Give & Serve at FPC

Good morning.
Welcome.
Glad that you are here.
We’re making you all guess who’s going to be in front today.
Today it’s me.
Glad that you’re here.
Today is our last day together.
Don’t shed any tears,
but this will be the last Sunday that we will gather.
I would like to welcome today,
Terry Brunsma and Dave DeWeil.
They are on session here at the church and they represent the
membership committee.
They’re just starting on that.
So their load today is going to be light,
but the next class that they do,
they’re going to be running the whole thing.
Right, gentlemen?
Yes.
That’s what I heard.
Let’s go.
So we’re glad to have you gentlemen here.
I would definitely recommend if there’s any questions that you have,
they actually both bring,
I think, really unique and awesome experiences of the church.
And so definitely if you have questions about education or ministries,
they both would have,
I think, words that would be much different and I think
very helpful than say the person who is at the church a lot and has a different role advantage
here.
So feel free to seek them out.
But we really have two,
no,
that’s a lot.
We have three goals today.
Let’s be clear on that from the start.
First goal, we’re going to talk about what’s next
for you here at the church.
And that looks like how are you going to grow and how are you going
to serve?
And that’s going to be a practical overview of all of the things that are available
to you, sort of a menu of options.
And then encouragement,
pick two of those things and
plug in in one of those ways.
The second thing is going to be what are the sort of space things
happening here as odd as it is.
It’s going to feel like we all went back to preschool,
but I can’t tell you the number of adults I’ve talked to here at the church.
And I just casually
mentioned, yeah, I’m taking the kids to the gym and they look at me and they’re like,
“Wait, we have a gym?” And I think,
“Hey, it’d be good for you to see the building.” So we’ll take
a quick tour and we’ll show you the spaces in the Ed Wing and we’ll look at the gym.
And then the last thing will be we’re going to talk,
we’ve got a big enough group,
this is going to be a little
bit of a difficult task,
but we’re going to see if we can generally sync our calendars on a new member Sunday.
We’re not going to have 100 percent,
everybody can do it.
But if we can get kind of
close to a Sunday that most people are around,
that will be great.
And then we’ll,
if we’ve got one or two couples,
we’ll figure that out on the backside.
That clear?
All right, those are the goals.
Can we get accomplished?
Yes, we can.
All right,
let’s first here talk about,
let’s just go through the list and we’ll build it up as we go to keep it simple.
So let’s start with serve.
So we at the church here have a very active mission committee.
I’m actually very excited about some
work that’s been happening on that team.
They’re very much having kind of a generational change right now.
The mission committee is the,
it really has two purposes here at the church.
They oversee the church’s financial commitments to giving.
Lots of folks don’t know this,
but every year, and this has been the case for as long as I’ve been here,
we have given around $160,000 to mission.
So that means that every dollar that we receive is about,
it’s just under 30 percent of that dollar
goes outside of this place,
ranging all around the world.
We have 30 plus missionaries that we
support, many of them we’ve been supporting for decades.
And so the mission committee oversees that financial obligation.
They also,
and this is part of this new change that’s happening with
that committee, they’re beginning a new focus on communicating that mission back to the congregation.
How many of you knew that we gave $160,000 a year to mission?
Okay,
so interestingly in our pews,
you would have many other people raising their hand to that question as well.
And so we have a long storied,
wonderful commitment to doing mission support all around the world,
and we’re going to be focusing the season of making connections with those
missionaries and telling their stories within our place.
So if you are interested in any of that aspect,
foreign mission,
financial stewardship, sort of telling the story of that mission,
that would be an amazing place to serve.
We also have a finance team.
They do all the things that
you would expect a finance team to do.
We have an excellent team,
but if you are a person who
has done that in the past or find numbers,
dollars and cents, adding up interesting,
that is a group of people who do a spectacular job of keeping us on the straight and narrow at the church.
And if you’ve ever worked in an organization,
it helps a lot when you can trust the numbers that you’ve been given.
So that is a place that if you have experience,
it’s a great place to serve.
We also have a new team,
which I’m really excited about.
I think most of you know that post COVID,
we’ve had a very active sort of digital presence.
We have been in the community for the longest time on radio.
And it’s kind of funny when you’re the pastor,
how many people at Walmart take you
aside and say, “I listen to you every Sunday.” You’re like,
“Really?
You do?
Yeah, I know you and your kids.” And what’s your name?
