Preparing for the Harvest
by Gretchen Olson, Pastor of Junior High Ministries
I graduated from college and was already pursuing my career as an elementary teacher in Bellingham, Washington when God spoke through the youth pastor at my church. “Someday you’ll be a youth pastor,” he said. My response: “God, are you crazy?”
After posing a long list of excuses and running from God’s plan, I found myself in Florida completing a youth ministry internship. Through all the hands-on experience that summer, I had the opportunity to see and trust God’s leading. I was poured into and nurtured. I was given a safe place to fail, to get up and try again. I was equipped to be in ministry. And finally, I yielded and accepted God’s call into full-time ministry. My life has never been the same.
Finding Hope in New Orleans
On a recent Touch The World trip, MPC-goer Angie Rhodes traveled with Trish Thomas, Marty Hanlon, Carolyn Speedy, Debbie Engle, and Marcia Porter to the area of Louisiana hit in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. Angie shares her thoughts from her trip:
“It has been almost 3 years since Hurricane Katrina brought devastation to New Orleans and there is still much work to be done. The neighborhoods have more empty houses than rebuilt and livable homes. The church buildings are still empty and damaged. Businesses are gone, too. St. Bernard Parish is like a ghost town. In the lower Ninth Ward, concrete slabs from houses that were washed away are all that remain. It is even hard to tell a neighborhood once existed there—all the grass has grown up so high.
Filed under: Jim Lyon - Posts
Embracing the Times
by Jim Lyon, senior pastor
Twenty-five years ago, when I was serving as pastor at the Fairview Church in Seattle, a member of the congregation named Rob Moore wanted to install a computer network in the church office. He had some new fangled stuff he wanted to donate that he believed would revolutionize the way we “did business.”
We thought we were already a state-of-the-art kind of place—why, we had IBM Selectric typewriters with electronic memories and changeable type! We had a monster Xerox machine that could copy and collate. No Flintstones here, boys—nope, I grew up with Captain Kirk and Star Trek.
I had worked before for Northwest Airlines, so I was no stranger to computer screens and databases. But, c’mon, a computer network in a church office? No way. Word processing? What’s that? Toss out “Memory Mabel?” (that’s the name I gave to one of our IBM memory typewriters)—preposterous!
