Life. Liberty. And the pursuit of God.

A drift toward smaller, “more realistic” dreams is natural. What is not natural is continuing to dream larger than your current reality. As a pastor of a new church, I find it a constant struggle to keep the dream and vision in front of people. Dayspring has met and exceeded most of our goals. I wonder, however, if that means we are setting our goals too low. When I failed at some of the goals for this new church, at least I knew they were God-sized to begin with.

I think I need to set more goals, which seem ridiculous, that are almost sure to fail if God does not show up. In August, we are planning an event that I hope a thousand people will attend. A few people have already told me that it is too big and maybe we should plan for less, let’s say 500. Now that I am thinking about it, maybe 1,000 is too small a vision. I wonder if we can order more hot dogs?

Here is a video that highlights some of the projects we accomplished recently on our One Prayer Day of Service. It uploaded to youTube a little fuzzy, but it works. We had four projects take place on one day and it was awesome to that many people serving.

I am in the final stages of planning for our small groups (GRACE Groups) for the Fall. Last semester was our first semester to have small groups and we had 5. As we prepare for this upcoming semester, we are implementing 10 small groups.

Since we are portable the groups have been extremely valuable in relationship building and making connections. Sunday mornings are so rushed that it has been difficult to build relationships in our church, unless you are on a set-up team (something about sweating together in close proximity builds comradery).

Our new church learned a great deal from our first semester of groups. I am working on some changes that will make the next set of classes even better.

Things I am adding:

• More fellowship time
• More vision sharing
• More prayer time
• Measurable devices

Bible study is great, but without accountability, strong relationships and solid prayer it does not go very far. I am willing to sacrifice knowledge for practice. In other words, lets really see how to put into practice what we already know, THEN let’s go learn some more.

I waited 4 hours at my house this morning for a surveyor who was late. The good news is that I was at home when I discovered that the washing machine flooded three rooms of our home this morning. The AC went out in my wife’s car – spent $1,400 to fix it today. Speaking of AC’s did I mention the AC also went out at my office today, I have someone coming out tomorrow to fix it.

On Sunday someone asked if the people around me were praying for me. I was told that Satan would be attacking me. I asked the person to pray that it would not happen. I guess they are a better prophesying than praying.

• We had solid attendance (for summer) today, we were down a little from the past couple weeks but the service still felt good.
• Saw several new visitors today, but I only got to visit with a couple of them. If I could change one thing, it would be that I had more time to visit this morning.
• Sermon was a little different today. I taught through the scripture more than preaching it. I like to change up styles from time to time. Sometimes it works, this time I don’t think it did.
• Dayspring’s worship leader, Aaron, was out today. He spent last week at a seminar in Austin for worship leaders.
• We had Leslie Garakani lead for us today. Leslie is Iraqi, grew up in Texas, loves Jesus, and plays a mean keyboard.
• I found out this weekend that Bishop Huie (my Bishop) will be preaching at Dayspring in February (attendance that Sunday is required for continued membership at the church!!!).

Sunday I will be preaching on the fourth sign in the Gospel of John, which is the feeding of the 5,000 in chapter 6. This is the only miracle recorded in all four Gospels. For me, this points to the importance of the sign/miracle, but I think too often we look at it as a nice sunday school story. It sounds like a safe story to teach our kids – Jesus loves us and cares for our needs. The problem is that too often adults stop there as well and don’t take the time to turn the passage over and around to see all of its many angles. Why was this sign/act so important?

I’m not a real Rabbi, but I play one at VBS. I’ll also have you know that both nights an adult has asked me if I am a REAL Rabbi. I would like to think it has to do with my convincing knowledge of Hebrew Practice, but I have a feeling it is my nose.

Dayspring is holding a combined VBS with Lane’s Chapel UMC. I am the Rabbi in the Synagogue. I was really dreading going in tonight because acting is not really my gig. By the end of the night, I was having a great time. Most of the groups were really into what was going on. Tomorrow night should be fun – I am bringing horseradish for the kids, which sounds like great fun to me already.

Our children’s director is leading the opening and closing sessions of VBS and is doing a wonderful job. We also have most of our people leading the skits and acting scenarios. I love that our church has attracted such a bunch of creative folk.

Also, I would say THANKS to Lane’s for letting us participate. Their people have done a fantastic job pulling it all together and it takes about two seconds after walking in to see that months of work went into pulling this off.

1. One of the things that we work on as a team is the flow of worship. I understand that silence is golden, but if silence is in our service, I like it to be planned. The service never goes perfectly, especially with a portable set up, but today everything seemed to flow together well. The transitions, songs, message and video all seemed to flow together as one this morning.
2. We had a group of people planting another church here in Tyler visit us this morning to see how we set-up and broke down. They are going to be meeting at the Ramada here in town. We are always glad to help other church planters. Although we are still babies ourselves and less than a year old, we have learned a few things in our time as a worshipping community about being portable and being the new church in town. I pray that they reach a ton of new people for Christ.
3. We are still in the planning stage for our fall event at Bergfeld Park. We have a web-site up here that tells a little about the event: (www.movieatbergfeld.com).
4. I am really enjoying our series called “Signs.” I have had a great time studying the messages and I think the series is connecting with people.

I have been out of town all week and will return home tomorrow evening. Tonight I got this e-mail from my WONDERFUL wife who transcribed the message for me from my kids. I know so many people who believe that they are the most blessed people in the world. I, too, hold that belief. My life has turned out to be far beyond what I could have dreamed. I have the most honored calling as pastor and get to live with the most spectacular people who I call my family.

From Anson (my son, age 4):

I love you and I hope you have a safe trip back and like I hope you have a good time and what are you exactly doing.  That’s all.

Dear Dad,

I hope that you had a wonderful trip and that you come home safe and that you will be happy to see me and Anson and that we can have a good day tomorrow and that we can cuddle up by the TV like most times and watch some of it and I hope that you will still remember to call me “bug” and I love you.

Love,

Avery (my daughter “bug”, age 7)

P.S. Oh, Mama, (write)one more thing:  Can you teach me more magic tricks when you come home?

(Postscript: last Sunday I performed a dumb magic trick during worship. Anyway, as it happens the vice-president of the Tyler magicians club was there. So, I got a personal invitation to the next seminar – magic world watch out!)