Tuesday, August 21, 2007

The COR Launch and Evidences of Grace

It’s official…Christ Our Redeemer Church is now an official Washington State church plant of Sovereign Grace Ministries! Woo hoo! Last Sunday we had our official launch service and it was amazing to see God’s blessing.

I wanted to give you a brief review of last weekend and Sunday’s launch and thank you for praying for us on this exciting day.

After braving the dreaded Seattle traffic the Crossway-Canada e-team arrived on Friday night. Christ Our Redeemer people had a meal prepared for them and arranged to have them transported back to COR host homes. All total we had 39(!) people from Crossway come to serve us. On Saturday morning we all met at Alki Middle School and then broke up into 2 groups, one for the car wash and the other for the park outreach. Even another local church (Living Water Community Church) showed up with a crew to help us hand out flyers. The car wash went well, and the park outreach went well also. Jay Lyles was a great help with the car wash. Between the neighborhood mailing, the car wash, and the park outreach we had 9 visitors come, several of which said they will return this coming Sunday. We had over 30 visitors (not members of COR, L-W or CCC) with family, friends, and interested parties. I met with two men today that said they will be back next Sunday. At the launch we had at least 250(!) in attendance (it was hard to count them all) with about 75 kids and 175 adults. The unthinkable happened! Living Water cancelled their service to assist us with the launch and to provide a meal and childcare for our guests. They were a tremendous blessing to us. The Crossway e-team served us well by helping with the set-up and clean-up, and Pat Sczebel and the Crossway worship team served us by helping us to glorify God in our singing.

I preached from Romans 11:36 on God’s desire for church planting, and seeing His glory as the purpose for it all. There seemed to be a good response to the sermon and then folks (even visitors!) stuck around for a long time after the meal. I spent the bulk of today doing follow-up with the visitors that came. I’ve included a picture from the launch and Tommy Hill has already given me a bad time about preaching in a tie J. (see attached)

I was very grateful for the way COR folks humbly served this weekend. They were all servants that made incredible sacrifices for this launch. I saw example after example of joyful service to the Savior.

We all were absolutely astounded at how God gave us grace throughout the weekend and particularly moved in our midst on Sunday. Our prayer was that God would be glorified in the launch and in the upcoming days of COR. We think we see God answering that prayer.

Thank you again for your prayers on our behalf and thank you to all who made this launch a testimony to the grace of God among undeserving sinners.

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