So we’ve had that and it’s wonderful,
but this online thing has
been a new thing.
And there’s some really interesting and engaging things happening there.
Just this last week,
our Bible studies and weekly study was listened to on audio alone,
just the podcast was listened to 500 times.
We’re congregation of 525 members.
So what’s
happening there?
That’s interesting.
And that doesn’t count all of the YouTube and Facebook,
which continues to grow as well.
So there’s some exciting conversations happening around the team
that’s going to help guide that conversation.
They’re going to meet two or three times a year.
If you have any interest in communication or just hearing about that ministry of the church,
that’d be a great place to go.
Membership, Terry and Dave present that here today.
But this team is tasked with things like helping you all on board into the church.
So they’ll be in touch
with you.
That committee will be too.
Make sure your pictures are up to date.
Make sure that you’ve
got if one of these places that we’re going to talk about today makes sense to help connect you
with them in that conversation.
They’re also responsible for the bulletin,
which lucky for these two guys, we just did.
So that’s off the cycle for a little bit,
but the bulletin is always
a little bit of a task.
If your information is not active,
some of you I think have your information
in that membership directory.
That’s great.
If not,
or if your membership info is wrong,
make sure to let us know because that’s going to get updated every year now.
Congregational Life.
Yeah,
we’ll put that here.
They are a team that meets here at the church.
They plan about five to six events a year,
opportunities for the church to get together and enjoy time together.
Often looks like a board game night.
We did shooting at the range in Superior one time.
We’ve done bowling.
We’ve done lots of different things.
So if you like planning social events,
and you like fellowship opportunities for people to get together,
that’s a great team that you
might want to plug into.
Also want to name,
we have the Presbyterian Women.
I’m going to
give you a little bit of an overview of what we’re doing here.
They have fellowship events that
they sort of plan.
If you are a woman in the congregation,
you will receive an annual little
booklet from them that includes all the information of things that they do.
So know that that’s a
standing welcome for you to participate in that.
Men, you are not welcome to participate in a
majority of those events.
So if that bothers you, I’m sorry,
but that is the way that the cookie crumbles.
Elders and deacons.
So both Terry and Dave are elders here at the church.
The way that we structure our governance is elders handle the business matters of the congregation.
Deacons handle the service aspect of the church.
So they’re involved in bringing communion to folks at home,
visiting folks in the hospital.
We have a whole list of people who are shut-ins.
They’re responsible to make sure that we’re connected with them,
that we know if they need help.
The deacons do a great job.
We have 12 elders and we have the same number of deacons.
So both of those are ministries.
Coming in as a member of the church makes you eligible to serve on either of
those boards of ministry teams.
Buildings and grounds,
running out of room.
Buildings and grounds,
as you’d expect.
They look after the building and sort of oversee the general maintenance kind of
stuff.
I’ll tell you that the building and grounds team,
if you are a building person,
if you’ve any experience in building,
it may be the best of times and worst of times.
Let’s just focus on the best of times.
There’s some conversations happening.
Ever since this building was built,
did Clint talk to you about how the building got built?
I think he was going to.
Yeah, so it’s not this miraculous process.
We just have a few things that probably are going to need sort of addressed.
One of those being,
if you’ve ever been in church on a Sunday where it’s raining hard,
occasionally there’s a leak from the steeple.
It’s been happening ever since the church was built.
You can imagine a leak
coming down with wood and structural integrity.
That’s the tallest point of the building.
Anyways, that team’s working on plans to fix that.
We’ve fixed it six times now,
since I’ve been here.
That’s been 10 years.
It’s still not fixed.
If you want to tackle a steeple project,
you want to climb up there.
No, I’m kidding.
We’re doing it professionally.
That team’s important.
If you have any sort of experience there,
that might be a great place to serve.
And then we have worship.
I know, there’s stuff on the left too.
We’re just not there yet.
Worship, they oversee all of the different worship elements of the congregation.
Recently, they’ve been working on some special projects in terms of like,
you might call them different
fixtures in the sanctuary,
things like banners, things like different.
You might have seen during
the Advent season, we had like these wood boards that were sort of building as the series went.
They were working on things like that.
They help oversee our second service worship band and
communion and all these important things.
If worship,
if art, if music, if any of that’s
important to you, that team meets, I think it’s probably about quarterly,
and that would be a
great conversation to have you a part of.
If most of these,
let me double check, PW,
they have a board.
