We walked in the theater on a Sunday morning and the place had had graffiti all over the place from one of the “canton gangs.”  It was a freaking mess, but our people didn’t flinch and got it cleaned up before the service.

I remember it because it was this week!  Our volunteers are awesome!

BTW, what a joke!  A gang in Canton?  Here is the deal, I think that is so funny that if any of those “gangs” can read, then let them read this and show up on a Sunday and let me introduce them to the “Ridge Stone Gang.”  I promise one go around with our set-up/tear-down “gang” and they won’t be a gang for long.

I don’t think we have a gang problem in Canton.  I think we have a parenting problem.  We have some parents who need to knock some sense into their lazy, cocky, teenagers.

That during the last worship song after an AWESOME Sunday morning worship service that something at the bottom of the lighting truss LITERALLY caught on fire and shot about a foot flame up in the air.  Luckily we got it out pretty fast without to many people noticing.

Yep, I remember because it was today!

We showed up at the school and they had stripped the wax off the floors and laid down new wax and we couldn’t walk on it for a week BUT they forgot to tell us?  Again we ended up having church in the parking lot and it was HOT!!!!

Yep I remember that.

That it LITERALLY took us 6 months to get a video to work in a service?  I kid you not, we tried video every week including preview services and the first time it worked was in February, 6 months after we launched.

It had become a running joke in our church and when it finally worked, our people were so excited they gave us a standing O.

Yep, I remember that….

We wanted to rent an office and couldn’t afford ANYTHING?  We then found a office in downtown Canton that was on the second floor about another store.  From the outside it was awesome.  It had just been redone on the outside and had a very cool porch overlooking Main Street.

Once you walked in that all changed.  It was two rooms.  One was 80% of the building and the other was 20%.  It had no air, the windows were literally falling out, I mean literally falling out and we and we tacked them in with a nail.  The carpet was ripped to shreds.  It stunk to high heaven.  The smaller room had no carpet and it literally looked like someone use to kill people in there.  The guy before us was an aritist and he painted  in this room.  It was covered floor to ceiling in paint.  It had what we called a stripper pole right in the middle of the room and the floor as literally sinking in.

The bathroom was so scary that I can’t even talk about it.  You would bleach it and it still smelled like something was dead in there.

BUT it was ours and we were so proud of it!!!!

However we weren’t proud enough to allow people in it.  If we ever had a meeting we would meet people at the door and then go across the street to the coffee shop because we didn’t want anyone walking in there.

Head downtown and though we have been gone for two years you will still see the sign up because no one else is dumb enough to rent the office we called the “crack house.”

Yep, I remember tha….

We had a children’s pastor (Not Preston, he was doing youth) and he was talking about how his throat was sore and when Tadd asked him if he was sick?  He replied, “well, I started smoking again and it is taking a toil on my throat.”  Tadd then shocked called me in to the office and I asked him why he had started smoking and he said, “well this job has me stressed and I started drinking again and when I drink, I smoke.”

We fired him.

Yep, I remember that…

I have decided this is going to be the title of my first book. :)  Every now and then I am going to post a “remember the time” post here as I look back over some of the CRAZY stuff that has happened to us in starting The Stone.   So here is the first one:

Remember that time we had a preview service planned before launching and we showed up at the school with all the equipment, all the workers, and all kinds of people being invited and realized we didn’t have a key to get into the lunchroom?  It was a Saturday and we didn’t know anyones number so tried to go through the drop ceiling, we tried to take the doors off the hinges, we tried to break the lock an nothing worked.  So we had our first practice service in the parking lot and it was like a million degrees.  Yep, I remember that.