Founder's Day Weekend A Win!

Please join me in giving a big shout out to God for a great Founder's Day weekend (May 16-17)!

On Saturday, God brought just the right amount of people to hand out over 1,400 frisbees during the parade. Through a great brainstorm from God late last week, we decided to have an impromptu pizza party at our house on Friday night and attach our invite post cards to the frisbees. This allowed us to only hand out one thing instead of two during the parade. Obviously, this cut our labor in half and allowed us to get out all the frisbees sufficiently (without holding up the whole parade). It was fun to see children clamoring for something they wanted- one of our frisbees! This opened the door to give out invites to our Sunday gathering...and more importantly keep communicating to the community that we are here, we care, and we want to be a force for demonstrating the love of Jesus in practical ways.

After the parade, we hosted a booth at the Founder's Day festival. We again sponsored "Chulo" the clown (much to hundreds of children's delight!), painted hundreds of faces, and gave away many balloons. The most important part of this time was numerous positive interactions with people from the New Albany area. ClearView is becoming a fixture at community events...and people are noticing. One man said, "You guys are so community minded, I think that is really neat." A friend of mine commented, "ClearView has sparked some healthy controversy in our church leadership about why we are not more involved in the community." Perhaps God will use us to spark further mission and draw others out to where people are already gathered.

On Sunday, we hosted our May key gathering (a rallying point for our team to work extra hard at inviting guests) around the theme God's Stimulus Package: Real Hope For Turbulent Times. We had a great time together with 55 people in attendance. This is the largest gathering in ClearView's short history. We had great turn out from our team and several guest families. The mood was great, we enjoyed a good time of worship together, and people seemed to respond well to a talk from God's Word based out of Matthew 6:25-34 where Jesus talks specifically on worry and how to overcome it through focusing first on God's agenda for our lives.

Specifically, I am thankful to God for:

• Our ClearView team. These are busy weekends...many of our people gave significant time and even responded on short notice to help us assemble frisbees/invites. They are moving our work forward with less and less dependence on outside help.
• Friends of ClearView that came to assist- friends from our neighborhood, other local churches, and even the mom of one of Seth's schoolmates! Special thanks to Jen, Emily, and Beth (each came from out of town and painted faces for 5 hours!).
  
• Very positive interactions with people along the parade route and at the festival. Each appearance at community events seems to spark deeper interaction with people we've met through various contact making streams- coaching, school involvement (PTO), community events planning, etc.
• A strong Sunday at ClearView. Our team was encouraged and I believe God was pleased.

Would you keep praying with us for spiritual movement from our involvement in the community? Only God can move someone from parade contact to Christ follower. But, we long to be part of that journey with those God calls. Pray with us for movement...