Sorry for waiting so long to post. I have been exhausted, I took our staff out to eat for pastor appreciation month, and to be honest I really haven’t had the words to describe what God did today.

5 weeks ago we launched a series called INKED: Leaving Your Mark. To sum up the series, I cast vision to our people abot what it was going to take for us to take the next steps as a church to reach this community. God has blessed The Stone beyond measure but I felt we were at a dangerous place running 500. I think 500 is a dangerous place because it is the place where churches get comfortable and content. I shared this with our people and then I talked about 4 areas I felt we needed to improve in to position ourselves to reach this community better.

The areas I identified are going to cost us right at $100,000. To many churches that probably seems like chump change but to a church that was over 70% unchurched before attending here, that is a huge goal. We decided that we would ask for 2 month commitments from our people to give above and beyond their regular giving. Almost everyone I talked to said that we were trying to raise to much in to short amount of time. We were told since we were not raising money for tangible things like land or a building, it was even harder to do.

However, I along with our team felt God was telling us to do it. We basically broke every rule of fundraising. The “formula” simply didn’t fit our DNA at RSC. I stood up and laid it to our people and pulled no punches about what we need to do.

I had no idea what to expect.
I had no prior event to judge it by.

Today was commitment Sunday and we didn’t raise $100,000, we raised about $105,000 with more commitments coming in this week!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have never been more proud of our people. The money has nothing to do with it. I would have been proud of them if we raised $50,000. I am proud of our people because today they allowed God to stretch them like never before. I watched people who don’t have a dime, step out and trust God. I watched people who were unchurched prior to coming here, step out and give.

Watching our crowd step out today and take the Lord’s Supper and place their commitments in the basket is a day I will remember for the rest of my life.

Ridge Stone, I love being your pastor and watching your faith rocks my world!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 8:19 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.