Most of these are teams of some sort that meet on some relatively irregular
period throughout the course of the year.
If you wanted to just,
how can I just plug in and do
something simple that or that doesn’t require that kind of commitment to a team,
there’s always the opportunity to bring goodies on Sunday.
There’s no better way to make a hundred friends in one day
than to bring goodies.
So if you’re interested in that,
Hy-Vee, whatever goody is a great thing
if you’re not a baker,
but that’s a great way to serve.
We love to have liturgists.
Some people, I realize that that’s a big phobia for lots of people speaking from people,
but if you don’t mind that,
I promise you everything is delivered to you in a very accessible format.
That’s not just like the pastors don’t want to talk the whole time.
That’s an expression of our theological
belief that we are all ministers.
That’s important to Presbyterians that we are putting forward the
entire congregation and worship because this isn’t some professional activity.
This is a thing that
we’re all doing together.
So liturgists, that would be a great way if you’re comfortable in front of people.
Yeah,
okay.
Is that enough?
That’s probably enough.
Oh, yeah, no, that’s not enough.
I missed CE.
Okay,
so this is a beautiful thing about Christian education.
I have in my time gotten the privilege of,
in fact, just this last year,
if you were in second
service, you would have been here,
but during our Christmas pageant this year,
we recognized a Sunday school teacher who had taught here for 50 years,
50 years, which if you just allow yourself
for a moment to consider the generations of Christian disciples that have happened under
her tenure, it is an astonishing and beautiful gift.
So of course, Christian education oversees our youth ministries.
Right now,
we have, I would say today,
we had a smaller crew in first service.
So today, I would guess we have 60 kids in the education wing learning about Jesus,
which in today’s world, thanks be to God.
That’s incredible.
When we had our fall scheduling,
which generally we have better attendance all throughout the fall than we do in the middle of
winter because it’s winter,
you know, we had 90 to 100 kids in Sunday school.
So that’s a spectacular ministry.
There is no age that times you out of that.
If you love kids,
there is a spot that you
can fit inside that,
but the Christian education committee does way more than that.
So things like recharge.
If you’ve never been part of our recharge ministry,
I’d encourage you come one night.
Just join us for one night.
It’s easy to do.
There’s opportunities to serve in the kitchen.
If you’re a kitchen type person,
if you like that,
there’s opportunities to just come for the lesson,
for the food, for the fellowship.
If you want to meet folks here at first press,
it’s a great way to do it because it happens over table.
And there are also several opportunities
within the CE sort of umbrella to do things unrelated directly with you.
So I have a teacher
who taught her entire career.
She came to me.
She said, I love youth, but I’m done with youth.
I’m not, I’m just not going to deal with the middle schoolers,
you know, throwing stuff across the room.
Sorry, Terry, but that happens.
I just dealt with that last week.
I know you never dealt with that.
So I love kids,
but I’m done with kids.
And so we’re great.
So she’s now in charge of all
the bulletin boards in the Edway.
And she makes all the bulletin boards look awesome.
Maybe that’s your gift.
Maybe your gift is that you volunteer for some time.
We had a person who said,
I’ll be a volunteer classroom decorator and said, you know,
the teachers are doing a lot.
If they just tell me what the theme is,
I’ll decorate their classroom for the semester.
And that was an
incredible gift.
So that’s an awesome way.
If you’re a sort of artistically minded person,
if you’d like to serve within the youth area at the church,
there’s lots of ways to do that.
I would also just highly,
highly encourage you.
Probably it’s the last service section here.
Consider volunteering for VBS.
That may seem like an odd sort of statement.
And you think, why would I want to volunteer when there’s a hundred little rugrats running around the church?
Let me make a case for it.
I don’t think that there’s a single ministry in the church
where we both get to show kids the enthusiastic,
joyful side of our faith,
which is always there.
But it’s an opportunity that we get to really just show the kids that being Christian is not dry and boring,
right?
That’s a beautiful gift.
And on the other hand,
there is no opportunity
that we have as a congregation to be welcoming and hospitable to so many folks who don’t consider this place home.
And I’m talking about people who don’t go to church.
And that is an incredible
gift for us to actually be able to show people,
“Hey, it matters to us that your kid has a safe
place to be this week.
And we want your kid to have an incredible experience.” That has ripples
in the community like I can’t possibly communicate to you.
So there’s lots of ways to serve for VBS.
