Our first fire!, and changes at church...

Last night Laura and I had our first fire in my new fireplace!!! I'm not sure if it's really all as exciting as I am making it out to be, but it got me pretty pumped up. I remember back to when I was growing up, one of my favorite activities every year was getting to help my dad build fires in the fireplace and then sit back to watch a movie or something with the fire going. Ahhh, good times... So last night it finally got cold enough (I think it was like 55F outside, which was cold enough for me) so we had a quick little fire, it was just one of those logs you can buy at Kroger for like $1.75, but it was good enough. We turned off the lights, sat on the couch, poured a glass of wine, and watched Evan Almighty; it was a great evening.

From Random Stuff ...

So that was the really exciting part of the evening for me, but I should also mention that before coming home to do the fire thing we had a great community group meeting. Our group is just starting to get to the stage where most of us know each other well enough to at least start discussing how we personally feel about different issues. This is great because our church is currently going through a time of major decision-making. Over the past few months the church staff has more formally begun leading the church in a discussion about where God wants us to go from here. For those of you who don't know, my church (Rolling Hills Community Church) does not own a facility of any kind. We meet on Sunday mornings at the Thoroughbred Cinemas in Cool Springs and we rent a small office space in a business complex for the staff to work in during the week. This situation has worked wonderfully for us for some time, but lately God has been leading many in the church to the idea that we need to prepare for growth. On the one hand, the prospect of having a facility that we as a church can call "home" sounds great and would open up many doors for us to expand our outreach into the community, however, there are many people, including myself, who are still very skeptical because we fear that pursuing this might take away from the community we have at our church. As we are now, we are constantly reminded that our church is not a building, it is a community of believers in pursuit after Christ, and we want to stay that way. We fear that by attaching ourselves to a facility we may lose that reminder and the community will change.

Although I haven't personally heard him say this, some have quoted our pastor as saying that, "Nashville does not need another big church" and I completely agree, I know of at least two 1000+ member churches within two miles of my apartment, there are dozens of others in Nashville, we don't need yet another. What Nashville does need desperately is a group of believers who are interested in changing this city for Christ, and that is what I think most members and attendees of RHCC view our church as. That is why some of us are concerned about what is going on, and we had a great opportunity last night do discuss how we felt about the issue. Although I personally did not feel led to participate in the discussion much, I appreciated what the others had to say.

Anyway, to try to wrap this up, I am very excited about what God is doing in our church. I don't want to give off the false impression that I am adamantly opposed to us building or buying an existing facility; I just don't want our church to become centered around it. I want to make sure that whatever we do is in God's plan and in his timing. I also take great comfort in knowing that our Pastor, Jeff Simmons, and the leadership teams are followers of the Spirit (much more so than I can claim to be) and that in whatever direction they do choose to lead us in, it will be the result of prayer, wise counsel, and the leading of the Spirit. It's a very exciting time for Rolling Hills! =)

DTM

Oh yeah, I also posted some new pictures from last weekend:

From SHOUTfest 07 ...