The State Of Vintage

Speaker: Greg Sanders

Carrying The Vision Of God

At the beginning of Vintage, for the first seven years, I would do what I would call the State of Vintage address every January. The goal was to inspire where we were as a culture. Where have we been this last year? And where are we going? That was always the heart behind it. 

Then there’s this weird thing that happened to the globe, and we stopped doing it. So this year, I decided to bring it back. I want to share the Year in Review of what we did last year, where we’re at as a church, and where I see the Lord taking us.

Proverbs will say it this way: without vision, people cast off restraint. I want to do a micro-teaching out of that. The word “vision” here means divine guidance. I would love to submit that is the value, the priority, and the necessity of having the right perspective and the right outlook as a people.

Vision keeps our hearts and minds engaged with the purposes of our callings. How many know what we call two visions? Di vision. Division is rooted in having more than one vision. If we decide to have our perspective on where we should go and the Lord has His perspective on where we should go, we begin to live in division.

I would also submit that as a people who are under the authority of Heaven and have given our lives to Jesus, we handed over our willingness to choose our vision to Him and said, “Instead, we will take Your vision.” That means it’s incumbent upon us to hear from Heaven, hear His voice, have constant discipline in the secret place, and know what He has to say to us. It’s our responsibility as a church to figure out who He called us to be in the city we’re in. We are all responsible for both carrying and managing vision.

I had a Bible college professor at Portland Bible College who used to say it this way: “Vision lives and dies at the pressure point of implementation.” I raised my hand in class once and said, “So what you’re saying is, don’t tell me what you’re going to do. Show me what you did.” He’s said, “Yes.”

We can measure our vision by what it accomplishes.

Goals For Vintage

My goal for this house is to keep us focused on the vision the Lord’s called us to. 

It is three really simple things. First, to be a people who hears His voice is my greatest priority for you–that each of us will be found in the secret place knowing how to hear His voice. 

If you think you can’t hear from the Lord, that’s a lie. You need to divest yourself from that lie because it’s rooted in hell. The scriptures say, “My sheep hear My voice.” It may be that you don’t know how to hear God’s voice, or you haven’t learned to yet–those are fair statements. To say, “I can’t” is sin because you’re directly countering something Jesus said it’s possible.

To be people who hear His voice and carry His presence means we walk in alignment with what’s in His heart so His presence rests upon us. There are three things that He’s called us to do and be in this city. Is it unique to us? I don’t believe so. My hope and prayer is that every church feels those three things are a deep priority. I’m not responsible for those houses. I’m responsible for this one. 

The Year In Review

I want to share an overview of what our vision accomplished, where I see us now, and how we can get better to accomplish the next thing He has for us. Are you ready? All right, here we go. 

The first thing I want to address is what I would call my observations. First and foremost, this is my assessment of where we are as a culture. I want to talk about things we did last year that were part of creating a climate of encounter. What do I mean by that? Creating a place for people to connect with the presence of God. So there’s a bunch of things.

It’s important for us as a family to be able to look around and go, wow, we did a great job. We did a lot. And we’re all part of it. I want to congratulate you for what you did. All of you are part of it. Rightfully so. 

I want to talk through our achievements. The first one is baptisms. We just saw some today, wasn’t that fun? In 2023, we saw 77 people baptized. I would say if January holds up, we’re on pace for a whole lot more. However, in my lifetime before this, I don’t know if I had seen 77 people baptized in total. Maybe over 20 years, that was a normal number.

What’s that telling me? That means people are coming into this house because we’re creating a climate where it’s becoming easier and easier and easier for people to decide to say, “I want to give my life to Jesus.” That’s incredible. Every single one of those people made a public declaration.

In 2023, we launched what I would call a prayer initiative. We made an internal decision–maybe a determination is a better statement–to return to our roots and begin to pray. Jesus makes a statement that says, “My house would be called a House of Prayer.” I don’t think it was a suggestion. Yet, what I see in the church at large is that prayer is the most talked about and least practiced thing.

So, we made a concerted effort to say that throughout our history, we’ve always been intentional with prayer. We’ve let growth, we’ve let busyness, we’ve let the chaos of being in buildings and being mobile–we let all that somewhat erode this conviction, but we’re going back at it. So we began to do that in a few different ways. 

We started joining the Colorado House of Prayer. We call it CHOP because the Colorado House of Prayer is a long thing to say all the time. CHOP is a city-wide prayer movement. It’s a building in the center of the city that has one agenda, and that agenda is to get the church together to pray. I could have said, “That’s a cool thing. Good for you. We’re going to pray here.” I just think it’s wrong not to bless what’s awesome in the city. So we chose to be part of that; we chose to partner with them every third Wednesday night of the month to pray.

