2015 in Review

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from this goofy bunch!

Dear Friends and Prayer Warriors,
The Lord has been exceedingly faithful to us this year.  Here are some of the highlights.

Janet, Frances, and Vernie all graduated from Jobs for Life and found jobs!

Our Jobs for Life ministry helped three long-term unemployed folks develop the confidence and the skills they needed to find and maintain employment. It’s a huge blessing to see men and women find hope in Christ and have him bless their efforts to provide for themselves and their families.

Our new red doors at our downtown location.

The Storehouse moved from its location on Black Road into the lower level of the Calvary Chapel Church in downtown Greeneville!  The new location provides handicap accessible restrooms, paved parking, and climate control, not to mention being in the heart of downtown.

The Mount Moriah Baptist Church mission team!

The Denton Bible mission team, minus Pat Smith, plus Pastor Gary and a couple hard working locals!

In order to get moved into the new location, we hosted mission teams from Denton Bible Church in Denton,
TX, Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Raleigh, NC, and First Baptist Church here in Greeneville. We also had a fantastic group of local businesses who donated their time, materials, and professional expertise to help us make the transition.  At every phase of the project, the Lord provided in incredible ways, and it was a humbling process to be a part of.

Our First Thursday Food Distribution

Since we opened at the end of August, we have had more clients coming to see us and more volunteers coming to serve alongside us, evidence that the Lord is continuing to bless this transition.  For example, at our old location our monthly food distribution served on average 50 families per month, and we usually had about twelve volunteers serving.  In November at our new location, we served 98 families and had about 25 volunteers serving, carrying boxes, and praying with those families. It’s been so good to see our volunteers realizing that this ministry is not primarily about meeting physical needs, though that’s important and we certainly do that.  Our ministry provides an opportunity to have conversations with lost and discouraged 

people, and to help them realize that the Lord cares about them personally, about their physical and their spiritual needs.

This year also saw the expansion of Seminary Extension.  Our first class in Greeneville was How to Study the Bible, which was a success, and the students are excited about continuing in the Spring with a study of James, where we will spend a significant amount of time applying the things we learned in class this Fall.

This is the church family at West Hills, plus special guest Ben Proffitt from the Baptist Association on the day of our installation service.

Our newest adventure has been taking on the pastorate at West Hills Baptist Church in Jonesborough, TN. The church is comprised of about 15 senior adults, one of whom is a deacon (elder). The church has been in decline for a very long time, and unless something changes, they will cease to exist in the next couple of years.  But they have a paid for building in a great location.  They have a core group of people who really do love Jesus, but who’ve not had the leadership (pastor) to help them develop an outreach strategy to engage the community around them with the Gospel.  As a part of our efforts to help the church be the Church, we are coming alongside them to provide that pastoral leadership and to help revitalize this local church. We covet your prayers as we seek to develop an outreach strategy that connects to the heart of the community and that senior adults can engage in.  In addition to our ministry at the Storehouse and with Seminary Extension, this will be a large part of our ministry for 2016.

Thank you so much for following along and praying with us.  Your prayers are more important that you can possibly realize in moving the hands of the Lord.  We couldn't be here without you! 

Until the Nets are Full,
Daniel, Meredith, Lily, and Hosea

We pray that you'll look to the Lord's goodness in 2016 with the delight and intensity that these two watch "The First Noel"!

Merry Christmas!

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Dear Friends and Prayer Warriors,

Thank you for praying with us (even when you haven't heard from us)! Here are the key highlights from the last two months.

The congregation at West Hills Baptist Church in Jonesborough had a family meeting on October 25th, and after giving everyone a chance to speak and say their peace, they all agreed that the Lord wants me to be their next pastor. It's a daunting task, but one we've agreed the Lord is calling us to. This is a bi-vocational pastorate, which means I'm still going to be employed full-time as a Denton Bible Church missionary. Our prayer is that the Lord will use us to help bring the church back to life, and that the church will become a reproducible model of revitalization that we can point to as we interact with other churches and church leaders as we expand our broad based leadership training ministry. Because we believe that your prayers move the Lord's hands, I'd like to tell you a little more about West Hills, and give you some concrete suggestions so you can be praying for us.

The church began as a split off of  First Baptist Jonesborough in 1961. The church did well under the leadership of its first pastor, and grew slowly until his retirement in the late 1970s. Since then, the church has been more or less in decline. There have been a handful of pastors over the decades under whom the church has experienced small amounts of growth, but with each departure the church has dwindled a little more. They've not had a pastor since 2010, getting by with interim pastors and pulpit supply preachers.

This is the church family at West Hills, plus special guest Ben Proffitt from the Baptist Association on the day of our installation service.

