Sometimes all you can say is… WOW!
I was saying that a lot today.
Every Sunday for the last 5 years my middle child (Caleb) has gotten up with me and gone in early to get ready for our Sunday Gatherings.
Today was no different.
I took the route that we went 5 years ago as we were about to officially launch The Chapel at Elmwood at the Elmwood Regal Theater. Caleb (7 years old) and I reflected on that day as we drove by the Theater. That was an amazing day… we launched our 1st offical gatheirng with 305! That was a crazy good day and I remember the emotion and the celebration of that day. I remember how scared I was the next wondering if anybody would come back! For the next 20 months we continued that journey at the Regal. Of course I could have never dreamed where would be 5 years later.
Fast forward to Easter of 09 when we clebrated our first Easter as Renovation Church… we were now having 2 gatheirngs instead of 1 and God again blew me away… we brought all the kids together and we saw over 400 gather on that day. During the course of that first year we saw over a 1000 people walk through our doors for the first time. We began to see this incredibly diverse and beautiful collection of people starting to make Renovation their home. Of course just about everything we do at Renovation starts out as an experiment so we did a lot of experimenting that year in a lot of ways. We threw a week long party on the summer of 09 and called it Summer jam and were again blown away as hundreds joined us each night… it was an awesome 1st year as Renovation.
Then 09 quickly turned to 2010 and we celebrated our 2nd Renovation Easter with over 700 people! We saw dozens of men, women and children receive the invitation that Christ offers to us. We celebrated that day like no other and it carried us through another amazing year. We began to take purposeful steps of christian community development. We began to take better steps in our community and for our community. Something beautiful was taken shape and we celebrated God’s goodness!
2011 came in a with a bang as we went from 2 gatherings to 3… it was a big step up faith for us but we had some great new team members get involved to pull it off. We rolled into our 3rd Easter with high expectations that many would vist and many would come to Christ on Easter and that is exactly what happened! We saw just over 800 on Easter last year and we celebrated once again the way God was working in the hearts and lives of so many in our community. 2011 blew by as new things like our XCEL Leadership Center started to take off in awesome ways and we celebrated God’s continued favor.
2012 came in with Joshua and the Renovation Station launching our 3rd experience for kids during the 12 noon gathering. This was a huge step of faith and engagement for many of our folks. We new it would not be easy but of course nothing worth while is! So we launched that 3rd environment in Feb and we celebrated that win!
We went through 40 Days In the Word where over 400 people engaged in small groups, and spending time getting to know the Word, love it and to begin to live it out. Many began to give financially in ways they never had before and we celebrated all of it at the end of those 40 days!
We began to look toward our 4th Easter with great anticiaption. We talked about how Easter is the best day of the year to invite people to come to Church and it is the best day for people to come to Christ! So we did a little tag team… we began to pray for those to invite and that they would come… I promised that we would do our best as a leadership tean to share the transforming message of Jesus Christ in a clear, compelling way for both kids and adults and so we got ready for today…
I had a hard time getting to sleep last night because I was so internally amped up for what could happen today…
I got to thinking yesterday that we needed more chairs in the auditorium so I drove over to ABC rental and loaded up my car with some stackable chairs just to make sure… I said God if you provide the people I will make sure they have seats!
Patrick and a crew of people spent the last 2 Saturdays getting our campus as beautiful as we have ever had it…
Then waking up to a beautiful sunshiny day Caleb (now about to turn 13) and I did our normal routine and headed to church!
Once there our teams of people started showing up getting everything ready… I had a sense that God was going to do something special in our mindst today…
We had a great 9.00 gathering… 250 plus adults and 70 some kids in Renovation Station… and about 40 hands went up when I asked for those who prayed to receive Christ to lift their hands!
The 10.30 gathering was nuts… the most people we have ever had in the Aud… so gald I got the xtra chairs we used everyone of them… another 50 plus hands went up… Renovation Station packed…
I didn’t know what to expect at noon but we had almost the same amont @ noon that we did @ 10.30… and had a hundred plus hands go up saying they had prayed that pray of savation with me!
Joshua told me that they had lots of kids also pray to recieve Christ… and they had almost 200 kids total in Renovation Station!
All total we had right at 1200 men, women and children come to Renovation today to celebrate not a religious holiday but an event… the greatest event in human history… the Resurrection of Jesus Christ! Not only did they come but possibly a couple of hundred men, women and children were welcomed into the family of God and that is defintely worth celebrating!
For all of you who helped, contributed in same form or fashion to the success of our day I say thank you! I am so blessed and blown away to serve with such an amazing collection of people.
In closing… I had a 85 year old grandmother who came up to me after the noon gathering and said… I have been going to church and teaching religious classes most of my life and today I finally understood what it meant to invite Jesus Christ into my life and have a personal relationship with Him… she told me “thank you!” I said to her… no thank you! thank you for coming and thank you for sharing that with me… Renovation great job today… let’s celebrate what God has done… He alone is worthy of our praise!
