Tom Sparling, Pastor
Worship Style - Contemporary
This is the first church on our pilgrimage that is not housed in a traditional church building. In fact, it is housed in a public school building! Praise God! The building is rented by the church, which even supports the culinary department by hiring some of the students to provide the coffee hour. We were greeted by several gentlemen at the door and graciously escorted to the auditorium by one of our greeters. We were then introduced to a couple manning the welcome table, given information and then had an opportunity to share our pilgrimage with several people.
The worship team lead us in worship with several songs that were familiar to us and with lyrics shown on a large screen, as you can see in the photo above. There were approximately 100-150 people in the congregation. We were struck by the number of college age people as well as young families in attendance.
Pastor Sparling was on Part 5 of a series entitled, "Big Life - Keys to a life of maximum impact". Part 5 - Rededicating our stuff - Stewardship. During this sermon, we were challenged to discern the difference between what we need as opposed to what we want. We were shown a clever video regarding First World Problems. (First World Problems are frustrations and complaints that are only experienced by privileged individuals in wealthy countries.) Philippians 4:11-12 speaks to this discernment. Furthermore, we were reminded that God owns everything. Psalm 24:1. We are only the manager of our "stuff". We were referred to Matthew 25:14-30, The Parable of the Talents. Finally, we were given three aspects of Stewardship: Spend (Proverbs 3:9), Save (Proverbs 21:20) and Share (2 Corinthians 9:8). As always, God is so very good! We have been looking at purchasing a new car and were reminded that we should be looking for what we can afford and what we truly need, not what we may want (heated seats, heated steering wheel, Blue ray player, etc.).
Worship Style - Contemporary
This is the first church on our pilgrimage that is not housed in a traditional church building. In fact, it is housed in a public school building! Praise God! The building is rented by the church, which even supports the culinary department by hiring some of the students to provide the coffee hour. We were greeted by several gentlemen at the door and graciously escorted to the auditorium by one of our greeters. We were then introduced to a couple manning the welcome table, given information and then had an opportunity to share our pilgrimage with several people.
The worship team lead us in worship with several songs that were familiar to us and with lyrics shown on a large screen, as you can see in the photo above. There were approximately 100-150 people in the congregation. We were struck by the number of college age people as well as young families in attendance.
Pastor Sparling was on Part 5 of a series entitled, "Big Life - Keys to a life of maximum impact". Part 5 - Rededicating our stuff - Stewardship. During this sermon, we were challenged to discern the difference between what we need as opposed to what we want. We were shown a clever video regarding First World Problems. (First World Problems are frustrations and complaints that are only experienced by privileged individuals in wealthy countries.) Philippians 4:11-12 speaks to this discernment. Furthermore, we were reminded that God owns everything. Psalm 24:1. We are only the manager of our "stuff". We were referred to Matthew 25:14-30, The Parable of the Talents. Finally, we were given three aspects of Stewardship: Spend (Proverbs 3:9), Save (Proverbs 21:20) and Share (2 Corinthians 9:8). As always, God is so very good! We have been looking at purchasing a new car and were reminded that we should be looking for what we can afford and what we truly need, not what we may want (heated seats, heated steering wheel, Blue ray player, etc.).