We’ve had other prayer gatherings going on throughout the week. At CHOP, we begin to reignite our Wednesday night family prayer gathering at 6:30. I want you to understand that I intentionally make those prayer gatherings boring and dry. I don’t want you to come and be told exactly what to pray. I want you to learn how to pray. When Jesus says, “My house will be called a house of prayer,” the only way you can be a believer who doesn’t pray is to say, “I don’t live in His house,” which is a bad decision because the book of Corinthians says you are His house. I want to be in a house where He goes, thank you for taking what I said seriously. 

We also began to invest in Revival Nights. We take the first Wednesday out of every month to just go before the Lord and worship. All of these are things we developed and implemented in 2023. 

We chose the Worship Ministry, we sat down with them and said, “We want to dig deeper and invest. We want to push into His presence.” Because my dream and our dream as a house is to see a unified sound in our region. I love pulling songs from other cultures. I love that we use songs from Bethel, Hillsong, Elevation, and Upper Room. But I want to see what the language of this region is and what the Lord wants to release through this area.

We sang one of those this morning, The Fear of the Lord. There’s just something on it that’s different because it’s our language back to the King. Our worship team debuted three brand new songs for the house. Fear of the Lord, Hymn of Thanksgiving, and Come Like a Cloud. 

That might not seem like a big deal to all of you who have never tried to write a worship song. It’s really hard. It’s incredible. I coined it the Worship Matters Initiative. Our worship leaders came to me, Greg Froehle, our Worship Pastor, and Casey, one of the worship pastors, and said, “We need to see live worship in all of our gatherings because it’s weird that we have rad worship on a Sunday, and then programmed canned worship somewhere else.”

We’re going to start building and investing and creating teams everywhere. This last year, they implemented live, real, authentic worship in every one of our gatherings. That is not a small feat. The whole reason we did that was so that people could have the opportunity to connect with the Lord.

I don’t think there’s an easier place in the world to connect with the Lord than in worship. I would take a Holy Spirit-inspired, anointed worship session over anything in the world. For me, it is the place I come back to when I’ve had the worst time. 

I’ll give you a tell. If you want to know how I had a tough week, you’ll watch me pace faster. You’ll hear me yell louder. Because I made a decision a long time ago that worship was going to be my happy place, and it was going to be my secret place. It was going to be my crutch. It was going to be the place that I would run to when it got tough. The Lord has never failed me in that. Every time I come to Him and just pour myself out, I leave feeling filled up. How does that work? How do you expand yourself and fill back up? Only He can do that.

We started investing in community worship events. Our Worship Team started going over to CHOP and doing worship sessions for the city. People could come in and pray and they’re just there to play to minister before the Lord. All of these things help to create a climate for the presence of God.

I saw us grow in discipleship this last year in incredible ways. We came into this year trying to work through how we help people grow in Jesus. That’s a big question. It’s great to bring them in and have an amazing worship session and teach the scriptures, but how are they going to learn how to follow Him?

Six classes were developed by Pastor Dustin: First Things, Vintage Theology, Life in the Scriptures, Healing and Prophetic Training, Baptism in the Holy Spirit, and Life in the Spirit. When I look at that, I think, “You could get a legitimate first-year Bible college training just with what we offer here at Vintage.” That’s incredible. If you’re here and you’re like, “I need to grow in the Lord. I don’t know stuff,” that is where you need to go. These are incredible classes that were developed and written in this house. I’m super proud of that. You can just go buy a curriculum somewhere, but my answer was, “No. That’s gross. We’re going to figure it out for us.” So this house, this family, developed an incredible curriculum for that. 

One of my favorite things about leading is being able to identify talent, identify gifts, identify things, and the Holy Spirit’s whispering. This year, I felt like the Lord whispered to me that it was time to bring some people into new places, gifting-wise. 

We released six new people into pastoral ministry this year. We doubled our Pastoral Team. We found people in the church that were already doing the work of ministry. They were team leads and were already helping in different places. We just invited them in and said, “Hey, we already see you pastoring people. Will you join us?”

You saw Casey, she led us in worship today. Casey joined our worship ministry as one of the worship pastors. 

Megan lives behind the scenes and is the Pastor of Operations. What she does is make sure this place ticks. She works with Daniel Sokolowski, our Executive Pastor for Business Development, and she just helps execute this house. 

