Hey Element Church! There is an INCREDIBLY easy way for you to give financially to Element Church, without even spending money. A new search engine called Goodsearch has been up and running now for several months. It is a search engine just like Yahoo!, Google, or any other. For every search you do through their engine, they donate to the non-profit of your choice. Element Church is currently signed up, you just need to select us as your non-profit. You can make GoodSearch your default search engine in your web browser. There are instructions on their site of how to do that. I have a GoodSearch link on the right column of my blog. We’ll be getting one on our web-site too. ALSO, you can click on online shops through GoodSearch such as Amazon, eBay, iTunes, and a TON more. Anytime then you shop through them they donate to Element Church. Some places as much as 25% of your purchase. It is definitely worth checking into and we would GREATLY appreciate you using GoodSearch. Again, go to www.goodsearch.com and the rest from there is pretty easy.
Goodsearch: The EASY way to give to Element Church
15 07 2008Comments : No Comments »
Tags : Element Church
Categories : Element Church, finances, updates
New Location Update
16 06 2008Hey Element Church! Just wanted to give an update on the new location and The Climb. Currently we are having some drawings done by an architecht to help us in the building code process. We need to show the proper occupancy load and fire egress for the assembly areas. We are thankful for the people God has brought our way to help us in this process and are doing our best to trust in God’s timing on the issue. Continue to pray for God’s help and favor in all of these issues. All building supplies are in and ready to use as soon as we get the go ahead. We want to do the build out as fast as possible so anyone with framing and Sheetrocking experience and know how will be greatly appreciated.
Yesterday we had $7593 given to The Climb which brings our total given to $40,607 . Yesterdays offering, including The Climb, was the largest Sunday offering in Elements young history. PRAISE GOD! Keep it up Element Church. I trust God is blessing you as you give! We have a healthy checking account balance and are able to do ALL the things we feel God is leading us to do. God is the faithful Provider and I know He will supply all our needs according to His riches in Heaven.
Trusting,
Jeff
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Categories : Element Church, finances, personal
Voice trumps budget every time!
17 03 2008Hey Element Church! This has been on my heart lately, and after this weekend I felt I needed to blog it. I don’t claim to be a church leadership, church planting, or church in general expert, but I do feel that through this process of planting a church I have learned a TON of stuff! WOW has this been a learning process. One of the things I have learned the most about doing church is the value of listening to God’s voice OVER the budget when the two conflict. Does that mean we don’t have a budget. NO! We developed a budget pretty early in the process but I learned very quickly that the voice of God doesn’t always come to us when a budget is being made. (I also learned that the budget of a growing church plant changes weekly lol) Sometimes the voice of God comes at a time when it APPEARS there is no money. Hmm, there in lies the conundrum. I TRULY believe that many churches around our country do not reach their maximum impact in their community because they listen to the budget first, and the voice of God second specifically when the two conflict. Now I know that we can use this TOTALLY as an excuse to spend money willy nilly on stuff that is NOT of God, HOWEVER, it is an issue we must address. Already in the life of our very young church I feel God has asked us to do some things that if we we listened solely to our budget, we wouldn’t have done them. At the heart of our DNA at Element is serving our city. This already has created voice vs. budget issues. In May of last year we really felt like our opening service project to the city should be a gas buydown. This made NO sense when we had less than 20 people committed to our church. It didn’t make sense financially or voluntarily BUT God’s voice trumped budget. AND IT WAS HUGE! It didn’t make sense in September to do another gas buydown before we launched our services, but voice trumped budget. It didn’t make sense in January to give one weeks entire offering away so our people could serve others, but voice trumped budget. We moved into February and we quickly outgrowing our space. Our lead team sat down and talked about options. The ONLY options that would work included MAJOR financial risks for us, HOWEVER, voice automatically trumped budget when it came to reaching our city for Christ. When we did our budget last November we didn’t plan on adding an entire service in another venue and seeing 370 people come to church. What if we would have set the precedent of listening to the budget and not the voice? A third service with the price tag it had would have been shut down pretty quick. What about the egg drop? That came out of NOWHERE for us. HOWEVER, our DNA is to serve EVEN if it costs money. We knew God wanted us to do an Easter outreach and when the opportunity arose VOICE TRUMPED BUDGET. We committed financially to the drop and what happened? FREE HELICOPTERS! If we would have listened to the budget we would have NEVER had the opportunity to watch God provide like that. This calls for some SERIOUS prayer for wisdom and discernment as Element continues to minister and serve. As I continue to lead this church, my prayer is that We/I will ALWAYS listen to the voice and NOT the budget. Voice trumps budget every time. Now I probably made some people mad. (the ones that listen to the budget) lol
Following Christ,
Jeff
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Categories : Element Church, Leadership, church planting, finances
Financial Seminar
1 02 2008Hey Element Church! We are very excited about the financial seminar tomorrow! Everything (I think) is in place. This has been a crazy week with Adam’s loss in the family, we were waiting by the phone each day as my Grandpa appeared to be nearing his passing (PTL he is making a GREAT recovery). As of this past Sunday morning we thought for sure he wouldn’t make it through the day, now he’s doing much better. We had the financial seminar this weekend, First Friday, communion on Sunday AND a very good friend of ours is flying in today to kind of check out Cheyenne and pray about the possibility of moving here and helping out with Element Church. Adam really did a lot of the leg work on the financial seminar with a few connections he had. Terri (as usual) did all the admin work on meeting space, food, etc. We got the packets all put together last night while watching Lost (WHICH WAS AMAZING!). Each person will get a three ring binder filled with all the information they need for the seminar. We didn’t want to just do a sermon series on money without offering some practical counsel on how to keep it going, so this fills that role. We have 110 I believe coming which is awesome! Alright Element Church. I’m STOKED for Sunday. Can’t wait to see you all through the weekend!