Some of that is we got some ladies who say,
“I’m not once again going to be walking around with
kids in the building.” So they cut up bananas so that there’s bananas for snack that day,
right?
We have other people who say,
“Yeah, I’m not really a teacher,
but if you need me to walk
around with preschoolers and make sure that they don’t wander off down the building,”
that’s an incredible gift.
VBS is a short commitment in that it’s four days,
it’s in the morning,
and the team that runs it is quite frankly very,
very, very well run.
Consider VBS.
They’ll be asking for volunteers.
And that’s a great way to just plug in and see
the huge reach that we have with youth in the community.
All right,
so service matters.
And this, despite what it sounds like,
is not a big advertisement
for you plugging in at the church.
What this is is a reminder that as we serve as a congregation,
we are not a professional organization that hires two people to do our work.
We’re just not a place who entrust pastors.
Remember what I said about the pastors at
First Press?
We don’t stand in between the people and the table, right?
We don’t stand in between people and Jesus.
We all together come to Jesus.
And so we are all called in our Christian vocation
and lives to serve.
You’re not called to serve in all of these places,
nor are you called to serve
in one of those places for the rest of your life,
which is great.
So if you are interested in any
single one of these,
give it a try for a year and then say,
“That was wonderful,” and be done.
But that is my encouragement to you.
Choose one place to plug into the congregation,
because your work here alongside the rest of the body will have a way of building you into this
body that Paul calls it in a way that simply showing up won’t.
And so I hope that you’ll pick
one of these that you might find interesting.
Some of that looks like just serving on Sunday.
Some of that looks like meeting throughout the week.
But we can connect you with any one of those
teams that might be of interest,
and we would be happy to do so.
Questions, thoughts, comments about the service aspect?
Can I flush out something if you were interested in one?
Yeah?
Maybe one more spot to serve.
I know LaRoye is needing ushering and reading.
Oh, yeah, thank you.
Yeah. Which is a great way to be the face of the church out front.
Yeah,
and actually,
just to maybe dispel this,
I think that’s really great,
Dave, because I am still anxious about introducing myself to people.
That may sound funny,
but we have so many guests and visitors here at the church.
I have introduced myself to members of like five years.
They’re like, “Well,
you know that we tune in on the radio every Sunday?” You’re like,
“Yep, and I’m an idiot,
and you know that.
I’m sorry.” But some of greeting and ushering,
the beauty of it is you
get to introduce yourself to everyone,
and it’s like a safe spot to be like,
“Hi, welcome to church today.” It’s a beautiful,
free, anxiety-free way to get to greet people and get
to know people.
I think that’s really, really helpful.
It doesn’t matter if somebody has been
a member here for their entire life.
Introduce yourself to them.
Say, “Hey, I didn’t see you last
Sunday.” They say, “Yeah, I’ve been here all the time.” You say,
“That’s great.
Now I get to know
you every time I see you.” That’s great.
I feel like I’m still a new member.
It’s only been a year
and a half, I think, since we formally became members.
Don’t be afraid to get involved,
rather than that.
I think everybody in this church is really welcoming.
You don’t have to be a
20-year member to serve,
and you can jump in right away.
Trust me, I’ll welcome you and
allow you to serve.
Well, not only …
I would hope that’s the case,
Dave, right?
If the only people serving are people who have been here for 20 years,
what perspective are we missing?
What people’s gifts have we not incorporated?
Unfortunately, the church, and by the church
here, I mean the Capital C Church.
I don’t mean this church in particular.
We have earned the
impression of the ball and chain.
I’m just going to admit that to you.
We’ve earned the impression
that you get on a committee and you’re stuck there for life,
and you do work that you don’t like to do.
That’s not a testament to our life, right?
If every family gathering that you went to
was that way, you would hate going to your family gatherings,
right?
If you never had joy,
if you never had laughter, if you never got together,
yeah, you got hard family gatherings too, right?
But church should be that.
It should be a place that when you come here, you say, “Whew,
glad to be here.
I’m glad to be here,” and you’ll find that even in the service.
So I hope you pick one.
I’ll talk to Terry and Dave.
If you would like to get connected with
one of those or talk to me,
we can help connect you with a person who could usher you in and give
you a trial run on any one of these opportunities to serve.
We’d love to have you do that.
Let’s talk about growing.
I think everybody should have one place to serve that they have in the church.
I think another thing that everyone should have is a place to grow at the church.