Matt Doherty. So if you’ve met Matt, he’s not just Matt from the Connect TV. Matt pastors our teams and our groups. Matt’s goal is to help you get connected and find life here at Vintage. 

Kelly, some of you don’t even know who that is. Let me tell you who that is. Kelly pastors are children, and if you’ve met Kelly, she is one of the most passionate, serious believers. And I love that our kids have a theologian pastoring them.

My wife, Belinda, joined our team this year. She stepped into an Executive Pastor role, and she works with the Womens Ministry. It’s been fun to watch that growth. 

Emily Poronto. Some of you know Emily. Emily pastors our youth. She’s the team lead. That is stuff that we’re creating opportunity for and bringing people into a place where they can help create that culture.

I love it. I love what I see. 

So there are some places of ministry growth and expansion areas where I see a new dramatic increase. These are places people are getting ministered to that are all new this year. That’s what I want to express to you–these are things that didn’t exist in 2022.

Vintage Care Ministry, pastoral care, and counseling therapy, was something that was in my heart in 2015. I had a dream that we could pull together a bunch of people who knew how to help people get healthy. We launched that in the fourth quarter of 2023. So now we have counseling and care services to help people get healthy. I love it. 

DTS. How many are familiar with what DTS is? For several years, we’ve had a ministry called DTS,which has been working with LCDC, with guys coming out of correctional systems to help disciple them, love on them, feed them, grow them. It’s been amazing.

But we had a gap. We had what we felt was an absolute hole in the system. We needed to develop the same type of ministry for women. So, this year, we launched an entirely new aspect of DTS. So now, they are coming together two Sunday nights a month to minister to over 35 ladies and help them learn how to follow Jesus.

Our youth and kids ministry grew 49.5% last year. If you are a small business owner, you understand that growth requires new systems and scale. And if you’re cheering for that growth, you should serve on that team.

In conjunction with that, as if it wasn’t enough, the Children’s Ministry Team decided we needed to help parents out more. So, they launched a new ministry called Vintage Family Care. The goal of that is to help parents become better parents and make sure the kids and parents stay more connected and integrated. We did our first parenting seminar last year.

We saw a gap in Young Adults Ministry, which is that 18 to 30-ish range where it’s kind of an odd season in life. Our team looked at it when we needed to love on this crew, and they launched the Young Adults Ministry. I love to see a place for the younger adults who are in that season to be able to connect with community groups. 

We launched 24 community groups last year. Then. our men’s and women’s Bible studies. At first, I was like, “I don’t know.” Then we launched it. 140 women showed up to study the Scriptures. We did that twice. For men, we saw 65 to 70 guys, two different types, get together just to grow and study the Scriptures. And out of that spawned all these cool guys doing this campfire thing, bonfires where they get together and just hang out. And they play guitar. And I don’t know what they drink. I assume it’s water, but they hang out and just talk about Jesus.

Then we have this incredible ministry that I watched develop, and it developed a little earlier than 2023. Once a month, there’s a group of people that get together. They’re aimed at ages 55 and older, called Caleb Culture. Randy and Judy Morowsky get together and love on people like crazy. They sing, they worship, they teach all this stuff. I look around. I’m like, “This is kind of a busy church, you guys are doing it.”

Numbers And Metrics

So let me give you some numbers and metrics of this last year because that’s a privilege to do. We built a home. We didn’t build a home because we’re like, we need a church. We built the home we felt like the Lord said, build a home. I am a business guy. I run a business. The first rule of business is to keep your overhead low and your profits high. Because of that, I love portable church.

Portable church is easy. It’s cheap. You have an instant community builder. But we felt like the Lord said, you need to put down roots. So we began to invest in building this house. In 2023, we were able to close out the building of this building, for which we invested $220,000 to close out construction costs.

Then we invested another $128,000 to furnish it, going from 10,000 square feet to 31,000 square feet, a little bit more footprint. We now have a place that’s fitted out and ready. I don’t know about you, but I bring a lot of pastors through this place because they’ll come and visit. The number one comment I get is, “When did you guys move in here?” I’m like, “We moved here like 17 months ago.” They’re like, “It looks spotless.” I’m like, “Yeah, we have a really good team.”

Missions, giving global, and local outreach. Pastor Daniel Sokolowski, who works as the Executive Pastor of Business Development, came to me at the beginning of the year. He said, “I’m embarrassed. I don’t think we give enough to missions.”

