Summer Recap and Fall Preview

The summer is usually a season that churches, whether large or small, experience a lull—both a lull in attendance and a lull in momentum.  By God’s grace, the summer was a time of growth in both numbers and momentum for Providence.  We certainly missed many of our families and students, but we had new visitors joining us for worship every week which has allowed us to nearly double our Sunday gathering since the time we launched in November.

Growing slowly and steadily has allowed us to assimilate new folks into rich gospel community that continues to encourage and challenge our family in knowledge and worship of Jesus.  Know this: through the gathering of the people of Providence on Sundays and through their being sent out throughout the week, the gospel of Christ is moving in Austin. 

Next week we are beginning an eight week study called The Gospel-Centered Life.  Because we have so many new people who are either brand new believers or not Christians at all, we want to spend some time defining and applying the gospel.  At Providence, we like to say that the gospel isn’t just the entry point to the Christian life, but it is all of the Christian life.  This paradigm is new for many people, so we’re excited to begin exploring how we are far worse than we think we are, and yet how God loves us much more than we think he does. We’ll preach through this content on Sundays, and then meet in smaller groups all over town throughout the week to go in greater depth.  We’re really expectant for the next eight weeks for God to continue to grow his people and for non-Christians to come to faith in Christ.

As for a personal Sherman update:

I (Nathan) spend the majority of my time meeting with and following up with new people who show up on Sundays—trying to get to know them as well as connecting them with others at Providence.  I’m also meeting regularly with a couple of students as well as Campus Crusade staffers as we encourage each other out of sin and into the light of the gospel.  One of the highlights of my week is meeting with two guys who are my age and for the first time in their lives are committed to a church body and thinking about spiritual things.  We’re getting to walk through the Bible together and talk about how God has reconciled us to himself in Jesus which leads to the life that for which we were created.

I’m also just getting to spend a lot of time alongside our pastors, which has been so great for me to learn how to be a better pastor, husband, and dad. And in any other spare time, I’m usually working on resources for our people, most notably a family devotional for the coming Advent season.  I’ll make sure all of you have access to that when it’s finished.

Marcie is still getting to volunteer once a week at the South Austin Pregnancy Center where she meets with and counsels pregnant women whose pregnancies are often unexpected and unwanted. She is also in her second week of leading a Abortion Recovery class for women who are still experiencing the intense emotional and spiritual trauma of a recent or decades-old abortion.  Needless to say, Marcie is engaging in some pretty intense and gritty ministry but also seeing the richness of God’s goodness and mercy in these women’s lives.

Please pray for these next eight weeks as we go through the Gospel-Centered Life.  I think it could be transformative for many as people will hopefully think about God’s holiness, our sin, and the work of Christ in new ways.  We’re hopeful that these small groups will be especially transparent with each other, which might be initially uncomfortable for people who haven’t experienced that before.  So pray that God would make much of himself by the humbling of his people and through their worship of Christ.

Summer Update

It has been just over a year since we moved to Austin and seven months since Providence Church launched. We have learned so much in the last year about God and his transforming Gospel, Christ and his transforming Church, and the Spirit and his transforming nature. We couldn’t be more content than where we are now, in a place of community and growth that is daily life-giving and refreshing. While at the same time, we couldn’t be more challenged in this season of learning and preparation for whatever it is that will come next for us.

So here’s a quick recap of what’s been going since our last update. First of all, the church is growing. Both in numbers and maturity. We were expecting to lose a good deal of momentum and feel quite small this summer with most of our students and Campus Crusade staffers gone for the summer, but we seemingly haven’t missed a beat. There have been new people every week at our Sunday gathering—either by way of side-door relationships just by people in Austin who are starting to hear about us. In the Spring, we spent 13 weeks teaching through the book of Luke, looking at characteristics of a disciple of Jesus. This was an important series for us because we want to be a people and a church who have first-hand knowledge of Jesus—not just some facts about him. After that, we spent five weeks looking at the nature and role of the oft-ignored third member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. I preached the concluding sermon in this series on May 29 (The Cosmic Spirit), if you would like to hear that audio. And now we are two weeks into the book of Deuteronomy, or How does the covenant people of God live in a fallen world?

