Note from Chuck
Hello Crossbridge!
It is 2012! That seems so weird to me. It’s like we are in the future! Where is my flying car and jet pack?! I hope you had a great Christmas and brought the New Year in with a great celebration. My oldest had her birthday on New Year’s so I rang in the new year by becoming the parent of a teenager! Oh Mylanta that makes me feel old! Whenever I say something like that my wife rolls her eyes and parents of older kids say something like, “Just wait”, like they know something about a coming apocalypse or something. It is how I feel though.
This Sunday we will be back to our regular Sunday schedule. So now that you have traveled and had your fill of the family and have spent too much money on Christmas let’s recalibrate our hearts by coming together as the people of God to proclaim the praise of Christ and hear the word of God. I’m excited to preach from a passage that God has put on my heart for you and hear what He has to say to us.
If you haven’t started already let me encourage you to join me in reading through the Bible this year. I am using the “YouVersion” app on my ipad and iphone for this. I have chosen the ESV Study Bible reading plan to read through. We will have a hard copy of this plan available this Sunday in an updated version of our Road Guide. If you are new, the Road Guide has multiple Bible reading plans in it and gives you a simple way to chew on what you read in the text and have a conversation with God about it. You can grab a Road Guide at the information table this Sunday!
I look forward to seeing you Sunday!
Chuck
PATTIES AND PIES ON THE PORCH IS THIS SUNDAY!
Hi Everybody!
This Sunday is our Patties and Pies on the Porch! It is going to be awesome! There are all kinds of pies coming so there will be plenty of food for everyone! Don’t eat breakfast that morning; you’ll have room for more pie!
These “Porch Sundays” are designed to connect our church relationally and to give you a tool to invite someone new to our church community. There are countless stories over the last year or so that we have been doing these of new people coming to our church through these events and meeting Christ and getting connected to what God is doing at Crossbridge!
I still find it nervous to invite people to church and I work here! It can be like asking someone to the dance at school.
“What if they say no?” What if they say I’m weird?” “What if they pull out a can of mace and spray me in the eye?! Ow, my cornea, it burns! It burns!” – Okay that last one was a little much.
It would be easier to talk ourselves out of doing this but we must remember that: everyone spends eternity somewhere. I still believe that people without Christ are one heartbeat away from an eternity without Him. I still believe it is the mission to the church to proclaim that Jesus is the only way to God and that He is God! Because of these convictions let’s invite some people to join us this Sunday!
Here are some helpful hints…
1. Be specific. The following rarely works: “You should come to church with me sometime.” It works about as much as, “We should do lunch sometime.” You have to be specific. “Will you join me this Sunday for the 11:15 am service at our church? I can pick you up around 10:15, we’ll get some coffee along the way and then have lunch afterwards. How’s that sound?” or “My church is very meaningful to me and I think you would find it meaningful as well. Will you come with me this Sunday; we’re having a fun day with lunch served after the services.” Remind them this is time change Sunday! They get an extra hour of sleep!!
2. Be an expert about the Family Ministry environments at your church. If you are inviting parents with kids, the single most important issue on their mind is, “Will my kids be safe and will they like it?” Do your homework and let them know you’re already thinking about their kids. Email them information about the kids programs. Tell them stories about how much your kids or your friends’ kids enjoy the church. (If you aren’t sure the kids enjoy your church’s family ministry environments, please see point #1.) If they have teens make sure to come to the 9:30 so their teen can enjoy Teen Chaos!
3. Leverage the church’s website. Send them there or to our Facebook page to see more about Crossbridge
4. Don’t give up. My experience is that I have to be persistent and keep inviting. I can’t tell you how many times people have said they were coming to church on Sunday only to cancel on Saturday night. Don’t be discouraged. Don’t be defeated. Hang in there. Keep inviting them.
This isn’t about church attendance. It’s about eternity. And when eternity’s at stake, we can push through the awkward tension knowing that we’re simply doing what Jesus did – reaching out to those who are far from God.
So, who are you inviting to church this Sunday?
Chuck
Chuck’s Thoughts
Hi Everyone!
I hope you are having a great week! I have been fighting a stomach bug since Sunday night so I’m just grateful to not be lying in my bed or in the bathroom (is that TMI?).
We have a lot of great things coming up in the life of Crossbridge. I hope you will read all the announcements below and participate in as much as you can. Ladies, let me strongly encourage you to not miss out on this years Ladies Retreat. Retreats are times to unplug from the daily routine and rest, reflect, recreate and retune your heart to the Father’s. Go here and sign-up today! Husbands, just sign your wife up for her, tell her you got the kids and that everything will be fine! She’ll thank you later!
We are just a couple of weeks out from our “Patties and Pies on the Porch” Sunday. We have these special “Porch Sundays” to connect relationally as a church but also to introduce our friends, specifically our friends not attending a local church or are not even Christians, to our faith community. There is still time to invite someone to join you for this special Sunday. Who will you invite?
