Just another day at Rochester...

I love the Rochester Church. Let me share some moments from yesterday as an illustration. We are a congregation of 1200+/- members with an attendance around 1000 (this is a VERY mobile congregation). Our building is thirty miles north of downtown Detroit and we draw from a twenty mile circle with a few driving nearly an hour to get here.

Yesterday morning we had, as usual, three services, back to back. At each of them I put out small woven baskets up front. I told them about Sam (not his real name). Sam walked into his trailer home and found his 19 year old son had commited suicide with a shotgun. The sheriff's department immediately called us. This church has that kind of reputation -- we are on the first call list for any disaster or need. Any officer who needs counseling comes to us. If someone is homeless due to fire, domestic abuse, or financial tragedy, they come to us. Our elders have assistants -- Care Ministers -- who lept into action within minutes, establishing contact with Sam, guiding him through his pain and emotion, arranging for him to have a place to stay, and navigating the government agencies that get involved in these things. (God bless you, Tom and Heather!)

Sam has attended Rochester several times but he is not a member. That didn't stop us. He wants to move up north (yes, people in Michigan can still speak of "up north") to be with his surviving family members and get a new start. The expenses for cleanup of the trailer and his son's cremation have already been taken care of. On Sunday morning I directed the peoples' attention to the woven baskets and asked them to contribute a dollar or two as they saw fit just so that Sam could have a few weeks of cushion as he looks for work.

During the lesson, songs, and prayers people broke out of the crowd to come up and put money in the baskets. They couldn't wait for the end of services when we traditionally give to special needs. THOUSANDS were raised for Sam. Our benevolence team will give him a big chunk of it now and hold the rest in reserve for his future needs.

I love this church.

At third service, I called up Pete Grant. He is heading up Soul Space, a new ministry we have, targeting the pierced, tattooed, broken, addicted, and fringe people of Oakland and Macomb counties. Pete was trained in the ministry but left it after two horrible experiences. He is pony-tailed, tattooed and pierced. He hangs out with others of the same ilk... and he loves God. He thought he would never find a place he could serve the Lord as the church rarely accepts freaks (his own term). We do. In fact, we commissioned him and four more like him to reach out to others in their group with the gospel.

Our first act with Pete and Soul Space is just beginning. They are securing a storefront where they will have a Christian Tattoo parlor -- no kidding. It is called Sacred Ink and will be a place where people come not only for tattoos but also for a safe, clean, caring environment where people are treated with dignity and God is hallowed. They are already making waves in the area and the buzz has begun. Whispers can be heard that there is a church that actually loves these people! Soon we want to have a coffee shop and music venue for them. Two of our Soul Space guys formed a blues performance group called Bar12. As an afficianado of blues for years, I can honestly say they are the best. Their CD comes out in a few weeks and we will have a benefit concert for Soul Space here at our building on November 18th. We are fully prepared to be overrun by the freaky and the fried that night. Even though we are still an acapella congregation that is about 80% white and largely middle class, we are not so arrogant as to think God only loves people like us.

We stopped services three times yesterday. In the first service we stopped to pray over an elder and his wife who are headed to Albania to teach the gospel. They just got back from Brazil and Cambodia and Finland and... you get the point. In the second service, "Sam" was there and the people left their pews and formed one huge circle around him to pray for him. In the third we gathered all the Soul Space people, put them in the middle of the family room (what we call the auditorium) and prayed for them.

While third service was going on there were two other large meetings in our building. The Children's Ministry Team was meeting to plan our future work for God's little ones and the Teen Ministry Leaders were meeting with parents to help them raise their children in the Lord and to form strong bonds of fellowship between the teens.

I love this church. We let God and kingdom matters break into our routine. Our elders are strong, faithful, and fearless men. Our members are ready to give, ready to serve, and not so hung up on process and procedure that they forget that God loves people and wants us to help them. The weather is already turning with some saying we will get a snow flake or two this weekend. I hate the cold, I hate the dark days, and I hate the wind that howls around my house... but I love this church. I love seeing Jesus at work in this place.