One of the answers to that theme question for Deuteronomy is one that our family is learning here in Austin. And that is that the covenant people of God should pursue justice for the oppressed while loving the unloved. Marcie is volunteering once, and sometimes twice, a week at the South Austin Pregnancy Center, where she is performing sonograms, providing physical needs for expecting and current mothers (clothes, diapers, cribs, etc.), and then widely loving these often isolated and scared women through the Gospel of Christ. These times are often the highlight of her , and she has already ministered to countless women.

A small group of us from Providence has also adopted a family of refugees from Burma through the Refugee Services of Texas. This family of six belongs to the Karen ethnic people group which are persecuted in Burma, and has been living in a refugee camp in Thailand for the past 12 years. They are Christians (the spiritual heritage of Adoniram Judson, whom they still celebrate), and couldn’t be more joyful and excited to be in America—the first country that has ever welcomed and wanted them. We furnished their apartment, picked them up at the airport, and then have just been hanging out with them while helping them shop for groceries and learn bus routes. There has never been a clearer reminder to us that, as Christians, we are all sojourners—exiles longing for a better country (Hebrews 11).

On top of all of this we are still pursuing Gospel Content, Gospel Community, and Gospel Cause (explained here) by living life together in encouragement toward each other and mission toward the city. I am leading a small group of men this summer through the Sermon on the Mount, including a UT student who is Buddhist and before three weeks ago had never read a word in the Bible. An exciting time. And Marcie has been meeting with and learning from the other pastor’s wives as they talk about the excitement and hardships of life in ministry.

Lastly, a quick family update: Caleb just celebrated his first birthday (May 21), which is really hard to believe. And Owen (now two and half) has started going to pre-school twice a week for a couple of hours, which he and his mother both very much enjoy. They’re just growing up so fast! I need a moment…I’m all verklempt…..OK, I’m back. There are so many young families at Providence and in our neighborhood that we appreciate and enjoy so much as both boys have made a bunch of friends.


Thank you all for your prayer and support for our family and Providence Church. We would definitely appreciate you to continue to pray for We hope that you will be in continual prayer for Providence as a whole, that is:

1. The lives and families of the church leadership.
2. Growth in numbers so that our staff may be internally and self-funded.
3. That the hearts and minds of our people may be daily transformed by the Gospel moved outward in mission.

But also for our family personally:

1. That as Marcie and I approach our fifth anniversary, we might be more in love and united as one flesh by our sixth anniversary.
2. That Owen and Caleb might come to faith in Christ Jesus as their reconciliation and substitute because of their great rebellion against the High King.
3. That God would move toward people through the relationships that we are making with both Christians and non-Christians alike.

Providence Update

Providence is quickly approaching our fourth month of existence, and God has done more than we could have ever imagined in such a short amount of time. On top of our churchly duties, Marcie has been very much enjoying volunteering weekly at the South Austin Pregnancy Center counseling young women and providing for their physical needs. And Nathan is helping a couple of Campus Crusade staffers with ministry and discipleship to UT athletes.

Our Sunday gathering is growing quickly with an influx of UT students as well as friends, co-workers, and neighbors of our members. As we continually tell people in our church and those who are interested in our church, Providence exists to glorify God through the centrality of the Gospel in all things. This is especially true in the way that we approach Gospel Content, Gospel Community, and Gospel Cause.

Gospel Content is simply that God is saving sinners and making His Kingdom made known on earth. We want to be learners by knowing and understanding the Gospel through the Bible. By Gospel Community, we mean living life together and experiencing transformation, encouragement and accountability. Our Gospel Cause is trying to be obedient in mission toward the city by loving our neighbor and seeking to redeem culture, vocation, families, etc.

Often our tendency can be to emphasize one of these to the neglect of the others, so we are trying to be very mindful and intentional to embrace the fullness of the Gospel as all three. We have created three smaller groups within our church which we are calling Gospel Communities to try to implement and all three of these aspects of the Gospel. Each Gospel Community has 25-30 people who meet monthly for a time of fellowship, encouragement, and prayer (Community). Within those larger groups, we also have smaller groups of 3-4 people which meet weekly to read the Bible or a study together (Content). Then as larger Gospel Communities we are trying to do mission together (Cause). That may look like serving or volunteering somewhere together, but more often is just inviting others from our Gospel Communities into the relationships we already have. So for instance when we have a neighborhood firepit at our house or go to the park after work, we invite several people from our Gospel Community into our mission and vice versa.

We are learning and growing so much daily and thank God that, through your support and prayer for Providence, we are here. Also, we finally have our website up and running which you can find here.

