Greatest Gift Offering

Next month, I’m inviting everyone connected to Coastal Community Church to participate in our annual Greatest Gift Offering. This is the time of year where we put feet to our faith – where we show our community the love of Jesus. The idea here is that as we buy gifts for other people, we want our largest, most extravagant gift to go to Jesus. We’ll use 100% of donations to this offering to fund the following projects.

• Upgrading our children, youth and main auditorium with new technology. This has been a big need for the past couple of years and we’re looking forward to upgrading. ($12,000)

• Church planting in Kwekwe, Zimbabwe. We’re partnering with Children’s Cup to plant a Coastal Community Church in Kwekwe focused on reaching those far from Jesus in one of the largest cities in Zimbabwe. They have already gathered 75 people to start and are just waiting for us to partner with them. ($12,000)

• We want to ramp up our local outreach efforts here to a whole new level in 2012. We have more outreaches, more events and more opportunities to reach those far from God with the life-transforming message of Jesus. ($13,000)

On December 18, 2011, we will receive the gift offering during our weekend service. We’re providing special giving envelopes and encouraging everyone to come prepared to give on that day. I am stepping out in faith and believing God for $37,000 in this years Greatest Gift offering.

If you’re going to be out of town on December 18th, or if you’d like to go ahead and donate now, you can do that here. It’s safe, secure and simple to use.

Please pray about participating and jump in with us. God has given us a great mission, and we’re blessed to be able to join Him in reaching our community for Christ and advancing the Gospel around the world.

Trying to Gain Balance

Life feels like I am walking a tightrope most of the time.     There are so many things to keep balanced.  It feels like if one thing gets to much attention then we will crash and fall. We have:

  • Our career to keep up.
  • Our spouse to keep happy.
  • Our kids to raise.
  • Our relationship with God to grow.
  • Our family to maintain.
  • Our education to continue.

And on and on the list can continue.  How do we continue to go through life and keep our head above the water?  What puts things in perspective for us to help us choose between what is good and what is best?

So my question is, what do you do to determine what you will and won’t do?

New Series Starting This Weekend at Coastal

God has been teaching me a lot of things lately.  One of those things is how to have balance in my life.  I don’t know about you but I am an all or nothing personality.  I am a person who does everything or nothing.  I always live in the extremes.  I am realizing that this kind of behavior is not really healthy.  I am trying to find balance in my life for the first time and I want to share some thoughts with you over the next couple of weeks that God has been working in me.

Sometimes we get so caught up trying to find balance that we forget that God calls us to fall completely upon His power. Balance often comes from slowing down, putting priorities in place, and living with margin. Come found out this weekend at COASTAL COMMUNITY CHURCH how we can find balance in a life that so many times expects us to live in the extreme.

ONE THING

A new year is always a great opportunity to make some changes in your life.  Every year it is so easy to get into the habit of putting together a list of things that you want to change in your life.  I don’t think this is the most effective way to make a change.  With a list if you fail at one or two items all of a sudden you give up on all the items on the list and you end up living the same life you lived the year before.  I am all about choosing ONE THING to change each year and working on that.

I know what your thinking, “One thing?  Are you crazy?  My life will never be any different if I only choose one thing.”  I know that is what you think but I believe that if we change one thing a year, over ten year we have changed ten things in our lives for the better that stuck.  If we only have to focus on being successful at ONE THING it is so much easier to walk out that plan than working on twenty plans.

I think that this year we need to make a choice to change ONE THING in our lives and work that ONE THING the entire year and see how much success we have over a period of time rather than trying to fix everything at once.

Incredible

I was sent this and just had to share it.  I wish I had been in this food court when this went down, it would have been magical.

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