Church planting...It's been on my mind a lot lately. Actually a lot of things have been on my mind lately. The summer's over and there is work ready to be done. I'm beginning to teach the junior highers for Wednesday night youth group for the second straight year and I also have a small group of 7th grade boys. If the Lord wills, I'll be starting a Friday night young adult Bible study. And, I'm auditing a class on church planting at Salt Lake Theological Seminary. The class is being taught by the pastor of my church's mother church who is also (I believe) the regional director of church planting for the EFCA (my denomination). So there are a lot of things going on right now. A lot of things to pray for if they happen to come to your mind during the week. I think that leaves Tuesday night free and the occasional Thursday night.
For Wednesday night, I'm doing a character study through the book of Genesis. I'm really looking forward to it. Obviously, I'm starting with God. I think I'll do the first three or four lessons on God and different things that are revealed about Him in the first chapter or two. That will be followed up with Adam through Joseph. I'm hoping to show how the gospel is revealed in the lives of all these characters, as well as grounding us in the foundations of who God is and what that means for our lives. I'm hoping this will humble me and the kids. The first lesson is that God is not all about us - God is all about God. He is the principal character through all of the Bible and He does everything for His own glory. Follow that up with the holiness of God, God's sovereignty and authority over and in creation, and the Trinity. Should be interesting.
The genesis of the Friday night study actually came from the end of my Sunday morning youth duties (potentially). Over the summer we cancelled sunday school and just had the main service. The elders decided to keep that format for the foreseeable future, which means that I won't be teaching a youth sunday school class. This frees up some time to really focus on adult ministry. In God's infinite wisdom and impeccable timing, the sunday that this was all announced I started talking to one of my friends about getting together friday nights for some discipleship/accountability and he really wanted to make it a young adult study which has been on my heart for some time. So, in the matter of about 15 minutes, one door of ministry closed and another one opened up. And the one that opened up seems more in keeping with my calling toward the Ogden area. So in the past month I've moved to Ogden and I'm about to start a Bible study (again, Lord willing) in Ogden. We'll see if this ends up becoming a church plant or if it will be another way for God to mold and shape me into who he wants me to be.
And finally, the church planting class kind of happened out of nowhere. I got an e-mail a couple weeks ago from Ross Anderson (the pastor of Wasatch EV Free) saying that he was going to be teaching that class and that he had been talking to my pastor about my desire to church plant and thought that I would be interested. I got the e-mail on a Thursday, read it Saturday, and signed up to audit the class the Monday it started. The books I'll be reading for it look really interesting. I really enjoy Planting Missional Churches by Ed Stetzer. We'll see what God has for me in this class. At the very least I'll be learning a lot of practical stuff about planting churches.
Anyway, that's about all the new stuff in my life so far. God bless and have a great Sunday.
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