Launch!

Yesterday (Nov. 14) at 4 PM, Providence Church in Austin was officially launched – a day many people have prayed, planned, and prepared for for well over a year. As our pastor Will explained yesterday, we’ve come to think of our core phase as pregnancy—expectation, excitement, preparation, as well as some pain and discomfort. Well the core phase is over, and yesterday the baby was born. And if the metaphor holds its form, parenthood is the most rewarding but also the most difficult thing in which one can partake. There were many new faces, as many people who our core launch team have gotten to know over the semester were also waiting for Sunday as the day they were officially invited into Providence. We couldn’t be more excited for these new people, our existing core team, and the many whom God will bring, but this is where the real work will begin.

Will started a sermon series from Philippians yesterday and proposed that Paul’s main theme throughout the letter is that the Church exists for mission and not comfort. If this is true, then the people of Austin—including our family—will continue to need the Spirit of God to call us out of our selfishness, autonomy, and lives of comfort, and instead into His mission to reconcile sinners to Himself and to each other through the God-man Jesus Christ. We are encouraging our people to read Philippians 30 times before the end of the year that God might awaken in us the joy with which Paul wrote from prison as he partnered with the Philippians in the advance of the Gospel. If you don’t have a plan for reading Scripture through the end of the year, I would invite you to join with us.

At least for a couple of months, we will be gathering on Sundays at St. Luke United Methodist Church. They are a small congregation who do not use their building on Sunday afternoon/evening, and we hope that we will be able to bless their church as much as they are already blessing us. As for my personal responsibilities on Sunday, I have been put in charge of Children’s Ministry which was not a class that I took in Seminary, so needless to say that I am preparing and organizing somewhat on the fly but not without the counsel of many knowledgeable and expert leaders.

We hope that you will be in continual prayer for Providence as a whole, that is:

1. The lives and families of the church leadership.
2. Wisdom in building necessary church infrastructure (selecting elders and deacons, children’s ministry, etc.)
3. The hearts and minds of our people that they may be daily transformed by the Gospel and conformed into the image of Christ.

But also for our family personally:

1. That as Marcie and I approach our fourth anniversary, we might be more in love and united as one flesh by our fifth anniversary.
2. That Owen and Caleb might come to faith in Christ Jesus as their reconciliation and substitute because of their great rebellion against the High King.
3. That God would move toward people through the relationships that we are making with both Christians and non-Christians alike.

OUR CORE LAUNCH TEAM (click to enlarge)

Providence Church

We have a church name! Providence Church in Austin.

As we’ve told many of you, we didn’t want our people to think of church as name and a weekly meeting, but rather a people who do life together as we live out the gospel and then invite people into that gospel. For that reason, we weren’t hard-pressed about making a decision for our name before beginning the core-phase, but we were also aware that we need a name, and a name says a lot about a church, so we needed to not take that decision lightly. We liked Providence for a lot of different reasons, but mainly because we just feel a unique sense of calling that God has providentially called this group of people together. As Will talked about in our Commissioning Service, if we had planted this church a year ago or a year from now, most of us would not have been able to be a part of it—our family especially feels this as a year ago we would have still been in seminary and a year from now we would probably already be committed somewhere else at a different church. This sense of calling gives everything that we are doing a greater and deeper sense of purpose while simultaneously giving us humility—that despite our weaknesses and inabilities, God has nevertheless chosen to use us to advance His Kingdom.

We are a little over halfway through our core-phase as we are planning our official launch in early November. In our weekly meetings and small groups we have been talking about different lenses through which to think about and view the gospel. In each lens we are talking about the implications for Gospel (how God has moved toward us and redeemed us), Community (how the gospel affects our human relationships), and Mission (how the Gospel propels us out).

The first lens was Creation, Fall, Redemption, or the macro-level story of how God created all things and is now redeeming all things. As a church we want to be a part of God’s mission to renew all things including our individual hearts, our families, our leisure activities, our culture, and Austin.

The second lens we just finished talking about was this Cross Chart, which is a micro-level look at how God is redeeming us individually. As our knowledge of God’s holiness and our own sin grows, our need of and the worship of the work of Christ on the Cross grows. Because of this we need the gospel just as much today—if not more—than the day were brought to faith in Christ.


