Thursday

Thursday was a good day. I was downtown in Fort Wayne at about 7am. I was supposed to meet Alyn Biddle (more on that in a moment) at 8:15. But I have gotten so conditioned to a long commute into 'downtown' areas after being in Cinci, I left way too early.

So, I hit the Dunkin Donuts in the dowtown library first.

Alyn (the InAsMuch minister from Broadway Christian Church) lead a ministry that is a compassion based ministry in downtown Fort Wayne. In our 2.5 hours together, I learned a lot about InAsMuch, but want to share two things with you now:

• They have an excellent structure and process for helping people out of poverty, not just handing them food, clothes or money without any exit strategy.
• They share the gospel with everyone they help. They provide accountability and help people to grow, not just survive another day.

After my time with him, including a prayer walk around downtown, I met my wonderful sister Penny for a quick lunch and then went to a meeting at the Chamber of Commerce about handling media outlets as a small business/non-profit leader.

One other note- in the last 5 days we have met and had good conversations with about a dozen neighbors. It's been great, and we look forward to getting to know them all better as the weather starts to warm up!

Thank you, Lord.

Sunday morning, the Flu, and strategy

We were supposed to travel back to KY last Saturday. Then, during the night on Friday Daniel woke up with the flu, as did Levi later and then Kristen. They were all down on Saturday and needing the comforts of a home, so we could not travel.

That put us leaving out Sunday morning. As we left our addition, I realized that the people in our neighborhood that we will be reaching out to with the love of Christ were probably home right then.

Now, it was about 11:30, so surely some had gone to church already and were back home. But there were a suprising number of people out- shoveling or doing some other work. Lots of cars parked in driveways. Lots of driveways with no new car tracks since the snow the night before.

That got me thinking yesterday about an opportunity.

See, there will be some time in the pre-launch phase where we will not yet be having Sunday morning services. We will visit other local congregations during this time and likely travel to a couple larger churches that are within driving distance.

However, what would be a good way to reach these families who are at home on Sunday morning?

What if we, in addition to the backyard parties on Saturday nights, hosted some Sunday morning brunches? Would that not connect sort of automatically with people who aren't going to church anywhere on Sundays? And with the house God has provided, we could do it and host multiple families.

There are 505 houses in our neighborhood. If the stats are true, then about 350 of them need to be reached with the love of Christ. So, if we had the modest goal of hosting 5% of those families on a few Sunday mornings, we could host about 17 families.

Hmm. God, could you use this?