I'm talking with Kansas afterwards. I'd love to be able to do that and give you the opportunity to do that as well, too.

So, good morning, good morning, good morning. This morning, we are tackling something totally different, and if you're visiting with us, know that normally what we do on Sunday mornings,

we are in the midst of an expository study through the book of Genesis, and so we are just almost, we're not even finished wrapping up chapter 15 yet,

and I'll wrap up chapter 15 a few weeks down the road, because we're going to take a break from Genesis after this morning,

because the Lord has led me, we're going to tackle a three-week, well, I probably shouldn't even tell you,

because half of you have been wanting to show up when I tell you we're going to do a three-week series on stewardship, okay?

Not tithing, not money. I'm not going to talk about your money. I'm talking about true biblical stewardship,

and what true biblical stewardship looks like, okay? That's what we're going to be tackling for the next three weeks.

I've got three messages the Lord has given me and laid on my heart, and of those three messages, really only one talks about money.

So there you go. And I will tell you this, you get this for free, if you have a, you know, so many people say,

well, I hate coming to church. All the pastor does, he talks about money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money.

Okay, I'm telling you what, I don't care about your money. I don't need your money. The church doesn't need your money.

God doesn't need your money. God needs your faithfulness. God needs your faithfulness.

God gets your heart, gets your faithfulness. Guess what? You're all in. You're all in, okay?

So I could care about you, but that's between you and the Lord, all right?

So that's, are these rows, like, wider right here, or is it my imagination?

It's going to freak me out until we get it right next week. Okay, there we go.

So, sorry, I digress.

So what we're going to do, what we're going to do today is, a lot of churches, what they do is they say,

listen, we're going to give you a budget report.

And that's always fun, isn't it, right?

We talk about numbers.

And here's numbers, numbers, numbers.

Why do we talk about numbers?

Why do we talk about budgets in the life of a church?

Because we're being accountable and good stewards of what God is giving us, okay?

And we're showing you and we're trying to be as transparent as we can

with what God is allowing us to do in and through.

And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, I'm going to brag on you because I love this church.

I'm going to brag on you, but I'm telling you that this church of, we have about 200 people

that come on a Sunday morning, okay?

But this church of 200 does more ministry, more kingdom ministry than most 500 member churches do.

I'm telling you, you guys, you guys get it.

Your hearts get it, okay?

And I want to be able to unfold some things for you this morning, okay?

All right, so what we're doing is I'm not going to show you the budget plan, okay?

You want to talk numbers?

Numbers, you can meet with our finance committee.

You can meet the head of the finance committee right now.

It's Foster Lindbergh.

Foster, raise your hand.

There you go.

And Cynthia Johnson is our CPA.

Raise your hand, Cynthia.

Throwing you under the bus there, too.

There you go.

You want to talk numbers?

Be as transparent as you can with every number under the book.

So there you go.

There's every number you ever want to know.

But what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a three-year ministry plan.

A three-year ministry plan.

See these beautiful magazines?

We're going to go.

I'm not going to hand this to you right now because if I hand it to you,

you won't pay attention to a single word I say.

You'll be like, oh.

Oh, there's my picture.

I see my...

Okay, yeah.

Look at this.

How cute am I?

Yeah.

But here's what happens.

Here's what happens when churches provide budgets and we do budgets.

And this is something that we met as an elder body quite some time ago.

We've been praying about this.

We presented it to the finance committee.

Finance committee says, yeah, sounds like a good idea for us.

Let's tackle it and see how it goes, okay?

Usually what happens, I've been serving in church ministry for 20 some odd years,

but in every church I've ever been a part of, and I'm not throwing any churches under the bus,

but this is how we've always done it, and that is that your church budget looks just like your home budget, right?

It's an annual budget.

I mean, some of you are like, huh?

You don't have budgets at home?

You just...

See the pants.

You got the seat of the pants budget.

There you go.

Oh, that's why you're in trouble, okay?

But usually what happens in the church is we present to you and say,

oh, can we come up to you at the end of the year and say,

well, here's what the budget was, okay?

Here's what the budget was.

And guess what?

You guys, your giving, it came to right here.

You were so faithful, we came just above the church budget.

That's beautiful.

And now you know what happened, though?

The church, we only spent this much.

Look what good stewards we were.

Look at what good stewards we were.

Does that ring a bell to anybody?

And look what we saved the church.

Now, I am all about being a good steward.

I am all about being a good steward of what God gives us.

But what that does is it creates an environment of people who just manage funds

and they have no vision for ministry.

That's all you do is you manage funds in your little department.

And what happens is so I'm over here in the children's department

and I got my $5,000 a year budget for my children's ministry

and it's no...

So you know what? We're going to buy all those marshmallow things that we'll never use. Because we got to spend that $1,200 bucks and show them that we're really doing ministry.

What that does is it creates an environment of people that just manage stuff and no one really has vision. Nobody has vision. So what I propose to the elders and what we talked about and prayed about is we're going to take a three year ministry plan. Listen, most ministry worthwhile hardly ever gets accomplished within a 12 month period, does it?

Most of the... most of the big things that God lays on your heart, does it happen within overnight, over 12 months? No, it takes time. It takes work. It takes breathing. It takes God kind of rearranging some things as well sometimes, doesn't it?

You know, I thought God was leading here and I was obedient here, but wow, that was just bad pizza. It really wasn't God, okay?