And now we are talking about Sonship, which is Paul’s language for describing us as adopted sons and daughters into God's family. Do we think of ourselves as truly being loved by our Father and thus rightful beneficiaries of his gifts and inheritance? Or do we revert into thinking functionally as orphans—ones who seek to be a part of a family and seek approval based upon our performance?

In short, we are learning so much about God, His gospel in Christ, our own sin, the Sherman family, and what it means to live as a Christian with gospel-centrality that we are fully convinced that this exactly where God wants us as we prepare for, not only a life of vocational ministry, but for worship as a family of our good and faithful King.

Please continue to pray for our family as we are still making the transition to two sons, a new city, and a new life in a new church. Also pray that God would continue to knit together this group of saints with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Eph. 4:2-3). Thank you all so much for your continued prayer, financial support, and just all-around encouragement.

I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. Philippians 1:3-5

Commissioning Service

Last Sunday we gathered together as a core team for our Commissioning Service. 54 adults and 25 kids came together for the first time officially as the Seed Austin movement (and by the way, we’ve given ourselves a self-imposed August 15 deadline to finalize a church name). I could explain what we did in detail and tell you how excited we are about how God is moving this group of people, but I decided to just share an email sent to us by one of the wives in our church. We love you all dearly and thank God for your continual support.

“I'm still thinking about how amazing the first church meeting was last night! I can't imagine it going any better. I really did love the whole thing.... how perfect to tell the story of God's hand in bringing everyone there (Will, you got me teary at several places)... and I loved getting to hear all of you read scripture up front and lead on the affirmations. Y'all are each so strong up front and I could listen to you read the Word all day long! I also loved it because it was a reminder of how many great leaders the Lord has brought to this church. I think the reading of the scriptures and the corporate affirmations and vows were really powerful last night... kind of the culmination of everything God has been bringing together... and the very first worship together. Awesome.

And then to have the missional focus and brainstorming and prayer time.... just amazing to engage in that from the start as a body. I love how that is in our DNA. It moved me when some of the kids even joined in and then when my Mom prayed (in our family prayer time) how she already senses the Lord using the words spoken at the picnics and the focus last night to challenge and change the way she views her days and the people on her path.

And on a logistical note, I thought the room was perfect and had a really good feel to it and was the right size... greeters and nametags when people arrived was a smart move.... the child care was seamless... the big white boards were fantastic... water in the back of the room was a great call... Cindy documenting the meeting with photos made the nostalgic part of me really happy... and the Central Market time was great and people were unhurried and talkative with each other. Seriously, I thought it was all so good. The Lord answered so many prayers for last night and is going before us in many ways. I'm still not believing how many people are in the core phase. God is already building this church beyond our expectations.



You can only have a first church service once and I thought that was an unbelievable beginning.

To the Lord be all the glory!”

Seed Austin

We’re finally in Austin and getting settled into our new house, new community, new city and newest addition to the Sherman family (Caleb Van Sherman is now eight weeks). Right now the Seed Austin movement is still just a movement as we haven’t launched into a full-blown church yet. As we’ve told many of you, we plan to meet with a core team of 35-50 people—friends and acquaintances that we already had in Austin as well as about 15 others that have moved from Omaha—until mid-October or so until we launch. We will still gather together on Sunday evenings starting on August 1, but our weekly time will be more of a training time for the massive endeavor we are about to begin. Once we “go public” in the Fall, whatever internal DNA we have as a core group will only replicate itself to the rest of the church, so we want to make sure that we have like-minded mission, purpose, vocabulary, etc.

So until August 1, we are meeting with folks who are interested in being a part of the core team and/or church, preparing resources, building relationships in our new neighborhoods, and spending time with our families in the calm before the storm. This week I’ve (Nathan) been working on a recommended reading and resource list for our church that might be helpful for you if you’re looking for good books to read (many of them for free on Google Books). We should have that up on our website soon (www.seedaustin.net), and we’ll put a link to that on the blog as well. If you haven’t been to our website yet, please do. There is some really great content there as well as pictures and bio’s of the rest of our team, so you can put names to faces and faces to a movement.

Please continue to pray for us, especially in the coming few months. Pray that God might strengthen our marriage and family in greater knowledge of Him. Pray that the relationships that we are building now might be cultivated into life-altering Gospel ministry for many. Pray for humility and eagerness to serve from our church leadership. And ultimately pray that the name of Jesus Christ might be worshipped and glorified because of the work that is being done in Austin!

Here are a few pictures of our growing boys-