Changes are a Comin’

This post is to reiterate in bullet point fashion—as opposed to a 50 lecture—what I shared with everyone this previous Sunday evening. We are a church plant that desires to plant churches composed of disciples who are discipling others. As such, we have to make changes practically to allow for a capacity in which the Lord would be gracious to work within.

2 Kings 4.1-7 details Elisha helping a widow and her son in the midst of a severe famine. She and her son were near the point of death, about to have their last meal, when God's prophet arrived on the scene. I'd suggest reading the verses for more details. For our purposes the point is that God provided greatly as long as there was a capacity, empty vessels to pour into. Without ripping the story completely out of context and jeopardizing the Spirit's intent in the inspiration of that passage, the principle applies at least somewhat loosely to where we are at. We're not dead. We're not almost dead. But we're skinny, so to speak. What these practical things are doing, or at least what we hope they will do, is provide empty logistical vessels that enable more opportunity for the outpouring of God. This will not replace empty vessels as represented by people willing to go on mission with the Lord (see Isaiah 6; cf. 2 Tim. 2.20-21).

Alright, on to the bullets.

Things we're needing, changing, and working towards in the next few months:

• Sunday morning service
  • this will allow more people to have a chance to hear about Jesus at Living Hope because we are meeting them where they are at culturally, namely in the "Church should be on Sunday morning" paradigm that is a cultural phenomena in our country
  • I will announce in the coming weeks what the actual launch date will be after everything has been nailed down, but for now we're looking to late June at the earliest and early August as the latest
• Kids' Hope
  • we launched Kids' Hope 3 weeks ago and have already been able to minister to several children, which is a great blessing
  • this is allowing more people to serve in our church body
  • 55% of people above the age of 15 are married, 28% of Mobile's population is Millenials (ages 9-28), 27% are Survivors (ages 29-49), 62% of households with children are married, 32% of households with children are single mothers.
  • simply, when you do the math with the above figures, there is a great need for holistic family ministry in our city, whether a nuclear family or otherwise
  • as such, we need more volunteers, either from within or new people joining us from outside, more funding, more room to grow our children's ministry, and last but definitely not least a director to head up this operation
• Gospel Communities
  • we want to see GCs reproduce themselves naturally
  • this means the burden of growing them falls on every individual within them as disciple making followers of Christ
  • we are nearly ready to overflow into 3 groups; the goal for the next 6 months is to have 4-6
• Building space
  • with the above things moving forward and growth (numbers-wise) being more possible, we will run into issues with fitting our new Living Hope family members in our current space
  • we intend to grow backwards first to save money and use the space we have as efficiently as possible
  • we will need to start renting another suite (the third one from our far end) to provide office space, bathrooms, a storage area, and a meeting place for things like the womens' book study
  • we can fit 125-150 (MAX!) semi-comfortably in our current space, at which point we will either need to move, go multi-service, or get another suite in our current building (provided one of the other tenants moves between now and then).
• Ministries
  • during growth and alongside it we want to see growth in ways that we reach our city
  • Hope for the Homeless has been very successful and we're humble to have a part in serving justice and love downtown to our friends
  • more grassroots startups like H4H are to be desired
  • two particularly needy areas in our community are: single mothers and the Hispanic/Latino community (fastest growing ethnic population in Mobile currently)

All of these things are goals. All of these things are prayer requests. All of these things are both. We are not just working towards things, we're praying for God's mercies, wisdom, guidance, grace, provision, and power in all of them. Neither are we only praying, we are doing all that we can, working with all of God's power within us to see these things come to pass for the fame of Jesus and joy of our city and the nations.

Be in prayer with me and the elders. Join hands in prayer for these things in your GCs; join and link arms with each other to march forward to these ends. God has a plan far bigger than what we can imagine. These are small things, pale in light of his wise and glorious vision for Living Hope. We are an army going to war against a spiritual enemy that has held our city in captivity for far too long, but we are an army that marches forward on our knees.

Join me.

To God be the glory.