I know the right answer, as a Senior Pastor. Yes. But what happened in my mind was, “Where am I going to come up with that?” He’s like, “Can you just bless me to work on giving more?” “Yes, let’s give more.” 

In 2022, we gave $111,000 to global missions. It’s a big number. In 2023, we gave $195,000 to global generosity.

Talking about how you gave, here’s the way I measure it. In 2022, we had 500 givers. I don’t know who gives, and I don’t know how much you give, because I don’t care. My job is to lead this house, not to ever be partial. I keep that off my lens. I make somebody else wrestle with that. So I never know. 

I’ll ask, and Daniel will give me numbers and say, “Here’s where we’re at.” One of the things that I saw that I was most excited about was that we went from 500 donors in 2022 to 590 donors in 2023. That means 18% more people decided they wanted to invest in the Kingdom. I love that. I think it’s a huge thing. 

Engagement on teams: we saw 530 people sign up and engage in the Planning Center to be part of a team. In the fourth quarter of 2023, we saw an average of 217 people serve in a month. Now, if you’re a business person, there should be a delta happening in your head instantly going, wait 530, 217, where’s the other 313 people? We’re going to talk about that.

Our attendance, this is the one that blew me out of the water. We grew 34.2% in 2023. We went from 627 people a weekend and average attendance to 841 a weekend and average attendance. 

Looking To The Future

I sat down with the Lord and asked Him, “Where are we to go this year?” I felt like He gave me a really simple answer. He said, this is a time for growth for Vintage, stay the course, and be consistent. Like okay, that was His word to me. I said, “What am I supposed to share with the family?” He said, this is what I want you to share. This is the time to establish My purpose in your region. The enemy has been at work in the church shifting her around. It is a smokescreen intended to render her attraction less call for rootedness and expansion.

So we’re going to stay the course, continue our pursuit of His presence, continue our diligence in the scriptures, stay committed to prayer, but be prepared for expansion. He adds to the church, not us. We don’t grow the church. He does. But we must be prepared for what’s in His heart.

There are some places that I want to see us expand and grow. These are the ones that are on my heart. 

I want to see a neighborhood prayer grid begin in 2024, where we will start tackling the city. To prayer walk, to take claim of the city, to walk the streets, to begin to pray the Kingdom over these places. So we have to develop this.

I want to see us release songs from this house, to release a set of songs that say, this is what the Lord is doing in Vintage. So I’ve tasked the team to keep writing so we can put the finances together to produce a record and release this.

Look around. We’re going to have to add a gathering. We have to expand our gatherings. I have been adamantly opposed to Saturday nights my entire life. I’ll be honest, I feel like the Lord’s changing my perspective. I’m not very excited about it. But I want to be honest and faithful. I’ve looked around our parking lot. We always knew this would be our biggest challenge. The church has grown. While we could say well, “Everybody come to the 8:30,” I don’t see changing our Sunday culture being a successful way to move forward as a family.

I don’t think it’s time for us to plant another campus yet. My goal and my dream is to take some of the pastors on this team and send them out someday. It’s a good deal God’s called you to do. But that’s a ways off.

I want to see us increase our missional giving. I’d like to see our missional number more like $250,000 a year we give to missions. 

How We Can Accomplish Our Goals

What do we have to do to accomplish this? There are a few things I’m going to challenge us to step into. Number one, one of the things we didn’t do, which drives me crazy, is start tracking miracles. We have to start tracking the miraculous of what the Lord is doing so

that the generations to come can look back and see what the Lord did in our day and in our time. 

We’ve been poor at this. All of us know there’s been a lot of stuff happening. We’re kind of known as the weird Holy Spirit church around here. I love that, for the record. I call it the Circus of Heaven. It’s one of my favorite things in the world.

But we have to start tracking it, which means all of us together have to start paying attention. I don’t even care if you blow up my email saying, “I heard about somebody getting healed of a bug.” I don’t care. We have to track it. But I’m putting it on all of us. I don’t want to just say, “Hey, Megan, track this,” because that’s not fair to her. I want to say to all of us, let’s capture what the Lord’s doing.

I want to see us increase our team’s engagement. My goal for 2024 is that every person in this house serves one gathering a month. What’s the adage? Many hands make light work. We have 530 people in our team system, but only 217 of those, on average, are serving per month, which means we’re having a bunch of people serve 2, 3, 4, and 5 gatherings a month. Those of you who are doing that, you’re incredible. You rock. We love you. But it shouldn’t be that way.

