Life in the Big Potato

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades. From the introduction of Working the Angles written by Eugene Peterson.

We survived our trip to Canada, but not without a few stitches. I mean that literally. I can't go into too much detail about the trip for security reasons--not our security, the security of some of the people we worked with. I can tell you that we were providing programing for kids and youth at a conference for adult believers. These are a special group of believers who have come to Christ out of difficult circumstances, and whose community will not easily accept their decision. As always with a trip like this, there are way more details than you'd like to know about. I'll share a few. We took six people. We rode in my truck which holds EXACTLY six people. It took us 8 hours to get there. When we passed through the border the guard didn't even ask for ID. PTL! The adults had three two-hour sessions (they usually lasted fifteen or thirty minutes longer than scheduled) during which we kept the kids. This made for extremely long days for us. As usual there were...

On our way home from MS, we had a layover in Minnesota. Before boarding the plane the attendants asked if we would board as quickly as possible so we could beat the president out of the airport. Well we didn't make it fast enough so we had a 40 minute delay after boarding the plane. BUT we were able to see AirForce One take off and be less than a mile away from the President of the United States. I took this picture from the airplane.

That's how many more people we need to go with us to Canada for a mission trip we are doing. Just pray that God will work out the circumstances, finances, and human hearts that need to change. That's also how many days we have until our baptism service. We just got word the our guest speaker probably won't be able to make it. But God is good. Pray that this will be a great time for our church to grow closer and stronger as we watch believers publicly portray their identity with the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. That just also happens to be the number of families that make up the staff of NorthStar AND the number of families that met last week at Globe Outreach's first annual staff retreat. Please pray for our relationships on these teams as we seek to serve God in community.

We are having a guest speaker this Sunday. Scott Rigsby who was here in June attempting the Ironman Coeur d'Alene is a double amputee. We are also having a cookout and a baptism at the lake. This week we are doing VBS so keep praying for us. I think that last night we had about four kids make a decision for Christ. Pray that their parents will understand since most of those do not attend our church.