Big Fred's Bytes - March Edition
Greetings,
I have quite a bit of information to share with you today across quite a range of different subjects.
Thank each and every one of you for your prayers and support during this past month as our family has dealt with such an emotional month. I could fill this letter with great detail on how God has been good to us through it all but I will save that for other opportunities. Praise be to God in all that we have endured.
Many have shared their excitement with the advancement of our video recording project. We have seen several pieces of this project start to show up, and I look forward to bringing this to completion in the next couple of months. Until then, you will see frequent changes from week to week as we work through accommodating the installation. Not to worry though, we are down to some final pieces that should be in place before Easter services. Many thanks to the installation team that has dedicated endless hours of work to bringing this whole thing along. We could not have done it without you guys.
We are working to train media team members in many new areas of service. So, if you can commit to an aggressive in-house training session and are willing to come early, stay late, and serve during the mid week, we may have a spot for you. You will want to speak with Pastor Chris or Jeff Daily for more details.
The Petrolia Campus goes to Sunday mornings next week. God has truly blessed His team in this new campus launch, and they are ready to take the leap into full Sunday services. There is still room for you to be part of this launch team if you are willing to make a consistent commitment to worship weekly at this campus, as well as be a part of the team that brings ministry into the Petrolia Valley. This is our own mission field that you can serve in and still get the comfort of your own home each night. What an awesome opportunity to help build a church which you can count on to bring the Gospel into the lives of that community each week. Pastor Fred will be the one to speak with regarding these opportunities – we need children teachers, media team members, band members and singers, hosts and greeters, building care volunteers and much more. We have several fun outreach events already coming together in the Northern Butler, Northern Armstrong, and Southern Clarion counties for this summer.
Our mission trips are starting to take shape for 2010. Details are sketchy, yet here is what we know. The Haiti trip will likely be very late in 2010 if in 2010 at all. There are many complications that these recovery efforts have been challenged with, and Samaritan’s Purse is not in the position to be receiving teams at this point. We want to make sure that our effort to help is a blessing to the people there and not an increased burden. Until they have some preliminary work covered that will account for all of the logistical issues, we have been asked to patiently wait. So we will honor that knowing they will need help for many years to come in this country, and at the right time, Harvest will stand ready to send more help. The generous donation that you already provided was very valuable to the residents of Haiti. We will share more information on this as we receive it.
We are moving forward with planning the Guatemala trip at the end of July. If you are interested in being considered for participation on this team, please mark your connect card soon indicating that you want more information. We will be having a meeting soon to provide additional details to those people.
HCC has already sent one of our own to Jamaica in February to review a ministry there, and we plan to have a very small delegation visit some ongoing projects in Mexico in a couple of months. We are continuously looking for the right opportunity to offer Harvest members a chance to go into the world and serve others by bringing the Gospel to them while helping in other small ways to impact their lives physically. I encourage you to be in prayer for what God may be calling you to do in His service.
HCC supports missionaries around the world and more details regarding who and how are available on our website mission pages. In closing, and while on this subject, I just want to thank each of you for your support of these worldwide projects already. Fourteen (14) percent of our total offering each week is set aside to mission work.
How could I mention missions and not include the Perspectives class? It has truly been such a powerful time to focus on God’s plan for worldwide evangelism. These speakers have dedicated their lives to the Lord’s work around the world, and we are blessed to spend some evenings reflecting on the Word of God as it relates to how He is doing that. If you missed this one, you missed something. Just talk to anyone in the class for more information.
We are very encouraged by the 120 men and women that attended the Focus on Marriage conference and look forward to how that may enrich their relationships starting right now. This was not just a class to watch; it was a time of sharing plans on how to apply this conference to your daily lives.
I have much more to share, but need to wrap it up. I saved the best for last. As many of you know,Community Groups are such an exciting part of developing friends and growing in our relationship with Christ and His church. We have some amazing testimonies that we will share with you soon regarding how community groups have impacted so many of our people. We are looking to improve upon this in a way that provides even more of you with opportunities to enrich your lives and your relationship with Christ and His church. In doing so, we have been researching many ways to help improve this for you. Your elders have considered this and have agreed to place a pastor in the leadership role of Community Groups for several reasons. This will serve the groups better and help facilitate the development of additional opportunities in this area. We have realigned the current staff in a manner that will allow for a flow of duties more consistent with this goal. At this time, Pastor Fred will begin serving as Petrolia Campus Pastor and Pastor of Community Groups. In addition, Pastor Rodney will serve as the Pastor of all Children and Youth Ministries. We think that both of these changes will bring a positive impact to our ministries. Pastor Rodney has many years of experience in both children and youth level ministry and will help build consistency within our children’s movement through all the school age years. We will have much more information to share on both of these transitions in the coming weeks, but for now, know that we are working very hard to serve all of these ministries. We look forward to these ministries only getting better in the process.
Big Fred Neal
Executive Pastor
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