Lastly, I hope you have been helped through our series in Proverbs called “PROVERBIA”. This Sunday we will continue with a PG-13 rated message entitled “Wisdom and Sexual Temptation”. We will talk very frankly from the scripture about sexual temptation and how to face it in a wise, biblical way. I hopefully won’t be speaking in a crass way but I will be frank and there might be words said you don’t normally hear on a Sunday. This is one reason why we encourage all parents to put their children from birth to 5th grade in our wonderful Crossbridge Kids environments. I will not say anything I wouldn’t want my 12 year old to hear, because she will be in the second service. But I wanted to give you fair warning that this was coming.
I encourage you to be here. I encourage you to take notes and let’s look at this issue square in the eye knowing the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ is greater than any shame or addiction we might have. I believe this can be a life changing Sunday. Join me even now in praying for it.
It’s a joy to pastor you Crossbridge!
Chuck
Chuck’s Thoughts
Hi Everyone!
The weather this week has been awesome! As the cool breeze has hit me I have silently thanked our God for sending us this refreshment. It makes me pray that He would be continually blowing a refreshing breeze of the Spirit’s power to apply the gospel on us. Just as the coolness feels so fresh and wonderful to us, that our hearts would have the same sense about our holy loving Father, amazing triumphant Savior and abiding Spirit’s work in our lives, reminding us of our forgiveness and placement in God’s family!
This Sunday we continue our “PROVERBIA” series and talking about “Wisdom and Our Friendships”. This series has been thought provoking for us as a church community and I love all the conversations I have been apart of and have heard about!
Let me remind you to be praying about who you can invite to our November 6th Patties and Pies on the Porch Sunday. This is a great time to introduce a friend to our faith community and allow them to taste what God is doing here!
Ladies, let me encourage you to do whatever it takes to be apart of the Ladies Retreat coming up on November 10-12. I know some of you are thinking of an excuse why you can’t go: “it’s too long, it’s too far, it’s too much, it’s too tiring, and etc”. Ladies you can’t afford not to get away and be with God and in community for a time of refreshing. You can’t put a price tag on being intentional about connecting with the Father and other Christ-Following ladies for gospel encouragement. You can sign-up right now on our website here: LADIES RETREAT
See-ya Sunday! Enjoying this journey with you!
Chuck
Living with Financial Wisdom
“Honor the Lord with your wealth…” Proverbs 3:9
This week in our PROVERBIA series we talked about what Proverbs said about living with financial wisdom. We wanted to point you to some resources that might be helpful as you seek to put into practice the things we talked about Sunday.
www.daveramsey.com : Dave Ramsey is the author of Financial Peace University. His biblically based financial planning has helped tons of people!
www.mint.com: A helpful tool to get organized financially.
www.ronblue.com : Christian Financial Counselors.
Books by Randy Alcorn:
Randy Alcorn has written some GREAT books on the theology of giving and financial stewardship. Any one of his books would be helpful to you.
Money, Possession and Eternity (This is Chuck’s personal favorite)
The Power of an Invitation
A couple of weeks ago I got to be the best man at my cousin’s wedding. At the rehearsal dinner there was a time for people to share stories about the couple, so I shared a story about my cousin. I spoke for a couple of minutes about our childhood, how meticulous he eats a snickers bar (you have never seen anything like it!), and then I shared how God used my cousin to change the course of my very life. You see my cousin was the one that invited me to church. He invited me to summer camps, lock-ins, youth group stuff, and of course church on Sundays. I went to the fun stuff but held back for a while on the Sunday church thing. After a while though I said yes and went to the church. I was so surprised by what I experienced: friendly people who were normal, teaching from the Bible that I understood and helped me see God in a new way.
The Holy Spirit used all this to open my life to Jesus and at a summer camp I surrendered to His call to come and follow Him. And it all started with an invitation.
Over the next few weeks we have some opportunities to leverage the power of the invitation to people we care about and need to be introduced to Jesus. God can use your invitation to literally change someone’s eternal destiny, like He did mine.
Would you pray and then take a step of faith and invite a friend who needs Jesus to one of the our upcoming events . . .
1. Spectrum Art Show
- This is our second Spectrum Art Show. It is an art show designed to be a gift to our community by providing local artists a place to show their God-given talent. This is not a church service nor will there be a Gospel presentation but this event might be a good step for some of your friends who aren’t ready for a Sunday Service yet.
- It is Friday October 14, 6-10PM, here at 1049 Eldridge.
2. Ladies Retreat
- Ladies take advantage of this weekend getaway to invite a friend who needs to hear the Gospel and be introduced to a loving community of regular people. Let me encourage you to focus on people who are not connected to Jesus or to a local church at this time. We love other Christians of course and the other churches in our area but our mission is not to be a vendor of religious goods and services to all Christians in the area but to create gospel environments for the people we have been entrusted with and those outside the faith we want to see saved.
- The retreat dates are, November 10-12, and you can learn more by going here.
3. Patties and Pies on the Porch – Sunday November 6!
- That’s right we will have our 2nd Annual (is it annual if you only have done 2?) Patties and Pies on the Porch! On time change Sunday (the good one with more sleep) after each service we will enjoy some yummy burgers on our front porch and some of the best pies in the city made by you! You can sign-up to bring a pie on Sundays using your Connect Card.
