Today has been crazy busy from the weekend and all that is going on at Alive Church, so I am a little late getting out this weekend update.
First let me start by telling you that after the weekend teaching on Baptism we have 25 people who have made commitments to be baptized next weekend, with 1 new faith commitment! Next weekend is going to be a great time - party! You won't want to miss it. Also, next weekend will be the beginning of a new weekend series called "Why" with the first weeks topic being: "Why Don't I Always Feel God?" Thanks to Phil Starke for painting during the message, Jesus right after His baptism, pictured here in my blog. We are going to use that picture as a give away to those we baptize.
This past weekend I made a very important announcement; our Twin Peaks campus will be re-uniting with the Oro Valley campus. This will be a time for us to re-focus as we re-join forces. Vision church and Pastor Toby will be taking over the lease at the Twin Peaks location as well as the Rock-N-Java coffee house there.
Though it has been a hard decision, we see that the timing is God's timing. Over the course of the last 12 months with two churches launching out of Alive, our resources, leaders, volunteers and finances have been stretched short. While we have seen growth and lives change at Twin Peaks, it has not been fast enough to get us where we needed to be to continue building that campus. After working with our land-lord he encouraged us to sub-lease and ultimately forced a move as of last Monday. We put the word out that we were interested in sub-leasing the space and Pastor Toby stepped forward and said that he and Vision Church would be very interested and were at a place where they could afford to do it at this time. They are going to lease the space, continue to operate Rock-N-Java as a community outreach and have gone ahead and assumed all debt as a way to purchase equipment. Our land lord was very willing to work with them and has decided to go ahead, and instead of us sub-leasing, he is going to assign the lease to Vision Church.
As we continue to go forward by reuniting our forces and resources all on the Oro Valley campus, I believe that God is going to continue to bless in a great way and give us the wisdom to live out His mission and vision for Alive Church and our future.
This coming weekend, Nov. 12th and 13th, we will have baptisms on both campuses and the following weekend, Nov. 19th and 20th, we will all be together for weekend services at the Oro Valley campus. I want to encourage all of you in this that God is working in and through this in ways that we can see as well as in many ways we cannot see.
One question I have had is what about staffing? As a church we have always staffed very lean, therefore a move like this does not force us to have to let go of staff. We have a great staff and have a place for all of them as we go forward - the staff has been stretched pretty thin as well over the last 6 months. As we all re-unite into one physical campus for now, we will actually still be a little understaffed...we are able to operate this way because of all of you - you are an incredible volunteer staff committed to seeing the mission and vision of Alive church go forward.
I want you to know that if you have any questions about this move I am available to meet or to answer questions through email and so is our Campus Pastor from Twin Peaks, Jason Marsden. Jason will continue to serve as a pastor here at Alive and I personally value him in a great way along with the rest of our pastoral staff.
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