I think we’ve never had a better platform in order to do that.
So, of course, we have Sunday school that happens between services.
We also have a men and women’s Bible study.
That is great.
If you don’t have
work commitments, that’s generally best for those.
So if you are able,
the men gather Thursdays at 1 p.m.
here in our fellowship hall.
Once again, that’s generally folks who are on the retired
side because that would be hard for
folks who are still in their vocations.
But that’s a great group
of men.
They study Scripture together.
They’re going through the book of Romans, I believe.
And then the women’s Bible study,
that happens Tuesdays at…
No,
men are at nine on Thursdays,
I lied to you.
Women are at one on Tuesdays.
And so that’s a great group of women.
Clint leads both of those Bible studies and he does a great job with both of those.
I’d love to have you join that.
And then there’s also a younger men’s Bible study that we started this year.
And that happens every other Tuesday at 7 a.m.
And if you’re interested in that,
that’s mostly guys who are working.
That’s an opportunity for them to come to a thing that they couldn’t come to
at 9 o’clock on a Thursday.
So if you’re interested in that,
let me know and we’ll get
you on the call list for that because that,
like I said, happens every other week.
Also, I want you to know that we have the Sunday School of Men,
Women’s Bible Studies.
We have the Young Men’s Study.
We do have Recharge,
which I think is a great way to combine fellowship
with learning,
with opportunities to serve.
So I hope you partake in that.
And then
this is a kind
of complicated place at this point.
We’re working on fixing this.
So this is unbelievable to me.
I just have been doing some research.
We have, between Clint and myself,
since 2020,
we’ve made over 700 studies that are now recorded,
which is intimidating.
And those have come in two formats.
One, the daily study, which happens live every day at
2 o’clock Monday through Thursday.
That’s a Bible study.
So we’ve been through Philippians and first
and second Corinthians, and we’ve been through Romans.
And right now we’re in Exodus.
We were in Genesis.
So that’s a great way.
If you’re a person who says,
“Yeah, I know I want to,
I need to study my Bible.
I want to do that,” what’s great is we read the text.
So you hear the text and you hear some reflections on it,
and it costs you about 20 minutes.
And you can do that on audio.
You can do that on video,
whatever is most comfortable for you.
So there’s the Bible
study of interest to you.
And the weekly study is more like,
what would happen if you sat down in
the pastor’s office and you asked the question,
what about fill in the blank?
What about the
apostle Paul is the question right now?
What about the apostle Paul?
And so for three weeks,
Clint and I, we’ve been talking about the apostle Paul,
looking at that from a variety of kind of pastor perspectives.
What kinds of things
might you find interesting in the middle of a conversation like that?
And we’ve done conversations about things like forgiveness.
We’ve done Presbyterian history.
We’ve done,
you name it, it’s all out there.
So all of that’s available to you on our
website, fbcspiratelake.org or search Presbyterian Church Spirit Lake,
and it’s under the media section there,
pastor talk, you’ll find all that kind of stuff.
The thing I’m excited about
is that content is very overwhelming.
So we’re actually right now in the process of building
a brand new standalone website,
which is actually going to become a central Netflix style distribution
post for all of this education.
I’m super excited because say that you are interested in not the
entire book of Romans,
because that’s overwhelming,
but you’re interested in forgiveness.
You could go to this new website,
we’re in the process of building,
you could put in forgiveness,
and all of the lessons related to that will come
up for you.
And I’m also very excited because say that
you’re interested in the Trinity,
you could go click on the Trinity and click send me an email,
and every week it’ll send you one email with a thing about the Trinity.
Kind of fun.
The goal for that is an opportunity,
I can’t tell you,
it happens about weekly now,
the people who tell me,
you know, we listen every week in Arizona, we listen every week in Kansas,
we listen every week in Florida,
we’ve just,
Omaha,
we just know that there are people all around the country that report back, we’re listening.
This is going to be the first opportunity that we have a church,
we’re going to invite
our members to say,
if you know someone who’s either in a small church that doesn’t have
a lot of Christian education,
or if you know family members that might benefit with it,
we’re hoping to provide this as a resource,
not just to first pres,
but actually to the wider church.
Like, maybe you don’t even go to a Presbyterian church,
but you might find those
resources helpful.
So that is a way to grow.
That’s probably enough.
Maybe the Lenten, the Lenten Sunday night.
Ah, thank you, yeah.
