Four Really Quick Things For Everyone At NewSpring Church!
Howdy NewSpring Church, I hope that EVERYONE is having an AWESOME Monday! I'm still so excited (and overwhelmed) in regards to all that Jesus is doing in our church that I wanted to write all of you and say a couple of things...
#1 - Thank you for your AMAZING amount of patience yesterday as traffic was a MAJOR issue on nearly every single one of our campuses. Just so you know...we have NEVER had the number of people we had at church yesterday--EVER! (We have had larger attendance numbers for Christmas and Easter services; however, those services are spread out across multiple days, yesterday was our largest Sunday attendance in our history!) AND...while we were all excited by this we know it presented an intense traffic challenge. Two things about this in particular...
One - I promise you we are working on it as aggressively as possible to make things as smooth as possible.
Two - The next time you are caught in traffic (at any campus for any service) just remind yourself that THIS IS CHURCH! Not a football game, not a Beiber concert...CHURCH! How awesome is it that there are lines of traffic of people trying to get to church? The "experts" are saying that the church in America is dying...but if you sat in traffic yesterday you know the opposite is true!
#2 - Thank you for your willingness to do whatever it takes to get people far from God to church!!! Every single time I've asked our church to step up and invite people you have all responded and we are seeing the fruit of that every single week as more and more people are surrendering their lives to Christ. Even a casual read through the Bible will cause us all to realize that Jesus wants EVERYONE to know about His love, grace, mercy and His offer of forgiveness. It was a foreign idea to the writers of the Scriptures that the church should be an inwardly focused, self centered group of people who referred to their activity as "discipleship" and in so doing allowed them an "out" for not sharing message of Christ. (AND...show me one example of a disciple in the Bible that was not an evangelist!) Found people find people...and all of you are OWNING that!!! We are going to reach 100,000 for JESUS!!! (We're already 25% of the way there!)
#3 - Thank you for your generosity! Because you give we were able to open up three campuses last year (Spartanburg, Myrtle Beach and Greenwood)...and ALL three of them had record breaking attendance yesterday! Also because of your generosity we are continuing to support churches in Estonia, Jerusalem, the UK and in Kenya!!! People that we will never meet on this side of heaven are being impacted because of your willingness to give!!!
#4 - Our Spartanburg campus is beginning a 6pm service THIS Sunday to try to provide more space as our campus there is EXPLODING. Keep that campus in your prayers as they have literally outgrown a facility (in less than a year) that we were thinking would be about a two year solution.
THIS COMING SUNDAY is going to be part two of "Love Revolution" as we continue our story about Joseph and talk about THE ONE PHRASE that can/will absolutely CHANGE your life!!! Cannot wait!