The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

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Category: Golf Course Road Church (Page 18 of 26)

All That Noise

November 2, 2022 / / 0 Comments

By God’s grace, our GCR Church gave $6,151,300 last Sunday in cash, checks, and pledges to fund our congregational emphasis on transformation and mission – that’s more than two-million-dollars above our goal! The money and pledge cards continue trickling in this week and I’m assuming by the time you’re reading this letter the total might be closer to $6.2-million!

Praise God for his faithfulness and gracious provision! The supreme generosity of our church family means all the Breakthrough initiatives are fully funded. Thank you so much for your deep faith in our Lord, your confidence in our vision, and your commitments to the mission at Golf Course Road.

Allow me to remind all of us that when we give our money to the Lord, when we invest our dollars and dimes in the Kingdom of God, it’s not gone. The tray goes down the pew and your check is in the tray and the tray disappears into a counting room and your check gets deposited with a bank. But it’s not gone.

It’s like a pinball machine. Whatever you give works like a pinball machine.

You know, you’re playing pinball and that little silver ball is moving right down the middle, headed for the bottom, and it looks like it’s lost. The ball is gone. The game goes dark. It’s over.

But then you hit the flipper. That blessed flipper! And the ball pops up and now it’s bouncing and pinging all over the place. It touches off an exciting set of strobe lights over there. It bangs into a bunch of noisemakers over here. It gets a bonus ball and some extra points up there. That ball is just going and going and bouncing and beeping and buzzing and there’s excitement and electricity and energy…!

Almost out of nowhere! How cool!

Because of Breakthrough, some of our folks at GCR put really large sums of money into the plate on Sunday. Because of Breakthrough, some of our people put ten dollars into the plate when they haven’t given money to church in years. Or never.

Your money’s not gone. You’re throwing it into God’s pinball machine and it’s about to come into contact with that flipper. Now you just watch what God’s going to do with it!

Everything you do for God makes a difference. It bounces and pings all over eternity.

Even one cup of cold water given in the name of Jesus makes a lot of noise in heaven.

Peace,

Allan

Breakthrough Sunday!

October 31, 2022 / / 0 Comments

The goal was to give four-million-dollars to jump start our vision and mission at the GCR Church. Four-million-dollars over the next two years would fund our Gospel work with our five local missions partners, adopt three new church plants, send one hundred of our church members on mission trips, remodel our worship center, restructure our adult Bible classes, start twelve new small groups, and host a dozen Christian Practices retreats. The goal was four-million-dollars. We prayerfully and worshipfully expected God to provide four-million-dollars.

Turns out, God thinks we can do more than we think we can.

By the grace of God, the generosity of the GCR Church resulted in an outpouring of more than six-million-dollars yesterday to fund our ambitious vision. The cash and pledges that were offered yesterday totaled more than $6.1-million dollars, and the number is growing by the hour with every check that’s delivered to the church offices today and every pledge that’s made online.

Six-million-dollars!

Yesterday’s Breakthrough results are the culmination of many things: a lot of hard work by a great ministry team, congregational confidence in the leadership of our church and the vision from our God, and the amazing grace of our merciful Lord. Our God is moving among us. God was ready for this church to take this step, he is ready for us to move on this. God’s timing was and is perfect with this in so many ways. I’m convinced he was always going to do this again with Golf Course Road, and I feel blessed by God and privileged by him to be in the middle of it with our church family together. All of us at GCR should feel very favored by the Lord to be in the situation we’re in together.

We are a ten talent church. We’re in the upper tier in the amount of gifts, money, resources, and blessings we have received from our Father. And that comes with serious responsibilities to God and to his mission. He’s given us ten talents, and he expects us to use them. That’s a heavy burden to consider and a tremendous opportunity to undertake with no fear and great faith.

Praise the Lord for days like yesterday and the obvious outpouring of his grace on us. May his will be done in and through his people at GCR just as it is in heaven.

Peace,

Allan

Fun Club

October 19, 2022 / / 0 Comments

As part of GCR’s “Breakthrough,” our church is partnering with Emerson Elementary School to provide needed resources and support for the teachers, staff, and the 420 students there and their families. We’re planning for our church members to serve as crossing guards and cafeteria aids on campus, to stock and organize the Care Closet, and to staple papers and make copies for the teachers. We’re providing teacher lunches and weekend food packages for the kids. We’re putting together a “Fist Bump Crew” to greet the students as they enter the campus on Monday mornings. And we’re committed to completely renovate their interior courtyard, to provide a beautiful space where kids can eat breakfast or lunch with their parents and where we can read with them through Fun Club.

Fun Club is a program through which an adult or two eats lunch once a week with a group or four or five students and reads to them during the meal. You eat with this small group of kids, you laugh together and bond a little bit, and you read. That’s it.

