Moving on...

I feel a little sad to say this, but this blog is closing down. Don't get too upset, because I am actually making an improvement.

You see, I decided some time ago that as we got close to Launch Day (which is now less than one month away) that I would make a change with my approach to blogging.

So, Triple Pointe Church now has a wonderful website, http://www.triplepointechurch.com/.
And I now have a more streamlined blog, http://www.patrickriecke.com/.

And http://www.thedevelopmentfw.blogspot.com/ will now go dormant.

For news about TPC, please go on the church site.
To follow my thoughts, please check out http://www.patrickriecke.com/.

Thank you for your readership! I think you will enjoy my even more direct thoughts at http://www.patrickriecke.com/. There are already several posts on there. Mostly they are short compressed blasts of thoughts about God and society.

Again, thank you for following this blog, and please take a moment now to bookmark http://www.patrickriecke.com/.

Practice, Practice, Practice

This Sunday, August 16, we will hold our first practice service at Hickory Center.

It's very exciting as well as a little scary. But most of all it will be a real learning experience.

We will be holding this practice without a sound system or trailer to transport the equipment we do have, but we will give it our best shot.

We have invited a few dozen people to join us and give us their feedback on what they experience.

If you would like to be invited to the service, please drop me an email at patrickriecke@yahoo.com

Back to School

Now here is a pic of the school supplies we get to give when we go to The River in the morning for their backpack drive for a school they help out at...
The boxes contain 24 notebooks each.

LOOT!!!!

Here are some pics of what we have collected for our Children's Ministry. And the best part is, we have only spent less than $100 of TPC budget money! Thank you to everyone who is chipping in!

Pain

We were contacted this week by a friend who is giving a message on God using broken people. She was looking for just a little input on the topic.

Got me thinking.

As I blog now, I am listening to my Pandora station entitled 'Jon Foreman Radio'. Don't really know Jon Foreman well, but heard one song I liked...

You know, most songs today are about the crappy parts of life. Maybe that's how songs have always been.

Chances are, as you read this, you have at least some amount of pain in your life.

And it hurts. It makes you angry. It makes you despair sometimes.

It's life for all of us.

For this reason he was made just like his brothers that he might become a merciful high priest...

During those frequent times of pain, it's good to know that we don't serve a God who only lives in the abstract, but one who lived in the real day to day that we live in and is merciful to us because he understands.

A vision of the future

This past Sunday we went to Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids. It was a vision of our future.

Not in the ten years old and thousands of people come each week sense.

But in the extremely scaled down and simple sense.

Walk with me through our experience at Mars…

We pull into the parking lot and there are no signs. Just little lettering on the doors to tell you that this former mall is now a church.

We enter through the West doors and find ourselves in a long hall. The walls are gray and without decoration.

The hall breaks open into an intersection of two other main entrances, the guest reception area, and coffee and donut area.

The donuts at this nationally-renown mega-church? Just hundreds of donut holes, powdered sugar and cinnamon, in big cheap plastic bowls. I didn't try the coffee, but there were only two kinds- the house blend (something from another country) and decaf.

Upon inquiring about kids classes we are told that the elementary kids go with mom and dad to the adult service, "Because it's good for them." I'm not sure if she means the kids or the moms and dads.

The experience with the two classrooms we go to is similar: cheap yet effective security measures, a welcoming teacher, and bare bones rooms with some simple toys kids love. (Our three-year-old remarks later, "They had two magnifying glasses!")

The decorations consist of large scraps of ugly brightly colored fabric paper clipped together.

As we reach "The Shed", the affectionate name for their very plain worship center, we are overwhelmed with the vastness of the room. (Imagine Sears with nothing but a small stage in the middle and gray chairs everywhere).

Highlights of worship- the 'praise band' consisted of only 2 people, there was a simple testimony time, and the message was scripturally based and therefore incendiary to the hearers. And this plain church praises God that he has given them the chance to give a total of $41,000 to needy out of work families in Western Michigan in the last 8 weeks.

"You are putting on a show on Sunday morning and you have to give people what they want." This mantra, lived so often by well-meaning Christ-following ministers, simply is not true. Thank you, Mars Hill, for making this clear.