say that the domain name tapestrychurch.com was available and should probably be picked up quickly. i checked and even though there is no website the domain name is unfortunately unavailable. i’ve been considering domain names for awhile and i thought i would check a few of these domain names out with you guys. here are the ones i am considering:

  • stevenspointtapestry.org – i worry this is too long BUT it’s easy to remember
  • sptapestry.org – shorter but not as easy to remember
  • tapestry-sp.org – i worry about the dash BUT it looks weird to me without a dash
  • mychurchcanbeatupyourchurch.org – i’m not sure if this send the right message or not but it makes me laugh to think of it
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yippie!

tapestry.jpg

i just received an email from dennis (the guy who will be my mentor up in wisconsin) saying that the everything has gone through and that i therefore i will have income. yeah! this wasn’t really a hurdle for starting tapestry because we were going to move up to wisconsin and start the church no matter what but it does make the whole thing a heck of allot easier. this means i don’t have to get a part time supporting job for a couple of years.

i know this isn’t much of a blog entry but this has been a huge part of my life for the past month and pam and i are pretty happy about it.

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it’s the name now

my mom found this (i’m not sure how she finds this stuff and i’m a little scared by all that she finds – if my mom was ever a stalker she would be an incredibly scary stalker – i love you mom 🙂 ). it’s a church planting prayer list for the minnesota / wisconsin baptist convention and we’re on it (look down and we’re the sixth prayer request). apparently i placed the name we were considering for the church somewhere on some form and it has been added to the prayer list. so it looks like we have a name now – it’s tapestry (actuall it will be stevens point tapestry church but just called tapestry for the fun of it).

here’s the rationale behind calling it tapestry.

  • a tapestry is woven together. to separate it is to destroy it – kind of like what i hope the community of faith we’ll be a part of will be.
  • a tapestry is beautiful whe seen from above but a mess of tangles when seen from below – kind of like what i hope the community of faith we’ll be a part of will be.
  • karl barth described the imago dei (another name that i for one would have liked but noone probably would have been able to pronounce) as coming from the fact that humanity is male and female (i.e. we are the image of GOD in community and to separate us is to deny that image). as a tapestry we best display GOD’s image together – kind of like what i hope the community of faith we’ll be a part of will be.

i like the name “tapestry” but it probably doesn’t matter anymore because it’s on the prayer list. so “jar” is now “tapestry.” hopefully it will live out its name.

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v.b.s.

it’s vacation bible school time at parkview.

i’m not the biggest fan of vacation bible school. actually that’s not correct. i’m not the biggest fan of v.b.s. the way it is done now. originally v.b.s. was a means for the church to go “out” and reach people where they were – one of the first v.b.s.’s was held in a beer parlor in order to reach the kids who lived in the slum around it. it seems to me that now most v.b.s’s are more about doing something for our “church kids” and hoping they will bring a friend or two with them (i.e. another “come join us” program). many of our churches (my own included) spend a decent chunk of change putting on this program within the church walls. i know and love many people who think v.b.s. is one of the greatest things ever. we have within our church some volunteers who put tons of effort into v.b.s. and do an amazing job with it. i’m amazed at some of the creativity involved in what they do. for example of this just walk into the student center – it’s been turned into a bedouin tent community.

i just wish we were doing something that involved going out into the community. the one v.b.s that i have seen that has done this actually involved moving the v.b.s from the church building into a local city park. the whole program was staged at a city park so that it would draw kids from the neighborhood. they spent just as much money on the program but had a very different goal. their goal was to move into the community and impact it. it was great. heck the pastor even drove a harley into the v.b.s. worship service one day. imagine 400 six to ten year olds in a worship service and a motorcycle driving into it. the place went crazy.

my point in this semi-rant is how interesting it is that great ideas for reaching out into the community slowly turn into programs for staying within our churches and out of the community. sunday school is another example of this. sunday school was originally an amazing movement of social justice to educate kids who would never be able to receive an adequate education during the industrial revolution. like v.b.s it slowly went from revolutionary to programaic. to continue being relevant and reaching out the bride of CHRIST has to constantly be reforming and questioning what it does. i’m not sure we do this very often.

when we start jar (which is slowly becoming “tapestry”) it would be real easy to just do church things – but that’s not what i feel called to do. the problem will be once we get the whole thing started, we’ll we continue questioning things? i hope so because i believe we must.

my run for the day
distance – 2.5 miles
time – 23:28
pace – 9:23/mile

[tags]vbs, church, sunday school, questioning[/tags]

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i’m finished – maybe

i'm a stevens pointer

the past week i have been basically writing a grant for income in stevens point. the north american mission board wants to help church plants and i have gone through everything they asked over the past 5 months. this week we reached the point of writing out what was actually needed. in order to do that i had to present a ton of demographic information showing whether there is a reason to plant a new church in stevens point or not. the above image is part of what i finished. it doesn’t look like much but i spent many a late night researching to be able to say the little that is on the photo and the ton that is in the 25 pages of supporting information. at one time in my life i actually thought that late night studying would stop after i finished school. HA!

on the movie front i was able to watch “north by northwest” last night when i couldn’t sleep and i was finished with my demographic research. it is amazing film. i love alfred hitchcock.