Great Week!

   

This past week was a great week! The group who came from Alabama were awesome! Thank you all who prayed for us, we made it through the week just a little sleep deprived, but excited about the things that happened. Our Alabama friends were hard workers, they passed out a lot of flyers for the block parties, prayer walked around our community, helped us do the block parties, bought supplies that we needed, helped with our Preview service, cooked us a hot meal each day (the food was so good!), played with Josiah (he thinks he has several more grandparents now), made us laugh, told great stories about their lives... they were a funny group and always laughing about something.  They were truly a blessing to us.  We are so thankful for their willingness to come, help us, and serve the Lord. 

These are pictures of stakes that they made that they wrote scriptures on that they were praying over our community. They staked them at different corners of our community. 

   

During the block parties they were awesome at helping me keep and eye on Josiah and they were great at playing with him so I could talk to the women who came.

    

They gave out a lot of snow cones and popcorn!

The bounce houses were a big hit!

Justin and I had some great conversations with people who brought their kids to the block party. Many people seemed interested, and were very open to talking about if they believed or not and what their views on church were.  We were surprised at how open people were at talking to us.  Pray that the Lord continues to work in those people's lives that we had the opportunity to talk to.  We had planned on having 3 block parties but the weather didn't cooperate and the other 2 were rained out. 

Sunday morning we had our first Preview service and we met in a hotel meeting room down the road from us.  We were a little disappointed that we only had 6 new visitors, no one actually came that we met this past week, but we were excited about those that did come. We had 23 total including the group from Alabama.  The Preview services are good not only so others can come and see what we're about, but so we can see what works, and doesn't work, and work out some of the kinks before we are officially meeting every week.  We learned a lot and realize we have a lot of work to do still.  As those who have been in church planting have told us... "Welcome to Church Planting!".  It is a lot of trial and error!  The people here are very skeptical of church/religion so we are just going to start rethinking some things. Let the brainstorming continue! 

Please keep us in your prayers as we seek the Lord for wisdom on how to reach the unchurched and unsaved people in our community.  Thank you. :)