The Lenten series.
So the soup is always good,
and the conversations are at least mediocre.
So I hope that you’ll join us for that.
If you can’t join us in person for
the Sunday night deal,
then definitely tune in because that gets put up on all of our, um,
sort of YouTube, Facebook,
you know, all that kind of stuff.
This series is, I think, unbelievably helpful.
Pastor Clint and I were asked to do a talk for our Presbyterian,
which if you remember,
that’s sort of the one step up level for us as Presbyterians.
When I came here to first pres 10 years ago,
I’m going to get this number wrong,
but it was somewhere around like 47 or 48 churches in that number.
I think we’re down to 34 or 33 now.
So
we’ve dropped at least 10 and there are several others in the process of
dying as congregations.
And so the Presbyterian asked Clint and I, you know,
on some level, like with what’s happening
at first pres, do you have anything to offer,
you know, to churches who are struggling?
And we reflected for months together and put together this whole series of what does it look like to
be a healthy congregation?
And we’re going to be adapting what we did for that presbytery for first pres here,
this church in, in particular.
And I’m excited about it because it is,
um,
it would be foolish to think that this place will always be immune to the realities of the church in America.
Right.
It would be foolish to think because things are going well right now,
they will always go well.
And so this is the exact right moment to take a step back into ask what does it look like for
us to be a healthy congregation?
What can we prune?
What can be watered?
What things have we not thought of?
And this is what’s so essential to Dave’s point.
What, what things do you bring
that are going to be completely new to us that we need to stop and we need to really think deeply about.
Um, so that’s what the,
this year’s Lent series is going to be.
It will start a week from
this Sunday.
So a week from today.
And that happens at five 30.
Yeah.
Oh, there you go.
Five 30 is the meal.
Oh,
dinner at five.
Five is the dinner,
then five.
You would want to come
here for the dinner.
I promise that part’s good.
And nursery.
But you have to let us know.
Yeah. Okay.
Um, thoughts on growing.
Am I missing anything?
Thoughts, questions.
Is that recharged just in the fellowship hall?
Right.
Yes.
Right. It is all there.
Um, it all happens at table that,
um, I won’t bore you with the long history.
What excites me about that.
There’s this whole thing in,
in like kind of mainline church right now.
There’s this kind of
dinner churches.
Have you heard of this?
Um, there’s this thing where churches will start a
service and they will do it all around the table.
And then if you read first Corinthians,
this actually makes some historic church sense because the earliest Christians would actually
do their stuff around the table.
They’d come, they’d have fellowship.
And if you remember Paul
gets after the Corinthians because the rich people are not letting the poor people in and they’re
getting drunk off of the wine at the table and Paul’s like,
come on guys, you’ve got to do better
than this.
Right.
So the church that he was criticizing them for kind of doing dinner church badly.
Uh, we are not particularly hip around here.
So we weren’t thinking how do we start a
dinner church?
We were thinking, Hey,
how can we get all of our generations together at the church?
And what’s amazing is a Kathleen cooks this great meal.
We all get together.
We say some prayers.
We read some scripture.
We eat together at the tables.
And then the kids have an activity at
the same time that the adults have a very short 10,
15 minute lesson.
And we get it all done in,
in an hour, which is,
I think the closest we’ve ever been as a church this year to actually making
it a recharge kind of thing.
Like you come to church,
dinner was done for you.
Learn something about your faith, get out of the,
of the rhythm for just an hour.
And it’s a great opportunity
to meet people.
So yeah, give it a try.
Um, it’s easy to do one week and none of those are series.
So they’re just come every night.
It’s different.
So that’s great question.
Anything else?
Doing well.
Uh, once again, I want to just note,
nobody thinks that you’re going to do all of this.
Make that clear.
Nobody thinks you’re going to do all of it,
but our hope is you’ll do one of each.
Right?
Circle something on the grow category,
circle something on the serve category.
Because if you’re part of a Presbyterian fellowship and in five years you’ve neither grown nor served,
John Calvin will roll over in his grave and you don’t want that guy rolling over.
Oh, I say that jokingly, but I mean it seriously.
This matters.
It really does.
If you’re going to be part of a congregation,
you should be growing in your faith,
in your knowledge, in your, in, in your thinking faith because that transforms your heart faith.
And if you’re part of a congregation,
you should be serving in some way or however that is,
those are important.
So I hope you’ll partake in that.