Sunday services are interesting. The average attendance in November was 17, including our four Shraders. Not including the Shraders, all but one of our core group are retired, and many have great-grandchildren. There are no musicians, so we sing hymns along with videos taken from YouTube. It's hard to be very formal with such a small number, so we're not. If a guest shows up, they get greeted publicly. There's nowhere to hide.  Our kids put smiles on folks faces as they dance in the aisles during the congregational singing. After the music, Meredith takes the kids to their Sunday school room and does her best to listen to me preach through the audio system while keeping an eye on our two wide open little ones. Every Sunday is a bit of an adventure for our family, with no other families our age. Lily misses First Baptist, especially her friends and her Sunday school class. Because the service times are different, some Sundays Meredith is taking the kids to First Baptist to Sunday School, and then driving to West Hills for the worship service.  Please pray for our family as we move into a place of sacrificial service. Our prayer is that over time, the Lord will bring others to join us in the work, but also that we'll have the privilege of seeing families come to know Christ, and seeing those families grow up in their faith.

The task the Lord has given me is to "equip the saints to do the work of the ministry". Designing an outreach strategy for a group of senior adults is a new task that I'm excited about.  Over the last two months, I've been preaching through the book of Acts and talking about the nature and mission of the church. At some point when I overcome the technological hurdles, I'll post the sermons online where you can watch or listen and offer constructive criticism to this young preacher. In the coming months, I'll be laying out a plan to use the gifts, talents, and assets of our church to help our little group of senior adults reach out to our neighbors.

The current leading idea is to build a community garden behind the church. The church has the land, and the location is ideal. There are several large neighborhoods within a mile of church whose yards are so steep that a home garden isn't feasible. We could potentially offer garden plots at no cost to non-churched families, and allow them to grow alongside us.  Denton Bible is already doing this at the Shiloh Field Community Garden, so we know we have access to some folks we can learn from along the way. By putting in a prayer garden at the front with some flowers and places to sit, our senior adults will be able to come out on days when the weather is nice and talk to our non-churched neighbors as they work in their gardens, building relationships and bridges to the gospel. Today, this is just an idea in my head. It will take an abundance of prayer and godly counsel for the church to move forward with this as an outreach strategy.  If you have any experience with a community garden, good, bad, or otherwise, we'd love your input in this brainstorming/dreaming/pre-planning phase.  Please be praying with us that the Lord would provide guidance for the church in developing an intentional plan for reaching our community with the gospel, be it via garden or other strategy. We know it won't happen on accident, and we know the Lord has a plan and we want to participate in it!

In our home life, the kids are great, full of life and energy! Fall has been mostly wet, so the kids have been running laps around the house for the last couple of months, and we try to get outside every day the weather is nice.  Lily is excelling in homeschool, though she and mommy are both ready for Christmas break!

Thank you for your prayers and support of our ministry. Without you, we wouldn't be able to serve the Lord the way we do.  

Here are some pictures of our family taken in October by Holly Morelock. She's done a fantastic job taking family pictures for us the last couple of years.

Hosea is such a HAM!

Momma was going to hold him down and take his picture whether he wanted to or not!

Off to the back yard! He's an independent little guy!

And some pictures from real life...

Turn Hosea loose outside, and he's headed straight for the dirt!

I like to have dirt on my face. It makes me feel like a big boy!

Helping Daddy put lights on the tree.

Christmas is coming, but they don't need any toys. They're good playing in the box.

Cuddles on a cold day!

Charlie asking the Lord's blessing on our time together at the first Thursday food distribution.

A rare shot of Mrs. Earlene smiling :)

One of our faithful volunteers registering families.

Charlie and Dennyr directing volunteer traffic during setup.

Volunteers setting up.

This little puppy was being silly on the very cold morning of our food distribution. 

Lily had a good time "chatting up Santa"!

Lily had fun learning about Christmas in the late 1800's at the Doak House Museum on a homeschool field trip! 

Lily is very excited about giving gifts! Here she is wrapping one all by herself!

It's been an unusually warm week, so the kids have been able to play outside.

Their current favorite spot is the sandbox!

They may drive each other nuts sometimes, but sometimes there's hope that they really do love each other!

New Semester, New Possibilities

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Family selfie on Hosea's second birthday!

Dear Friends and Prayer Warriors,

The new Storehouse location is fantastic, so one last huge Thank You to everyone who the Lord used to bring this transition to pass.

In only our second month at our new location, our food distribution has already grown from 50 families to 76.

The vast majority of people we serve through our food distribution are senior adults living on a fixed income.

Since completing the Storehouse transition, we launched our first Seminary Extension class in Greeneville.  We have three faithful students who are learning and growing, and I think the class has been a blessing to everyone involved. They take their final exam Monday!  This first class was rules for interpreting Scripture. Our next class will be a walk through of James, where we will apply the things we learned this semester to real world Bible study!  With the holiday season looming, we will start back our next Seminary Extension class in January.

