Contacts...Contacts...Contacts...

I should have written about this much sooner... but the last few weeks and months have afforded us some rich opportunities to sow deeper into the lives of people we've been building relationships with.

• Seth turned five on January 7th. We celebrated his birthday with about 12 or 13 families at an indoor play place in our community. Many of the kids and parents present were from Seth's pre-school class or soccer team. Seth had a great time and Mom and Dad were able to deepen relationships with many parents.
• The day before Seth's party, Seth was invited to a party for one of his classmates. This afforded Dad the opportunity to stand around and connect with other parents while the party continued. These two opportunities, coupled with the article about ClearView that ran in the paper the week before, gave us great opportunities to share about our work and what we moved to the community to accomplish.
  
• I've had numerous opportunities to meet other parents during Seth's latest round of swimming lessons at the YMCA. It has been exciting to sit by the pool for a half hour with these other parents and have a natural avenue to start conversations with captive adults. In one instance, I met a friendly lady who attends another Grace Brethren Church in Columbus, lives in New Albany, and was very excited to hear about our ministry. This family is willing to talk with us about the possibility of hosting a Kids Club in their neighborhood this summer. I've been praying for "people of peace" in local neighborhoods that would allow us to work out of their yard to reach families with a one or three day program for kids and families (similar, but smaller in scale, to the Backyard Bible Club we ran last summer). When I told Melanie what we are doing, her comment was something like, "This area really needs a good, Bible-teaching church." I asked her if she runs into many people in her neighborhood that go to church and she answered, "I don't know of one of my neighbors that is connected in a local church." I left this conversation confirmed in the need for a new church here and our calling to accomplish that. Yeah, God!

God is working and leading us to pre-ordained conversations...working out His perfect plan to see this new, disciple-making, church launched in our community. Thanks for praying!