My Dearest Brothers and Sisters,

 

I love doing ministry it is in my blood God has raised me up to do this. We all get frustrated and tired. We slip in and out of reality of the problems between a good feeling and a bad feeling. The bad feelings of the struggle of life that we all deal with, our fiances suck, our life sucks, our relationships suck. I tell you I do believe that Satan causes some of this but I believe that as Christians we cause some of it ourselves. On Sunday Henry made a good point this week about not trusting in Jesus. I find myself falling in this trap also, well don’t we all , at some point and time find ourselves making a deal or bargain with God to make things better and then we will get it right for him. Unfortunately that is what a lot of Christan’s and non-Christians do all the time, bargain with God.

 

Well let us turn that away from us and think about the people we are surrounded with everyday and everywhere how are we communicating with them, are we even communicating with them. I mean we walk around and talk to people but most of the time it is in passing or do we really talk to them. We invite people to church but do we tell them about church or just hey come see us at church. We as Christians need to tell people why they are coming to church, that they are coming to church to meet Jesus Christ. When they get to church and leave church we need to communicate with the congregation thru phone calls, e-mails and a kind letter in the snail mail.

 

The real reason for church is to introduce people to Jesus Christ, in turn comes the fellowship and love all wrapped up together. We need to come up with one more group to meet during the month we have Y-God, we need to come up with another to meet to have 2 groups a month. I know we tried the men’s and ladies groups but they didn’t pan out but I think our success will be in the group that both our male and female parishioner’s meet together at the same time. Build COMMUNITY together and they will invite other people to the small group and in turn they will become interested in the church.

 

I believe we need to focus on the COMMUNITY of the small group. I ask all of you to pray and ask God to direct us all in the area of small groups this is not a strong point of mine so I will accept any help I can get. I am also having a meeting with the County Prison Chaplin and going to see what we can maybe do in the area of a prison ministry. i believe that all this DOES tie into the vision. God has revealed to my heart that our success lies in the development and building of COMMUNITY thru small groups. We don’t have to have the groups in Estero we can have them in our own areas and start building COMMUNITY there we will see assimilation to the church thru this ministry and even if they don’t make it to our church we are still touching lives for Jesus Christ 

In Christ,

Pastor Rick