Growing Pains

A long time ago in a church far away, I was blessed to be part of a church where the Senior Pastor led us through a series called the Five Things God Uses To Grow Your Faith. Those Five things are: Practical Teaching, Providential Relationships, Private Disciplines, Personal Ministry, Pivotal Circumstances. Today I want to focus on the providential relationships and pivotal circumstances.

Just about four and a half years ago God moved our family of four to a small community called Anacortes, WA. It was exciting, an adventure if you will. Now this move was not without it's challenges. If we are being honest, and I hope we are, it took our family a couple of years to really feel like Anacortes was home. God provided some really incredible friends for our family (providential relationships). These friends helped us grow in our faith, loved us, challenged us, and made realize how good God is. In the second two years in Anacortes, God provided me (Kevin) with some real pivotal circumstances in ministry, in which, I was able to learn and grow. I experienced good and hard things that would shape me as a pastor and follower of Christ.

Fast forward to this weekend. Yesterday we had a harvest party that I challenged the church to put together just two weeks ago. They rallied together and last night was amazing. People stepped up and ran carnival games, took family pictures, painted faces, told Bible stories, and made everyone who walked through our doors feel like they belonged there. This morning several families who came to the Harvest party showed up at church!

But that wasn't the coolest part. We got here almost three months ago and went from a small congregation of 30ish, with only three kids, all three came with me when we move here, to this morning when we had over 100 grown up types and somewhere between 15-20 kiddos!

But wait there's more, today we had our first baptism! Today Melody went public with her commitment to the Lord. She is a picture of a transformed life. Before Christ her life that was shrouded in darkness because she was living to please people and often using alcohol to cope with bad decisions and social anxiety. These days Melody is an Awana helper and so much more at Blackfoot Christian Fellowship.

I stand amazed at what God is doing here and what he has allowed us to be a part of.

If you're wondering why I titled this growing pains, well it's because before this incredible weekend, we had a really rough week. I won't go into detail, but as a family let's just say that we miss our providential relationships from Anacortes and we're wondering how long it'll be before we experience some of that here. They say that the darkest hour is before the dawn and that proved to be true last week and hopefully we're coming out on the other side. I know it'll be a long while before we have deep friends like we did in Anacortes, but we trust that God is moving here and in us.

Thanks for reading and for praying for us. Keep Kate in your hearts and minds as she is working so hard to educate our kids and dealing with me, a full-time job on it's own.

I would write more, but its late and I'm bushed, so I try to do better next time to tell you about the family, what the kids are up to and I'll even post pics of them playing in a mountain of leaves.

We love an miss y'all!

Things don't seem to be slowing down

Well as the title says, things don't seem to be slowing down a bit. Since I last posted a lot has happened, I'll start with the church building: We've ordered all the chairs (they're supposed to arrive in early November), our new lighting is in, but not installed, new big screen TV monitors for the front of the sanctuary are ordered (and arrive tomorrow)!

 We've got a Harvest Party scheduled for next Saturday! I gave the church just under two weeks notice to pull if and they are responding with great excitement and are jumping in with both feet. We'll have carnival games, a picture taking area, a Bible Story tour, a cupcake walk, and no Harvest Party would be complete without a bouncy jungle :). It's crazy some churches don't have inflatables on hand. I'm hoping to have t-shirts printed for all our workers the church name and logo on them, maroon of course :)

My (Kevin) parents came and visited for a long weekend. It was a really nice visit. We had a good time with them and they got to see all that's going on around here. They watched the kids ride the horse, my dad helped me with some projects around "the farm," and we celebrated Jolee's 3rd birthday; I can't believe my baby is 3! It seemed like Christmas as my parents went crazy and bought all of us a bunch of stuff (clothes, books, tools, food and more), they are really generous that way. We are a blessed family.

As a church we are continuing to go through the book of Acts. It's been really good for me and I hope the church too. This morning we examined Acts 4:32-5:11, it's the story of Ananias and Sapphira who  drop dead at Peter's feet after they lied about the amount of money they gave to the church from the sale of their property. It's tough when the Bible exposes our heart's deceit. Read it and see what you think and if you want to know more, then you can go to www.blackfootfellowship.org and learn more. Did I mention that our website is live? It has been for just over a week. I've got to add more info, but our tech guy (Jon Swain) has done an incredible job of making it look awesome.

Tomorrow I'm headed to another pastors conference for the day. This one is for the the Southern Baptist Church (SBC). If you recall, our church is a dually aligned church with both the SBC and the American Baptist Church (ABC). I'm going to introduce myself to the that group and get to know some of them. It should be a good thing and I'm looking forward to it.

This week I begin coaching 1st and 2nd grade basketball! I'm not sure what I was thinking when I signed up to do this. That's not true, I know exactly what the rationale behind the decision was, but holy smokes, it s gonna be crazy. Can I just say that the Parks and Rec Department in Anacortes is top notch! Here's a big shout out to Dustin South. Things aren't quite as organized here, but it'll be fun none the less, but let me assure you that I'll be glad when the season is done and hasn't even started yet.

