Until The Nets Are Full: 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.