Be Care Full!

The past two years has been interesting for me. I’ve had to try run a vibrant children’s ministry with little resources to do so.  It’s not that the church doesn’t want me to have resources, it’s just the nature of the life cycle of our church, the community we are in and of course the economy.  When you plant a church in the midst of the nations worst economic time in recent memory, fill your chairs with non or new believers and hold church in a school building then you have a fairly good recipe for consistently small offerings.  This not to say God isn’t providing for our needs.  He’s indeed blessing us and we are successfully reaching people for Christ all along the 380 corridor.   What I’m referring to is the ability to do what I want with the ministry that I’ve been given.  Notice I said what “I want”.  What I want is to create a children’s environment that rivals anything in north Texas.  Where people come into an area and they say “Wow”.  I want the kids to feel like they are in Disney World, Six Flags, Universal Studios and Chuck E. Cheese all at the same time.  Ok…Maybe Chuck E. Cheese is a bit over the top but you know what I mean.

Guess What? That takes money!..and a bunch of it.

Truth is, we are under-resourced and we’ve got a bunch of jimmy-rigged, hodge-podge, old and over used equipment that we piece together to make a pretty decent worship experience for our attendees.  It reminds me of Gideon’s army.  I feel like we take our small, rag-tag but selectively chosen army into battle every weekend with jars, lamps and trumpets and we’ve got one shot to make it all happen.  So far, God has shown up and every weekend we win the war.  I personally think it’s a miracle that we make it from weekend to weekend.  To say the least, my faith in God has grown tremendously over the past two years.  I can’t say that haven’t wanted for more as the earlier part of this blog will tell you but I sometimes think that if we had it, it might skew the miracle that occurs every weekend when everything just works when it’s not supposed to.

For now, I’m going to thank God for the blessings he has given us at COC.  I know as a staff that we pray continuously for His blessing and we all believe that where there is vision there is provision.  I think God will continue to provide us with what we need and when it’s His will he will let our cups run over.  Perhaps, then I can see a touch of my dream come to life but in the meantime I’ll take my Jar and Trumpet make as much noise as possible.  I’ll just keep on Going Gideon!

Jesus Rocks!

Brian