Further Signs of Things to Come

The asphalt path between McCrery's and the YMCA is now complete!

This was a small, but very important step in the whole Phase III process. This path will allow BVBC members to walk between the YMCA parking lot and McCrery's Auditorium, the location of our 8:30 and 10:00 Traditional Worship Services.

Construction also began on gym. The gym you ask? As part of the preliminary work we are putting in a double door to the gymnasium. Carl Jones and his crew went to work. They knocked out the existing wall, and will be recycling the current double doors in the fellowship hall. (Great Idea Jollie! It saved us boatload of money!)

Construction also began, and is nearly finished, on the new "Coffee Corner", a remodeling project done to our current library. It will open the area up to have coffee and fellowship on Sunday mornings. Once construction starts, we will loose the use of the current "Java Fellowship" area in the fellowship hall.

The Library will still be functional. We have removed the books that haven't been read in a while, and are putting the more popular literature in the shelves along the walls. The shelving units and the desks in the middle of the room will be put in storage, leaving us with an open place to fellowship and share a cup of coffee.

Phase III is winning!

Today I:
Ordered Sound Equipment
Bought Brass Quartet Music for Sunday services.
Trailer to hold Equipment we will use for Phase III worship
Worked On Signage for the Parking Lots and the buildings for Phase III
Prepped music for The Boy's Rehearsal
Prepped music for The Worship Choir Rehearsal
Prepped for The Brass Quartet Rehearsal
Lead The Boy's Rehearsal
Lead the Worship Choir Rehearsal
Lead the Brass Quartet Rehearsal

I have a feeling this is what life will look like for the next four weeks. Please be praying for all of us as we move forward. It has been amazing to see God's hand in all of this. He does provide the strength for us to stand up under all he gives us to do. To God be the glory!

Seeing God through the Eyes of Another

6:00 Worship was lead tonight by Brian Bortnick and Anthony Leounes. They don't go to our church, but are friends of Laird Townsend, one of our guitarists. Brian has an amazing story of how God pursued him and has given him a story to tell. We only caught a thumbnail sketch of his story, but if you want more information, check out his myspace page or his website

What impressed me about him was his overwhelming sense of joy. This was a man who loved the life God has given him, and he loved to tell people about it. There were maybe 50 of us there, but that didn't matter to him. He told us his story and sang his music as though he were singing to thousands, which he has done in the past with his former band Octane. Numbers didn't matter to him, he blessed those who were there and he challenged us to be bold with our faith. I hope we have a chance to hear more of his story, and more of his amazing music. Please pray that God continues to bless his ministry.

The First Signs of Construction

Like the citing of a robin signifies the arrival of spring, so to does the first hole in the ground signify the start of construction at Brandywine Valley Baptist Church.


This "hole" is the beginning of a path leading between the YMCA parking lot and McCrery's. By May 11th, this pathway will be completed, and the membership of BVBC will be able to use that path to get to our traditional services being held at McCrery's. There will be more and bigger holes to follow, but for now, this is where we start. It is going to be a lot of fun!

One Hour, how do you hit the ground running?

See if this sounds familiar.

I hit the snooze bar too many times. My spouse hit the snooze bar too many times. We are running ten minutes late. Breakfast was burnt, cold, or didn't even happen. I have indigestion because I ate my burnt/cold breakfast too fast. I had an argument with my spouse/kids because they are the reason we are late. My spouse/kids had an argument with me because I am the reason we are late. We hit every red light on the way to church. Because we are late, we had to park at the very back of the parking lot, making us even later. As we walked into church and took our seats, it felt like every eye in the place was on us. How embarrassing! Did the pastor up front glare at us for being late? Wait a minute, I put on one black and one navy sock. AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Selah

And now ... we expect you to instantly place all these distractions aside and allow yourself to have one hour, oops, 50 minutes of intimacy with our creator. Cue the Mission Impossible Theme!

I think the largest distraction we face entering a time of worship is the time it takes to get to church. So how do we, as environmental creators, take a congregation from the hectic process of getting to worship, to actually worshiping God in spirit and in truth?