It should be said that we all participate together; every single one of us believes that we have a unique identity and imprint, and the Lord wants to do something with us, so we grab onto a team, and we serve one gathering a month. If you say, “I can’t do that,” does his face look like it believes you? I’m asking you to commit to serving one gathering a month. We have great systems. We have great teams. They can coach and train you.

I want us to increase our prayer engagement. When Jesus said, “My house will be called a house of prayer,” I think He meant it, and I think He meant it for all of us. 

We have a 7:30 AM prayer gathering on Sunday. We have a 6:30 PM prayer gathering on Wednesday. Pick one of those and be faithful come and pray every week. You’re like, “I don’t know how to pray.” Knowing how to pray is how you learn how to pray; you pray.

I worked hard to make our Wednesday nights tough. You have to walk in and pray. There’s not a whole lot of wow factor and entertainment. You’re like, “You’re advertising it that way?” Yes. Because I want you to understand, it’s intentional. Jesus looks at the 12 who’d been following Him through the world and says, can you pray with me? They go to pray, last about 10 minutes, and then fall asleep.

He looks at them. He says, seriously. You can’t give me an hour? I think that word still applies.

It will be good for you. It’ll be good for this region. It’ll be good for this house. Because the prayers of the saints are sweet-smelling incense. Revelation will teach us that the prayers of the saints rise to Heaven like incense, and there’s an angelic realm that will collect those prayers and put them into bowls. When those prayers fill up the bowls, the bowls tip, and when the bowls tip, the activity of Heaven hits the earth, and we see signs and wonders released on Earth. You can play a part in that just by showing up to pray.

I want to invite us to increase our faithfulness with regular and crazy generosity. I read a statistic this year that I had never read before. Most churches see 25% of their yearly income in December because everybody does year-end giving. That’s a cool thing, I suppose, but I think it’s lame.

Here’s why. Psalms will teach that there is a supernatural blessing in unity. There is a place of commanded blessing where brothers dwell in unity. I have a belief that I cannot prove, and I’m begging us to help me prove it. I have a belief that there’s a supernatural authority when the people of God collectively step into generosity when all of us do it. You’re like, I don’t think it matters. Consider it in reverse. 

We see this story in Joshua where one guy commits sin, and he grabs on to something he was told not to grab onto. The Lord says, don’t take that. He took it and brought it to his camp. In his mind, he was just one guy in three to five million people. Nobody would know the difference, right? The Lord held Israel back from success until they dealt with the one guy. That tells me that He cares about all of us being united in a collective journey.

What do I mean by that? My hope and my goal is to see us all step into generosity. We had a great year last year, we saw $2.3 million come in. That’s an incredible number. We grew 34.2% in attendance.

The problem is the year before we saw $2.3 M and a little more come in. So we went down about six-tenths of 1%. I think that that was an incredibly gifted year. I love it. I love that we saw money come in. I love that. I don’t care about the number. Here’s why. I feel like the Lord revealed to me the widow’s story in a way I’d never seen last week, and I’d love to share that with you.

She brings her gift, and the disciples criticize her gift because it’s so small. It’s like a penny in the offering. Jesus looks at them and says, don’t you dare. It’s the heart of the gift that matters more than the number. 

I had a guy come to my last gathering. He’s like, “Dude, you’ve got to tell my story, just don’t share my name.”

He said, “I grew up dirt poor. I grew up so poor I put myself through Catholic school with a newspaper route. I paid for my education as a kid. I got married to this crazy believer who thought we should tithe. My answer was not a chance. An extra six years into marriage and she finally convinces me to just start with 1%.” Because the tithe scripturally is 10%.

He’s like, “So I started with 1%. All of a sudden, I started watching our whole world shift fiscally.”

He’s saying, “So the next year, I thought I’d try 2%, and I slowly grew to where 10% was my standard. I cannot tell you how we made it. But every time we faced a problem, somehow, we made it through. I am a firm believer to this day that the blessing of the Lord is on His system economically.”

Growing up, I’ve never loved talking about money because I grew up Pentecostal, and I think I still have PTSD. But Belinda and I made a decision early in marriage that we would always be faithful to the tithe. We’d always be faithful to offer, and we decided, “Lord, our finances are Yours.”

It was really scary because I’m a business guy at heart, business is about profit. And the more you have, the better you are. The less you have, the worse you are. It’s a really simple economic scale. In truth, my wife probably led us into that type of faithfulness more than I did. She just grew up in a home where her dad was like, “Nope, this what we do.” I used to see the tithe checks at their house, and he would take it to church and drop it in. He was just super faithful with it.

