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When I got up this morning the smoke from the fires out in the Great Dismal Swamp had blown in, making visibility lousy and breathing challenging. Things weren’t much better when we got to the church, but we managed to wheeze through it all together.

• Attendance was back up today, and we had several guests from the neighborhood with us
• Today was an awesome service. I was so proud of our church.
• It was so awesome to look out and watch our folks during the greeting time.  Brenda had to start playing the organ to get folks to sit down!
• We celebrated the 48th anniversary of Robin Class, our ministry to mentally handicapped and developmentally challenged people
• They sang “Happiness is to Know the Savior” today and it was so cool! Our Robins express their worship so unhindered by things that hang the rest of us up.
• The lady who usually is in the nursery has been out with a knee replacement. We hadn’t thought about a back-up, but today during the service we had a guest with a small child. One of our other ladies quietly slipped out of her seat, came up along-side the guest and offered to take her child to the nursery. It was so wonderful. Nobody had to ask….she just saw a need and met it.
• The message today was based on Acts 17:6.  I talked about How to Change Your World.
• Speaking of changing our world, over 200 World Changers volunteers will be with us beginning on Saturday, July 5, to work on about  a dozen homes in the neighborhood right around our church.
• The month of July is going to be an extremely busy–and significant–month in Cradock’s life.
• This afternoon we had the second of our Dreaming Again session.
• I presented the map of our current organizational structure.
• We have a ratio of 3 committees for every one adult Sunday School class. This is not good.
• We had two groups who got together in recent days to think strategically about spiritual growth and service. They reported tonite. Incredible!
• One of them said, “it’s easy to come up with ideas of things we think the community needs because they are things we like to do…”
• “Most of us drive to church in our air conditioned comfort, and not many people who see us in the neighborhood know we are part of the church because they never see us outside the building.”
• “We must build street credibility if we are going to serve our neighborhood.”
• “We’ve got to get outside the building and build strategic partnerships in the community to serve the community.”
• I was blown away. The coin is dropping. People are getting it!
  
• People are beginning to think strategically and are talking about the kinds of strategic changes that have to occur for our church to be in existence 5 years from now.
• We have decided to delay a strategic conversation about Worship until after this coming Sunday.
• Next Sunday, three of the churches in our community (Baptist, Methodist & Presbyterian) are combining their morning worship services.
• Our special music is going to be provided by one of the visiting groups with the World Changers project. That should stretch most of our folks pretty seriously.
• We’re also having a huge dinner on the grounds following the service.
• We were debating the merits of 9″ plates versus 11″ plates, and divided plates versus un-divided plates. I don’t want my potato salad getting up against my waldorf salad. I think the 9″ undivided plates won, tho…..
• I think that from a strategic perspective, having an opportunity for our folks to experience a different style of worship up close and personal will do more to help their understandings of what it means to worship in the heart language of our neighborhood than any other single thing we could do.
• After that we can get together to talk about what our strategy needs to be in terms of worship.
• I’ve got a week filled with meetings in prep for the missions project next week.
• Hope to be able to blog through that event..we’ll see!
• I’m going to go warm up a burger!  Peace!