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)