- Our Porch Sundays are great times to invite someone new to discover what God is doing at Crossbridge.
The power of invitation is amazing. Leverage it for His glory and our friends’ joy!
Inviting with you!
Chuck
Chuck’s Thoughts
Dear Crossbridge!
What a great time we had this past Sunday celebrating the faithfulness and grace of God at Crossbridge! 9 years! Wow! From setting up at Sartartia Middle School, our various service projects, dropping Easter eggs from a helicopter, to leasing an old grocery store, and countless stories of lives changed by the power of Jesus! It has been a great ride and I believe that God is just getting started in bringing about a Gospel movement in our city!
BIG thanks to all of the servants who made Party on the Porch a success! We had some unexpected things happen to us Sunday, but so many of you jumped in and pulled it all together. I want to give a special thanks shout out to Reed Cutshall, Jan-Michael Jenkins and Hugh Durlam for being examples of men who just oozed servant leadership on Sunday. They jumped in and did above and beyond the call of duty service! Way to go guys. If you know them be sure to thank them for their service to the church.
Special, special thanks and prayers go to Adrian and Shelia Garcia. The Garcia’s Coordinate our Porch Events and do an amazing job at planning these special Sundays for us to have fun, connect with each other and invite new people to our church. Shelia and Adrian were the behind the scenes people that made almost everything we experienced outside at the birthday party happen.
The Garcia’s were unable to be with us Sunday because their eighteen year old, Cameron, was in a pretty bad car accident Sunday morning. He doesn’t have any life threatening injuries now but was pretty banged up. Please be in pray for Cameron that God will continue to heal him. Today is the first day he was able to get out of bed and will have an extensive recovery period. Pray for the entire Garcia family during this season as well. Many of you are already praying for them, and have been to see them. As usual, you are a loving church and respond well to people in need!
This Sunday we will be continuing our series, “PROVERBIA”. If you missed last week please check out the pod cast here.
It’s not too late to invite a friend to join you for this great series in God’s word. Click here and watch the video trailer we made for the series.
You are a great church and I am honored to be your pastor!
See-ya Sunday
Chuck
Words from Chuck
Crossbridge Family,
I know you are looking forward to a long weekend, slightly cooler temperatures (one forecast said 87 as a high – I may need a jacket!) and RAIN! I am seriously thinking about sitting in a lawn chair outside in the rain the whole time if it happens! I hope this weekend you will take some time to rest, recreate and renew your spirit through time with God.
There are so many exciting things happening in the life of Crossbridge right now. Community Groups and mid-size groups (i.e. Ladies Bible Studies and Men’s Leadership Lab) are starting up. We will celebrate 9 years of being a church community on September 18th with our Party on the Porch. That day we will also kick off our fall study of the book of Proverbs as well! The last two weeks we have seen tremendous crowds at our Sunday gatherings. And last Sunday we baptized 6 people! Praise God!
This past Sunday we also took our “Opportunity Offering”. We have been talking about this for months and you can learn more here (insert link). Many of you gave and committed to give over the next few weeks. Some of you have let us know you were out of town or there was another reason you didn’t give or commit this past Sunday. We will have the Opportunity Cards available the next two weeks in the handout and you can always give online as well here. Thank you for your faithful generosity! We will be announcing in a few weeks where we are at with the construction debt.
You are a joy to pastor!
Chuck
Words from Chuck
Dear Crossbridge Family,
This Sunday is what we are calling our “Opportunity Sunday”! Not only will we have the regular and amazing opportunity to worship through singing, Biblical teaching and communion but we will get to witness several believers declaring the allegiance to Jesus through baptism and give of our finances toward the retirement of our debt on the build-out of 1049 Eldridge.
I trust that you have been seeking God about what your role is in retiring our debt so that we might move forward in our mission to make growing followers of Jesus Christ. God provides to and through His people so that His name and gospel may continue to move forward. No matter what amount you are giving this Sunday there are no small gifts. The gifts may not be equal but the sacrifice will be. Some of you have asked can we give this out over time and the answer is yes. We will have commitment cards in the Sunday handout for to tell us what amount you will be giving over the next month till October. If you are reading this and have no idea what I’m talking about go here (insert link to Opportunity page) and get caught up on what we have been talking about these past several months at Crossbridge
God is doing great things here at Crossbridge! We get the privilege of celebrating that by watching people declare that their lives have been changed by Jesus and giving toward the mission of the church so that more people might be changed by Jesus through the ministry of this church.
If you call Crossbridge your church community then this is not a Sunday to miss!
Expecting Great Things!
Chuck
Renewal: What is it Good For? Pt2
Here are some resources if you are interested in doing further study on the topic of renewal/revival.
Revival by Martin-Lloyd Jones…click here to order.
A God-Sized Vision by Collin Hansen and John Woodbridge…click here to order.
Renewal as a Way of Life by Richard Lovelace…click here to order.