Our children’s minister, Kristin Rampton, and our oldest daughter, Whitney, are already plugged into Fun Club at Emerson. This picture is of Whitney reading to a small group of second-graders earlier today. Does that warm your heart, or what?

Are you telling me you can’t do something like this once a week? Don’t tell me. Tell Whitney.

Peace,

Allan

GCR at ACU

October 15, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Road trip! We jumped into J.E.’s Suburban Thursday morning and headed east to Abilene for some team-building and the restructured Summit. Cory, Kristin, Ryan, J.E., and I were eager to hang out with groups of ministers in our own areas of interests, to reconnect with old friends, and to hear Andrew Root, the theologian and author of last year’s “Churches and the Crisis of Decline.” But a beautiful side benefit was the bonding a group experiences on even a two-hour road trip.

You can learn a lot about people when you get them together away from their regular day-to-day contexts: the extremes Ryan goes to in planning every detail of our adventure, Cory’s shaving habits, Kristin’s chewing gum obsession, J.E.’s questionable tastes in music. The things that make us laugh and Ryan’s “bit” about Jerry Seinfeld not being that funny. The things that stir our hearts to action. The love we share for Christ and God’s people at Golf Course Road. The pressures and stresses that come with congregational ministry in a time like ours. The varying levels of concern we shared about the lack of a good late night ice cream place in Abilene.

 

 

 

 

 

We were overjoyed to see some of our GCR kids who are attending school at ACU. We ran into sweet Callie Doke and her boyfriend, Gabe, after chapel at the newly remodeled Moody Coliseum. The super-fun Emma Daman drove us around campus in her golf cart with supreme skill and professionalism – five stars! I was blessed to see a couple of our Central kids from our church in Amarillo: Chelsea Flow and her new husband, Riley, who are now ministering in San Antonio, and an exuberant Eli McCall who seems to be truly loving his Wildcat life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was great seeing Todd Lewis and Lance Parrish. Todd and I served on the city council together in Marble Falls a million years ago and worshiped and served and raised young children together in that wonderful Marble Falls church during the ’90s. Lance and I began our congregational ministries together at Legacy – he was our Junior High Youth Minister and I was a first time preacher in 2007. I enjoyed sitting at the feet of Randy Harris again. It was at once terribly sobering and wonderfully encouraging – just like every session with Randy. I was thrilled to hug Judy Siburt’s neck and catch up with Carson Reed. I ran into Jake Perkins and Wes Crawford. It was really good to be in a familiar place with so many familiar people, worshiping together, talking about ministry together, praying together. Our gracious Lord has been very kind to put so many of his best people in front of me over the past 20 years, to walk with me and help me, to teach me and encourage me in this task for which I’ve been divinely called, but for which I am so horribly ill-equipped. None of that is lost on me. Some of the very brightest and best people in our Christian tribe have poured themselves into me over the years. I have been highly favored by our God. And I am forever shocked and eternally grateful.

 

 

 

 

 

Back to our ministry gang at GCR. Another tremendous blessing for me from our Lord. Carrie-Anne and I have been in Midland now for about 14-months. That’s long enough to learn enough about where we’ve landed, the people we’re with, and what’s probably ahead. And it’s good. It’s very good. It was just two hours in a Suburban to Abilene there and back, a few meals together, an impulsive hour at Minter Park, and some conversations about ministry and our current culture. But it confirmed my love for this group our God has put together at Golf Course Road. We’re committed to the vision and direction the Lord has mapped out for our church, to the relationships within our ministry team and our families, and to working and serving together in Midland, Texas by his grace. God can work with a ministry team like ours. And he is.

Peace,

Allan

Christian Practices

October 13, 2022 / / 0 Comments

A word to our Golf Course Road congregation here in Midland as we commit to more of the ancient traditions like dwelling in the word, lectio divina, praying Scripture, borrowed prayers, imaginative reading, and memorizing and reciting the Bible. These spiritual disciplines give us a variety of tried and true ways to engage our God through Word and Prayer. These are the well-worn paths to experiencing Scripture and prayer with all our senses, not just our brains and intellect. I’m excited for us to read and pray together with our hearts and emotions, too.

As we get into this, be aware that a lot of people who talk and write about spirituality and being spiritual do so in terms of silence and solitude. That’s the focus, the general theme that runs through all of it. Some people who talk about Christian practices and write about spiritual disciplines seem to value silence and solitude above all other practices. They value silence over sound. They value solitude over community. They prioritize the authority of tradition over the challenge of freedom and prize predictability and rule over spontaneity and experiments.

I would suggest a balance.

I would invite you to try all of it, to experiment with a variety of ancient Christian practices and new Christian ways of paying attention to what God is doing in your life. You don’t have to be an expert in any of them or in all of them. I would only suggest that we value all of these practices and explore them together as important places where God is at work.

Peace,

Allan

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