Update Tuesday - Come Together

It was a pretty amazing experience last week.  I wish I could say that it was very intentional and that I had better planned it.  The truth of the matter is that it was a bit of a last minute idea.  Our Wednesday night Fellowship had planned a Thanksgiving dinner together; I would cook a turkey and others would bring sides.  On Monday, I casually invited a few from our Beer Store Fellowship to join us.   Our Thursday group had planned to postpone due to some scheduling conflicts and so I invited anyone who could make it to just join our Wednesday gathering instead and have a combined event.  What transpired was a Thanksgiving dinner for which I truly give thanks.  For the first time ever, we had an event at which members of each of our three Fellowships were together in one place.  Many of them were meeting each other for the first time.  In particular it was the first time that any of the guys from our Beer Store Fellowship were at an event with members of either other Fellowship.  We talked a lot, we laughed a lot, and we ate a lot...all in all a very memorable evening. 

I have been thinking lately about words spoken by God in Jeremiah 23:7-8

“The days are coming”—the Lord’s declaration—“when it will no longer be said, ‘As the Lord lives who brought the Israelites from the land of Egypt,’ but, ‘As the Lord lives, who brought and led the descendants of the house of Israel from the land of the north and from all the other countries where I had banished them.’ They will dwell once more in their own land.”

 

Speaking to His people in exile, God tells them that not only will they have ancient stories from their past but that He plans on doing new things and that they will celebrate and recount these new stories of God's ongoing activity on behalf of His people.  One of the key things about last week's meal  for me is the excitement I have to begin to look ahead to the new year.  What is God planning, what will He be doing and what are the stories that we will have to celebrate?

 

We will be spending some time over the next month or so doing strategic planning for the coming year.  One of the areas that we will be exploring, and one that our Thanksgiving dinner has got me excited to think through, is the interdependent piece to our network of Fellowships.  We are now up to three Fellowships, and we continue to pray and plan for further addition and multiplication.  We can also now begin to ask what it looks like to be an interdependant network of Fellowships.  What will we have in common, how will we relate to each other, what will we do together? Our Thanksgiving dinner gave me a small glimpse of some of the things that may be to come as we gather together  as a larger whole and celebrate what God is doing in each of Fellowships and we are inspired by the bigger picture that each of our groups is a part of.  

For those of you who continue to pray we thank you and would ask that you would join us in seeking the Lord for the next steps that He has planned for the coming year.