I LOVE MY CHURCH!! SERIOUSLY…SO proud to call these people my family. You guys are amazing. I don’t know about anyone else, but I NEEDED today! Was so filled during worship and so passionate about what I was sharing. Trust you were filled up as well and encouraged by God. Here are my ruminations.
— After 1st service I got to pray with a man in the lobby who wanted to ask Jesus into his heart. He came right up to me, it was his 2nd time here, and said, “I need God in my heart man.” We stepped aside and he confessed Christ as Lord, confessed His sins, and opened his heart to Jesus! WOO HOO!! If only for the ONE!
— This guy had lived a VERY rough life and he said, “I feel like I can be myself here.” LOVE it! I told him that we literally designed our church with guys like him in mind. We got him a Bible, a next step packet and will be able to follow up with him. THAT’S WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO!
— Man, I don’t know what it was about today, but I was so moved during worship. Yes, the band sounded AMAZING and they did a great job, but I was just overwhelmed with the love, mercy and grace of God. Seeing the team worship as they were playing, I was literally just grinning from ear to ear.
— TONS of cool stuff happening in our church right now. Through the power of ONE dollar experiment we received $2,344 to bless two families from our campuses. The church is matching that amount out of our outreach funds for a total of $4,688 that will go a long way to meet some real needs. THANK YOU to everyone who helped us with that experiment. You can read more about this experiment we did HERE.
— On Saturday, 277 people from Cheyenne & Wheatland were out serving the communities through the power of ONE day serving opportunity. In Wheatland they had over %50 of the congregation out serving the city through some major cleanup. SO proud of our Wheatland team. You guys ROCKED it! Here in Cheyenne we had over 100 people who did landscaping and painting at the Comea Homeless Shelter and large groups of people serving the city through various clean up projects as well.
— Again, SO proud of our church and those of you who stepped up to love on our communities this way. It was great to be out there on Saturday with our family, meeting new people, talking to passersbys who had questions, serving together as a church.
— Today we launched a NEW experiment called, “The Element 432 Experiment”. It’s based off of Acts 4:32 “They felt that what they owned was not their own so they SHARED everything they had.” God used that verse to stir my heart about a year ago, thinking, “What would it look like if a church shared everything they had?” I am SO excited about this.
— We developed a Facebook Group called “The Element 432 Experiment”. Go HERE for the page. This is for our church family only, so it is a closed group for now. To be added to the group a moderator will have to approve you. (We’ll just check our database system to confirm people who are a part of Element) On this page, you can post something that you are in need of or something that you can give. For instance, you might post “I’m in need of a lawnmower”. Someone can reply to your post that they have a lawnmower you can have or one you can borrow.
— HOW COOL would it be if the church started sharing what we had to take care of each others needs. I LOVE IT! I hope it works. We’re calling it an experiment because it might fail miserably, and we’ll just pull the plug, BUT we’re willing to try anything! HA!
— This will be a work in progress so please be patient with us as we try and live out this Biblical principle. This could turn into a GREAT way to serve each other in the church.
— Continued The Power Of ONE today preaching from Acts 4:32-35 and asking the question, “How can one church make a difference?” Here some excerpts on the day:
- A difference is not determined by how many people you have or how big of projects you can do, it’s determined by how the community around you begins to change.
- I fully believe the church that God desires EVERY church to be is a church that makes a difference in their community.
- While one church might make a more noticeable difference, EVERY church can make a difference.
- Unity does NOT equal uniformity. The church will never be unified in practice, but we CAN be unified in purpose.
- The devil knows that for the church to make a difference we need to be unified in purpose, so he distracts us from our purpose by getting us divided over our practice.
- What we need to understand is there is no perfect church because there are no perfect people! What we CAN have though are imperfect people in an imperfect church that are united in heart and mind because we serve an ABSOLUTELY perfect God.
- Unity in the church doesn’t happen because of all the great people. It happens because of the power of our great God.
- Instead of being selfish, what if the community began to see us sharing. “They shared EVERYTHING they had”.
- Being unselfish is not just about our belongings, it’s also about our bodies. Specifically, serving God through the church that you attend.
- I don’t believe you should volunteer because the church has a cool mission that needs fulfilled, I think you need to serve because it’s what you’re MADE to do.
- Jesus, through His church, has established the church to be THE difference making organization in the community and I believe if there’s anything to give our time and our bodies to it’s HIS church.
- Their testimony carried WEIGHT because it matched the WAY they lived.
- Jesus said, “I will build my church”! We can’t build the church, ONLY Jesus can. The only thing we can do is BE the church, and the church that Christ intended was one that is united, unselfish, unashamed and HE will make it unstoppable.
- The biggest obstacle to the church today, are those of us who attend it. Complacency is a bigger danger than conflict. Greed a greater opposition than any government.
- The community in Acts began to change and take notice of the church NOT because of their preaching, programs, property or the fact they made a POINT. The Community took notice because the church made a DIFFERENCE.
— Challenged everyone who calls Element “home” but is not currently volunteering to step up and serve. You can sign up to volunteer HERE.
— Updated our Cheyenne campus on where we are with the remodel. Our final stamped architectural drawings have been submitted to the city for permitting. Lord willing, we will have our demo permits to start demo on May 17th. We are doing most of the demo ourselves, which is a HUGE cost savings. We’ll have more detailed information and sign up instructions coming up so you can be a part of the demolition process.
— Ok, that’s it! GREAT GREAT day today! Thanks so much to everyone who is a part of this thing called Element. Love you guys.
Till the end,
Jeff