In our worship tradition, the Call to Worship is one of the first elements. It's purpose is simple, "call people to worship." We use anecdotal stories, scripture readings, video clips, or other things to achieve that purpose. The trick has become to remember the purpose , and keep it fresh.

I grew up in the Roman Catholic Church, a liturgic worship tradition. It is one of the most beautiful worship services, but it also presents a great challenge. Every week the prayers and the patterns are predictable. This can unintentionally allow the congregation to "going through the motions"or "doing church on auto-pilot". Our minds wander so easily.

I had the privilege of attending mass recently, and watched this phenomenon in action. That was until the priest, for what ever reason, stopped at the end of a prayer and personally expounded on the prayer he just recited. It was amazing to watch the congregation look at each other, as if to say, "Wait a minute, that is not part of the normal worship. What is he saying?" Those statements by the priest brought the words of the prayer home. It caused the congregation to engage in the process more then they were seconds before. Those words were the ones being talked about in the parking lot and I am sure around the supper table that night.

What that priest had done, in effect was to call his congregation to a greater depth of worship by getting their attention. He didn't let them just go through the motions. I really appreciated that. How do we make sure that the call to worship, a standard element of our worship times, doesn't become something that people just sit through, but that engages them, and call them away from the distracted process of "Getting to Worship"? How do we keep our call to worship doing it's job?

Creating Worship Environments

January...2007. Atlantic City, NJ. My staff and I were on a retreat, seeking God's guidance in planning our worship times. (No, we weren't fund raising!) We longed to create worship services that had a positive, weekly impact on the life of our congregation.

God gave us the concept of "Creating Worship Environments". We realized that it is impossible to orchestrate the movement of God in peoples lives to a specific moment. We simply don't know where God has each individual at a given moment. But what we could do is create an environment that put our congregation in a place with God, where all the distractions of this life were set in their proper place. Our goal became to create an environment where God could do what he needed to with our congregation; where he found them and in ways that only he could know. Too often this doesn't happen because our distractedness gets in the way.

It was a powerful concept for our team, and helped us considerably through the course of last year. As BVBC goes forward with our construction phase, there will be a whole new crop of distractions for us to deal with. I look forward to the challenge! Over then next couple weeks, I thought we could consider what it means to create distraction-free environments, both in theory and in practice. This should be a great conversation!

Song Story from Sunday

Lisa Burchnall does a beautiful job of decorating our church for the holidays. Every Easter she covers the cross at the front of our sanctuary with white silk Easter lilies.

This Sunday night, we sang Kristian Stanfill's version of the hymn "Jesus Paid it All". At the end of the song, Melody, Kaelin and the congregation sang the chorus a cappella, which ends with these words,
"... sin had left a crimson stain
He washed it white as snow...".

Those words took on a special meaning for us Sunday night, as we looked at the image of the cross before us covered in white Easter Lilies. Think of the text, "Sin had left a crimson stain..." When Jesus body was taken down from the cross, the cross wasn't clean. It was covered with dirt and with the blood that was pouring out of Jesus body as he hung there. The crimson stain was on that cross because of my sin and the sin of humanity.

"... He washed it white as snow." I grew up in Minnesota, which is snow covered 13 months of the year, (at least sometimes it feels that way!). The baseball season opener was last night, and if the Twins didn't play in the Metrodome the game wouldn't have happened, because it snowed 8".

All that to say I know a little bit about snow. When snow covers something, it looks clean...for a moment. Then the wind blows dirt off the fields and the snow gets "dirty". Or it starts to melt, and looks more like ice than it does snow. If snow were to fall on a cross, it would cover the top side of the cross, but you would still see the cross, the blood stained cross. Evidence of my failures would still be seen. So for me the snow analogy comes up a little short.

However, as I looked at the cross covered with lilies it was this amazing contrast of death and life. It was as though those lilies, a powerful symbol of beautiful life, sprang out of that blood stained cross. Its that image that gives us hope! We can have new, beautiful life because of what Jesus did for us on that cross. The sin stained cross cannot be seen anymore, because it has been covered by Jesus death and resurrection. Can we live in that freedom? Can we forget our sin as God does, throwing it as far as East is from the West? Can we truly live AND LOVE as free people?