Following Christ,
Jeff
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Categories : Element Church, church life, finances, updates
Sermon Series and community outreach
19 12 2007For those of you on the “inside” here at Element Insider you’re going to get the sneak peak of our upcoming series. We’ll be promoting it this Sunday at church. January 6th - 27th we are going to be doing a series called “Deal or No Deal” and talking about finances. In fact the first two sermon series of the new year are going to be topics that are literally drowning our society. Money and sex. Along with our Deal or No Deal series, we are going to be offering a FREE, one day Dave Ramsay financial seminar. Adam just got off the phone with a guy, who along with his Dave Ramsay certified brother, will be doing a full day’s seminar on finances. Element Church is going to provide this seminar completely free to those in the community who may need a day like this. The seminar is highlighted on our new mailer going out, as well as our invite cards we got made. We’ll also be doing an advertisement in the newspaper leading up to it. We’d like to launch a “Financial Peace University” Life Group following the event if we have enough interest, as well as someone to lead it. Below are the graphics for the invites of the upcoming series. All of our invites are done in a “rave card” size (3.5″ x 3.5″). We order them from 48hourprint.com and their custom size options. VERY affordable.
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Categories : Element Church, Outreach, finances, graphics, marketing, planning, updates
Budget almost done…
11 12 2007On one hand I HATE budgets. Not HAVING them but MAKING them. Today, outside of our creative session and one counseling session I spent the entire day trying to finish the budget. It is pretty much done and I love the way we are doing our budget. I received some tips from some other church planters and it has really simplified the process of doing the budget.
Now, on the other hand I LOVE this budget. Why? Because starting this new year we are going to be completely on our own financially as a young church. What a scary thought, but what an invigorating one as well. We are 2 months and 2 weeks old, we had 240 people at church last week, we’ve seen 34 people acknowledge that they asked Jesus into their heart to be Savior AND we are looking at being self sufficient at 4 months old. The goals we are talking about and setting are lofty BUT doable with God.
We are praying for God to continue to bring us people to connect with the Life in Christ. That’s what we’re about. We didn’t go overboard on our budget by any means, but we didn’t hold back either. We sat down and piece by piece said “What would we like to see here?” We came out in the end “inches” from where we needed to be. So a few adjustments here and there and we’re almost done.
Doing the budget this week has been so time consuming but it’s been necessary. We needed to get it done to have an idea of where we’re going to be on our own.
Following Christ,
Jeff
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Categories : budget, church life, church planting, finances
Decisions
21 08 2007MAN! Financial decisions are the toughest for me right now in this whole church plant thing. We have been SO blessed through our mother church and through our church conference financially. We received over $150,000 of seed money from those two groups to get started. The hardest part right now is budgeting that to fund the initial year. Obviously we want to plan ahead to ensure that year #2 happens, but part of making sure year #2 happens is spending some money in year 1 to attract and assimilate people to Element Church. We are facing, in the next week, some SERIOUS financial decisions at it pertains to launch. We want to launch HUGE so we want to be specific in our promotions and do the things that will yield us the most fruit. Anyway, my personality is “Let’s do it all!” and that’s not what we need right now. We are seeking God for some advice and wise counsel in these matters. We want absolute peace about the financial decisions that have to be made. Your prayers are MUCH appreciated.
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Categories : church planting, decisions, finances
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