"...more than I could ask or imagine."
I've been following along on Perry Noble's blog about Newspring church opening their second campus. Above is a picture of their famous baptism service where they baptised over 500 people on a Sunday afternoon. We visited Newspring before launching actionchurch and they definitely live up to the "hype"...I'm not surprised at all that they had over 9000 people show up at their two campuses Sunday... What surprised and encouraged me was the last line of this post...
Perry wrote: "Just the other day I was riding down the road and drove past the Sullivan Building on the campus at Anderson University. For those who do not know–that is where we first began having services in January of 2000.
I remembered the weekly battle with trying to make sure the air conditioner unit was working…it usually wasn’t & we had to call a technician out to try to rig it up before our services. Half of the time it didn’t work!!!
I remembered the Sunday we showed up and a student group had taken the sound system that we normally used…and being the mature Christians we all were…WE FREAKED OUT! BUT…thanks to “Super-Joel” we were able to piece a few things together and make it happen.
I remembered putting EVERYTHING our church owned–I mean EVERYTHING in a closet that we rented from the college that was about four feet wide and six feet long.
I remembered the “children’s facility” that we had to work with…a conference room that had a conference table in it that took up 75% of the room, no lie! (We had three kids the first Sunday!)
I remembered the retreat that several of the guys took in June of 2000, six months into the church plant. We stayed up VERY late into the night praying and dreaming…I asked them all to dream BIG with me–and we wrote out our incredibly enormous goal that we all felt could happen…that by the year 2010 we could literally have 1,000 people coming to church every week.
I remembered all of that while standing in one of the most incredibly decorated children’s rooms that I have ever seen…and it hit me, “God really is able to do immeasurably more than all I could ask or imagine. HIS DREAMS for HIS CHURCH are way larger than my dreams for HIS CHURCH. And…this is JUST the beginning!” Read the rest
I remembered the weekly battle with trying to make sure the air conditioner unit was working…it usually wasn’t & we had to call a technician out to try to rig it up before our services. Half of the time it didn’t work!!!
I remembered the Sunday we showed up and a student group had taken the sound system that we normally used…and being the mature Christians we all were…WE FREAKED OUT! BUT…thanks to “Super-Joel” we were able to piece a few things together and make it happen.
I remembered putting EVERYTHING our church owned–I mean EVERYTHING in a closet that we rented from the college that was about four feet wide and six feet long.
I remembered the “children’s facility” that we had to work with…a conference room that had a conference table in it that took up 75% of the room, no lie! (We had three kids the first Sunday!)
I remembered the retreat that several of the guys took in June of 2000, six months into the church plant. We stayed up VERY late into the night praying and dreaming…I asked them all to dream BIG with me–and we wrote out our incredibly enormous goal that we all felt could happen…that by the year 2010 we could literally have 1,000 people coming to church every week.
I remembered all of that while standing in one of the most incredibly decorated children’s rooms that I have ever seen…and it hit me, “God really is able to do immeasurably more than all I could ask or imagine. HIS DREAMS for HIS CHURCH are way larger than my dreams for HIS CHURCH. And…this is JUST the beginning!” Read the rest