Cultivating the vine

I have been attending The Vine Church in Braselton for the past 7 years.  I have loved worshiping under the leadership of David Walters, our teaching pastor, and Jared Strong, our worship pastor.  They are young, full of energy and full of the holy spirit.  I have watched the church grow under their care.   David announced last week that we would be adding a second campus to our church.  The building is located immediately adjacent to Flowery Branch High School on Spout Springs Road.  The two campuses will have similar services, but we will be adding a second teaching pastor that will share responsibilities with David at both locations.  David has encouraged us to pray for the people that will serve at the church in preparation for those that will meet Jesus there for the first time and to pray for those that already know him and will learn to love him more.  I am asking for your prayers for all that God has planned to do there.

A soldier’s prayer

I feel fortunate that I have not been directly impacted by the heartbreak of losing a loved one who is serving in the armed forces.  I  cannot imagine the pain that would bring.  If that were to happen, I hope that I could have some since that that person died doing what they loved and what they felt called to do.  But, I can only imagine that.  For those of you that have suffered that loss, I pray today that your heart would be healed from the sorrow of your loss and that your memories of him/her would be full of joy.  I found this soldier’s prayer online and it gave me a glimpse of something to hope for in each one that is currently in service.  Click here for the prayer.

SkyFall

In case you were hoping for another James Bond movie review, sorry for the fake-out.    Pew Research Center makes a living doing surveys of what is going on in churches.  They released some findings this week that the sky is falling for Christianity and reported an 8% decline over the last 7 years in people claiming to be Christians.  That certainly sounds like something for all of our churches to be worried about.  Seeing the growth at my church in Braselton and the growth of other churches around the country, the statistic surprised and concerned me.  I was happy to find this counter point by Ed Stetzer which was published in USA Today and sure hope that he knows what he is talking about.  In case you don’t have time to read the full article, his theory is that people who were raised in a Christian home that used to check the “Christian” box on surveys, are now checking the “None” box, indicating that they are not really practicing any religion.    The percentage of people going to church has actually remained fairly stable with the number of people identifying themselves as evangelicals increasing by 2.4 million people.  All of the survey questions pale in importance to the one question that matters the most: “What am I doing to become more like Jesus today?”

Gathering The Troops

For those of you that follow my blog at SpotOnTheLake, you know that our team loves the lake and loves our work.  With my son, Michael, working with me, it makes it that much harder to get our whole family together for some down time.  Last week, all of us made it down to Daytona for some time together without work (mostly).   Janet did an amazing job keeping the business thriving while we were gone.  The Atlantic offered us the opportunity to try surfing on real waves (very limited success) instead of on a wake behind a boat.    Of course there was plenty of fried seafood, books and some board games.  Most of all, it was just fun having everybody together with time to relax and no schedules.  Caroline didn’t make the photo shown.  She was probably up in the condo making sure that everything was perfect for us before making her way down to the beach.  I love that we have kids and grandkids that love being together.  I understand that is not a given these days.