November 17 – “Revitalize, foster, adopt”

I got up extra-early yesterday.  It was the last day of the convention, but I really needed to work on the Bible study for home group.  I needed to finish that so I could proceed to the sermon prep for Sunday.  So … success for home group this week.  Great cliff hanger.

 

I beat Kel to the convention.  Guess I didn’t have quite as far to go as he did.  Took me all of ten minutes, including parking.  I went upstairs and grabbed a cup of coffee, then headed over to the meeting rooms for the breakout sessions.  I managed to reserve a few seats in the hottest seminar available for the morning.  This one was a session on churches helping other churches.  The three levels of assistance are: revitalization (guiding a church to use its own resources to reboot), fostering (providing external resources for a stated period of time to help a church get through a rough patch or get back on its feet), and adopting (actually welcoming another church into the family by making their campus an extension of the assisting church).  Pretty interesting stuff.  Especially the adoption thing.  I have seen it be pretty difficult to accomplish unless both sides understood up front what was happening.  Otherwise, there is bound to be some residual bitterness.  Of course, there may be some bitterness anyway.  It’s a tricky slope to operate on, but it can really be a helpful tool as well.

 

After the meeting we both headed home.  I had my day set aside for sermon prep and catching up on my usual Monday work stuff.  Chris had done her walk while I was gone.  We compared notes, as we usually do, on how far our respective phones had recorded us as going.  I managed to get right at two miles with a few flights of stairs.  Matched up pretty close to what I faced at the convention center.  She blew me out of the water, though.  She was over three miles with her six flights of stairs – the usual. 

 

1 Samuel 2:2 says, “There is no one holy like the Lord; there is no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God.”

 

Father, thank you for the assistance available to churches who need help all across our country.  Help them to reach out to the proper resources.  Amen.