Thursday, September 6, 2007

Church

I love watching to see where God meets our needs. From that the difference becomes obvious between what I need and what I want. For example, we are confident that God opened the doors for us to come here. We know he will bring a buyer for our home at the proper time. But it hasn't happened yet. So obviously, God in his wisdom knows that we did not need to sell our house before we left. Or within the month after we left. I would tend to think of that as a need, but it releases so much tension to just rest in the knowledge that when the house needs to sell, it will. God will be faithful to finish the work he began in bringing us here.

Conversely, God obviously knew that while we are doing ok on the physical home front, we are in immediate need of a church home. We were not even looking for one, assuming we would attend with Justin's family while making the church tour of College Station. I found out later that Justin had been looking at the different churches online, trying to get a feel for what is here.

Then our third day in town, as we were eating lunch in a local fast food restaurant, we noticed a building that said Brazos Fellowship on it. That sounded to us like the name of a church, but it didn't really look like one. And in his searching, Justin had not found that church listed anywhere. So we looked up the website address that was on the side of a trailer in the parking lot, and sure enough not only is it a church but it happens to have a picture of the service on the front page that looks just like a picture of a K2 service!

We went inside and the entire staff happened to be there preparing for the weekend service, so we spent about an hour touring the building and talking with different members of the staff. We asked about the graphic logo we saw on all their signage, containing three circles, showing an up arrow, a road, and an asterisk. Turns out it stands for Reach Up (worship), Reach Out (evangelism), Reach In (discipleship). Funny, we saw a tremendous similarity between that and the saying of K2: Focused, Tight, Out There.

Well the more we learned the more we couldn't wait for Sunday, and it did not disappoint. This is a church plant about 2 years old, that has a blueprint very similar to that of K2. Their mission statement is “to reach seekers and challenge believers to become fully-devoted followers of Jesus Christ.” If you know K2 at all, you should find that familiar wording.

To us, half of what we are looking for in a church is shown in a weekend service: music style, leadership style, children's program, etc. The other half is the community of a church. This week we went to a family group meeting and met 8 other families. We felt an instant connection with several of them. At the end of the evening the group was actually split into three groups for the semester, so essentially we have already met members of three small groups at the church. We are really looking forward to knowing more people in the lobby on Sunday, and to getting involved in the ministries of the church. How unexpected, and how very wonderful, to have already begun making friends and getting plugged into a new church home.

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