We (I) launched an all church initiative a couple of weeks ago called "Dinner with my Neighbor." On Saturday, November 1, everyone from BCF is supposed to invite a neighbor over for dinner just to get to know them, no other agenda. I can't wait for Sunday, Nov 2, to hear how it went for everyone. It's gonna be very cool.

We're also about to launch something called Simple: A Large Small Group Experience. In order to get peoples minds wrapped around the idea of small groups, we're bringing everyone to the church for three Mondays in November to introduce them to the concept. We'll show the video teaching by none other than Andy Stanley and then we'll have small group discussion around tables. At the end of the three weeks, I'll say something along the lines of, "Wow, wasn't that easy and great! Now who can do this in their own house?" I know it'll be good or at least I'm hoping and trusting God to bring people to it.

We've continued to have between 80-90 on Sunday mornings and several new faces each week, many who are return visitors. It's great to see people from both congregations getting to know one another and the new folks too. Our offering have been up substantially too! Thats a relief because for a while I felt like we were bleeding. There is sill so much for me to wrap my mind around and get a handle on in terms of the business side of the church. Oh for the good old days when I didn't have to worry or think about such things, just kidding, I love the challenge.

What else can I tell you? Oh yeah, next week is our first baptism!!! I met with Melody on Friday and she's ready to publicly declare that Jesus is her Lord and Savior. She's got quite a story and God is doing a great work in her heart. It's so fun to see people trusting and growing. It reminds me of you, my friends in Anacortes who God was and is doing a great work in. I want to say again thank you for allowing me the chance to be there and learn, to struggle and grow with y'all, to mourn and to rejoice too. I will always count Anacortes, as four of the best (sometimes toughest) years of my ministry.

Kate and the kids are doing well. I'd love to say we've settled into a routine, but that's not exactly true. Kate is an incredible trooper and has been wonderful for our kids. She is with them all the time, teaching, loving, training, feeding, answering questions, and generally being an all around incredible mother, wife, and woman. I'd love to send her on a vacation but unfortunately I can't.

It's now 9 PM here and I'm just about to eat some yummy baked apple stuff that I made. Yes you read that correctly, I baked a cinnamon, brown sugar, oatmeal apple something. We picked the apples off the tree in our back yard. To be more accurate, I used a football to knock most of them down. I'll sign off for now, but once again thanks for all the prayers, for taking the time to read my random ramblings.

We love and miss you all and you are always in our thoughts and prayers. See you soon!

Lots Going On

It's been a couple of weeks and I apologize for not posting sooner. I'll keep it short tonight and promise to post something later this week, so here goes. As Joe Friday says, "Just the facts, ma'am." Well its been a couple of weeks since we merged together and things are going well. I'm so excited to announce that I've got a baptism coming up! Melody has recently returned to church and in one of our services she committed her life to Christ and is ready to take the plunge (literally). I was out of town for half the week last week at a pastors conference in Post Falls. I was able to take one guy from our leadership team and I met a bunch of other pastors from the PacNW. There were three other guys doing "restart" churches like we are here in Blackfoot, and I'm glad to say that God is doing some really good stuff in all the locations. Yesterday, Saturday, was a big day at Blackfoot Christian Fellowship. We painted the Sanctuary and we were able to bless a Guatemalan congregation from Utah with our old pews. They were so excited and so were we. This morning you should have seen the faces as people came into the church, saw the color on the walls, and sat in folding chairs, it was awesome! We showed the church a video of the group that came to pick up the chairs; there was clapping and shout of joy from our people. Right after that I told them that we were having our first capital campaign called buy a chair for you and the friend that you're going to invite. Kate and I wrote the first check and dropped it into our offering box. This week we'll be ordering chairs and light fixtures to replace the old behemoths that are in the room now. It was a drastic difference today, but things felt real good. I'm not sure if I mentioned to y'all that with the merger, I have an Associate Pastor on staff. Dave is 65 and is a Cowboy Church Planter and today he preached at BCF for the first time. It was good to have a break and he did a great job. Many of our folks know him from the Blackfoot Cowboy Church and I think he set me up real well for next week. I'm excited for a few of the things that we're about to do. 1. A Harvest Festival 2. Operation Christmas Child 3. A neighborhood initiative, to get to know our neighbors better. Other things that have kept us busy are the home school group, Kate is still trying to get a good rhythm for the week, and lots of projects around here to get us ready for winter. This weekend's project: I started building a winter stall for our horse. It's almost done and if I say so myself, it doesn't look too bad. Our nights have been dropping down into the mid to high thirties and the days have been awesome sunny and mid-sixties to low seventies. Finally for today, we're getting ready for my parents to make their first visit to Idaho. They arrive on Thursday and will be with us for four days or so. It'll be a good time for the kids to visit with Grammy and Mumps and to show them around the "farm," and for us to catch up with them. Thanks for praying and caring for us and we still have room on the farm for guests (hint hint). We love and miss y'all and wish we could visit with you soon. Congrats to Mike Wenger and Sherry Love on your engagement, we're really excited for y'all. Grace and Peace, Kevin, Kate, Claire, Daniel & Jolee