If you've followed the blog for any length of time, you know that I have a passion for helping churches BE the Church.  As a part of SERVE, we believe that well equipped church leaders is one of the keys to seeing this happen.   Lots of churches in East Tennessee lack pastors with formal training, or lack pastors altogether because they were built around a bi-vocational model, and bi-vocational guys are getting harder and harder to find. These churches are usually either stagnant or declining, and desperately in need of revitalization.

Seminaries generally don't prepare men for bi-vocational ministry. Let's be honest. Most guys who go invest years of their life in a Masters level program preparing for ministry do not feel called to do ministry as their secondary occupation. The solution for this seems to be to identify and train local men to pastor these churches, and this precisely what I have been investing time to do.  I work with Seminary Extension training church leaders and future pastors.  We try to teach volunteers at the Storehouse about working with the materially poor.  I've invested time in helping men develop their abilities to prepare and deliver biblical messages.  However, for the past four years, a question that has been regularly posed to me by everyone from strangers to supporters to potential local partners is "What makes you qualified to train pastors if you've never been one?"  I usually answer that question, "giftedness and excellent training", but to be honest, that rarely satisfies people.  It's a valid question, and one I've prayed over a lot the last two years.

At the end of August as I was preparing to launch our Fall Seminary Extension class, Ben Proffitt, the Director of Missions with our local Baptist Association, asked me if I was interested in helping to revitalize a tiny little church on the west end of Jonesborough, about fifteen minutes from our house.  Ben and I met with Gene, the church's only remaining deacon, and James Harrison, the pastor of First Baptist Church Jonesborough, a potential partner in this endeavor.  Gene invited me to come and preach for a few weeks, so I began to spend Sundays preaching at West Hills and beginning to get to know the people. One of the blessings of the Storehouse transition is that we have had more volunteers serving day to day, and more of my time has been freed up to prepare to preach and teach and potentially pastor.

West Hills embodies much of what I've written about in the past in terms of churches that need revitalization. A paid for building. No debt. A core group of faithful believers. Gene functions as an elder, but they lack a pastor with vision for the future and the ability to help them connect with the community that has changed around them dramatically over the last 50 years. Change will be difficult, but if the church fails to change its current trajectory, it will die in the next decade or so as the last of the members go to be with Jesus.  We have been praying about how we should help, and if this is the Lord opening a door for me to gain some pastoral ministry experience and develop a platform for growing our leadership training ministry.  We've sought counsel from the DBC guys in Texas, and they're supportive me taking on the responsibility of guiding this church as a part of my regular ministry activities with the Storehouse and Seminary Extension.

Nothing is formal yet. I've tried to be very clear about the types of changes that are going to need to happen in order for the church to bring the gospel back to the center of all our activities, and ultimately to grow and add families.  I think the church members are a little overwhelmed (I did that on purpose), and there is some uncertainty about whether or not they want to go forward (that's good). On Sunday the 25th, they will need to decide whether or not to call me as their next pastor, and in the meantime we will be seeking the Lord's will in this as well. The task is daunting, especially for Meredith and the kids. We covet your prayers. We want to be faithful to the Lord's call even when it's challenging, but we also want to be wise and back away from this if the Lord has reason for that as well.


Things you can be praying for this week:
1. Please pray for wisdom regarding the potential pastorate as West Hills.
2. Please pray for our Seminary Extension students to finish their first class strong in the coming week.
3. Please pray for Meredith as she homeschools Lily. Starting school has been a huge adjustment for them!  She's doing an amazing job and Lily loves it, but it's taken far for more energy than she anticipated!

Here are few family highlights from the last month!

"I'm a REAL princess!" Mommy and Lily went on a field trip to see the Biltmore Estate. 

Ice cream at the Biltmore Creamery.

Petting the rabbit on a field trip the Rural Resources farm.

Playing with worms and learning about vermicomposting.

One of her stacks of birthday cards! Thank you for helping me make her birthday special!

How birthday's change after you add small children...Lily won't eat icing because it's too sweet, so mommy's cake has and icing-less  corner.

This big boy celebrated his second birthday! He's a ham and a delight, and he loves tractors. In fact, if you were to tell him happy birthday, he would probably enthusiastically respond, "I like tractors, too!"

One of our favorite family outings is to pick our own pumpkins out at Buffalo Trail Orchard!

We love the hayride out to the pumpkin patch!

 Hosea loves hay bales!

But not always having his picture taken....

Sister gave him a hug to help him feel better!

Thank you for all your love and support for our family and ministry in East Tennessee!