I have watched The Lord bless us so insanely,

I promise it’s the only place in scripture, church, where He says, I double-dog, dare you. It says, test me. Watch what I want to do. So I’m asking us, as a family, to step into faithful generosity in 2024. I don’t care what the number is. I don’t care what the percentage is. That’s between you and Him. Giving is a sacrament. It’s an act of worship. I’m just asking you to step into the economy of Heaven. I believe if we all do that faithfully, this house will always have more than enough.

I’m asking you to commit this year to spending time alone with Jesus every day. “My sheep hear My voice.” I get it. I know life’s busy. There are a lot of days where I’ll skip a day or miss a day because life gets busy. I’ll come back and have simply learned how to say, “Hey, I’m sorry, I missed a couple of days.” My favorite thing He ever said to me is, I’m not insecure. I don’t find my value in how often you’re with Me. I was like, snap, that was good.

But you know what I find every time I’m with Him? I find value. I hear His voice, which changes my life. I promise you, next time you fight with your wife, go sit with the Lord. Next time you face something in business that you don’t know how to solve, go sit with the Lord. Next time somebody irritates you, and you want to punch him in the face, go sit with the Lord. Watch what He has to say. Watch how intimate He wants to be.

The last thing I would request as we enter a season of growth this year is this. Would you commit with me to invite the people you know who need Jesus into this house? To say, “God is doing something cool at my church. Do you want to come with me?” If they say, “Why? Do you think I need church?” Tell them yes! 

Invite them here, and here’s my promise. We will turn ourselves inside out to create an atmosphere where Heaven invades Earth, so when they walk in, you don’t have to explain it. They just feel it. They’ll stand here and go, I don’t know what’s going on. But I need this in my life. We’ll see that baptism tank full of people who have made a decision. 

Final Thoughts And Benediction

I want to wrap this up with this. I think Vintage is in the best place I’ve ever seen her. I’m so proud of you. I’m so proud of us. I love what Jesus is doing here. I’m incredibly excited about where we’re going. Please take these challenges to heart. Let’s be the people He’s calling us to be. I want us to let eternity be the witness of what we did in our day in our time.

There was a guy I grew up with named Linfield Crowder. He was an evangelist and a friend of my grandfather’s. And here’s how crazy Pentecostal I grew up. Linfield Crowder would come join us in worship and the pastors all sat on the stage. During worship, he played a saw.

So he would take a saw with a bow and play it like a theremin. It’s an incredible art form, I just didn’t know how backward I grew up until I tried to explain that to somebody. I grew up in everything short of snake handling.

But he used to say this phrase, “Eternity, eternity, where are you going to spend eternity? What will you do with Jesus?” Church, we have a standard in front of us that the Lord is set. Eternity will be the witness to how we respond.

I want to stand before Him and say, “I’m so proud of you. I’m so proud of those around you.” 

Would you stand with me, please? I want to invite our Prayer Teams up. If you’re here today and you’re like, wow, a lot was going on. I got a lot. I need some prayer. We have teams here. They want to pray with you. They’d love to help you. It’s a privilege.

In the West Lobby, we’ve got Bibles and Bible study signups for the men’s and women’s groups. So please catch those. If you’re here and you’re new, and I see a lot of faces I don’t recognize, so some of you are new, or else I’m new. I can’t figure it out.

Pastor Matt’s over here at the Connect TV. I’d love it if you just give him five minutes to walk you through the next steps to get connected and get involved. If you’re here and you’re like, “Hey, I put my name in the hat on a team, and I’m one of those people that needs to jump in,” Pastor Matt would love to talk to you guys as well.

Give boxes are in the back. I want you to pray about where you’re at with giving. I don’t ever want somebody to give out of emotion, that sin. It is an act of worship that needs to be done right before God. I trust Jesus in this process.

Pastor Gary says this to me all the time. He says, “Ddude, I don’t think people understand how unique and rare what’s happening is.” It’s pretty fun. But unless the Lord builds a house, everything we do is in vain.

So let’s let Him build this house. Pray with me, please. 

Jesus, we love you. We honor you. What a good day in Your house. Would Your face shine upon us as we consider the things You’ve put in front of us? We take them to heart, we take them seriously. But more than anything, we’re thinking about that day down the line when we stand before You and get to hear You say, ‘Good job.’ That eternity would stand as the witness of how we lived our days. We love You, we honor You, and may your face shine upon us, in Jesus’ name. Amen.