Our church rocks!

It's a common characteristic of church planters that they're cocky about their church, but I'm cocky about my church and I want to brag.

• I like the fact that we can change things up on a Sunday morning. We didn't have any music today. Instead of singing, we spent the response time in prayer. I asked someone who is new to TFC what they thought about the change. She told me, "it was good, but don't do it often, I love your music."
• I'm proud of the fact that rather than just talking about prayer, we actually prayed! Everyone talks about prayer, we took time this morning to pray. And we're going to be doing it more next Sunday, you don't want to miss it. Dan was telling me about what we'll be doing and he said, "sometimes God just does awesome things when we become more intentional about prayer."
• Nate told me after church, "we didn't screw up the music today." I added, "and we had good preaching." We had no music and a guest preacher.
• It's an awesome privilege to have my former pastor preach at my church. As I said when I introduced Pastor Dan; his example was a HUGE reason I developed a passion for unchurched people. The only person more influential in my calling into pastoral ministry, with a passion for reaching the lost, is my dad.
  
• Here's where I really want to brag about TFC. Since we didn't have any music to set up or practice this morning, Zach, Chris, David and Nate all went to observe the set-up procedures of another church that meets in a school to see what they could learn. This is a great church. We're very similar to them in style and ministry approach, we're just on a smaller scale than them. Their church was launched several years ago with a couple hundred people, several hundred thousand dollars (!!!) and two full-time staff. So, yes, we're a bit smaller operation than them.
  And yet, every one of the four guys who went came back saying, "we're more efficient than them, I wouldn't trade anything we do for what they do." The only exception is their lighting system. They have a $5,000 (!!!!) lighting system that blows our can lights away, but our sound and media is just as 'powerful' and even more efficient. Turns out that Chris was giving pointers to their full-time music guy.
  I say this not to put down that church, they're an awesome church, but to brag on TFC!
  The talent we have in our church is amazing! And I know of church plants that have paid twice what we paid for our sound/media systems and literally have half the quality.
• And what else is cool is that while four of our media/sound guys were observing another church, we had 5 guys still at our school, setting up the sound and media that we needed for the day. So our talent pool is several people deep. Holding down the homefront were Josh, Scott, Philip, Caleb and Justin.
• He's been gone for awhile, but today's trip to that church made me want to give a shout-out to my good friend Emanuel Reinbold. God has since moved him onto pastoral ministry in Nebraska (where they really need Jesus - right, Joe) but his hard work in our early days is still paying dividends for our set-up process and sound system.

Yeah, our church rocks!!!