So now I know I'm on the right track and God's leading me here and we're stirring, we're moving, we're doing these things, alright?

So it usually takes more than just 12 months.

So what we're proposing and what we're doing, what we're doing as a church is we're taking a three year ministry plan.

2019, 2020, and 2021. Three years.

That's why... so I told you, see, with my sermons, you guys know how good I am on titles.

That's why this is Vision 21. That's all I had.

21, 2021. There we go.

Vision 21.

So what's going to happen here is, just to give you a quick synopsis, then we'll kind of unfold some things.

Each year, 2019, 2020, and 2021, we absolutely will have a budget, okay?

There will be a budget for each of those three years.

There will be line items, okay?

There will be accountability.

It will be people who have to be accountable for whether or not they're spending, and this, that, and the other.

But what's going to happen to say, let's just use some easy numbers for you guys.

Let's say the children's ministry again.

Say their budget is $5,000 for 2019.

It's $6,000 for 2020.

And $6,500 for 2021.

That's what they want for that three year window.

And they're looking at doing some big things in 18 months.

They're really having some vision for these things.

What will happen, as long as our giving, our giving continues to be, we make budget, and you guys are faithful.

That little ministry that only has $5,000 the first year, and $65,000 the second.

And that first year, if they only spend $2,500 of that $5,000, usually that, everything gets wiped clean the next year.

But now, under this three year ministry plan, that additional $2,500 rolls over into the next year.

So now, they can look down the road and say, you know what?

Well, $5,000, we can't really do this really community event, do this, that, and the other.

I don't know.

I don't need to create vision for the children's ministry, okay?

They need to do that.

But now, all of a sudden, they have the $6,500 plus the other $2,500 that they didn't spend, okay?

Now, they have some money, and they have some things where they can really look forward and kind of have some vision for the days ahead and see about doing some things.

Does that make sense?

Now, at the end of three years, everything goes away.

And we might have to say, well, next year, we'll have a two-year vision because this three-year vision is just a lot.

We don't know.

We don't know.

But we understand, we understand that the environment that we currently have doesn't produce people to really be visionary and look down the road, all right?

And so what we've done is we've put together this brochure, this beautiful brochure that we spent a lot of time on, okay?

And we didn't spend a whole lot of money because my cousin has a print shop in Jacksonville and gave us a incredible discount.

So before you think, well, on Vision 21, we spent all the money on the magazine.

No, we did not.

No, we did not.

I don't know who talks that high, but if you talk that high, that was you, okay?

But what we have is we have something that, because I know not every one of you are visionary.

I can tell you, I can tell you visionary things, and you'd be like, yeah, I don't get it.

And I get that.

Not everybody can see.

Some of you got to hold something.

I need to, oh, now I see.

Now I understand.

Put something in your hands.

And these things are going to be available in the information.

We're going to hand them out to you, though, personally today.

But they will be available in the information table in the days ahead.

Greg is also going to put it on our website, so you can go and click, and it even opens like a little book on the website.

Wow, we're fancy.

We're fancy.

And so you can turn the pages and read it on there, so people will know.

And it also allows me in the days ahead, when I stand here from the stage, and I welcome visitors, and I can say, hey.

We'll see you next time.

until I finish talking, okay? But it puts something in people's hands that's tangible. That's tangible. On the front, we had the best picture we could think of. Somebody took a picture of the bridge. We liked it, so guess what? That looks like Brunswick, doesn't it? That's Vision 21. And it looked kind of mystical, like we had a vision there. Oh, it's mystical. So there we go. It's mystical. So there you go. All right, the next page. Next page. When you open it up, this right here just kind of tells a story about who we are, where we came as a church, where we're going, and what Vision

Vision 21 is all about. Let's people know. You don't have to sit there and read it all right now. I shouldn't, you know, I can't read the font. You'll get one in your hands, okay? But it tells who we are and how we began, this, that, and the other.

And I love what Kansas was saying, too, and that is, I never grow weary of telling our story that this was never meant to be a church.

God had the plan. We never had a plan for a church. We were just doing a Sunday night Bible study in an insurance room. And the next thing you know, it grew to where we had to rent a big room in the Holiday Inn.

We were in the Holiday Inn for a long time. And then all of a sudden, God said, no, you're going to be a church. We were like, we got people to pray and fast. We're like, okay, well, so we moved it from Sunday nights to a Sunday morning.

We said we were a church. We put the banner in the ground. And those people who were coming for the Sunday night Bible study that were going to church elsewhere, we told them, you stay where you are.

Jesus didn't say go into the nations and shift sheep. You know, if God's calling you, this is where we're going. We'd love to have you come along with us. But this is what we're doing, okay?

And so we were so high tech, guess what? We were in a little room doing our little things up on the wall up there with the words and everything and written two two-room suites for the children's ministry on Sunday morning when they didn't overbook the hotel.

When they overbooked the hotel, guess what? We had to take the kids out to the pool.

We prayed for good weather and parents would be like, my kids are out of the pool, you know?

And the kids are like, yeah, everyone want to be in kids' ministry then.

But that tells, it doesn't go into all that depth in there. I'm just telling you that's our story.

But that's part of our story in there and how it began.

The next page is just a table of contents. I'm going to go through some of this really quickly, okay?

Because you can read for yourself.

Then the next page is one of the most important things.

People.

It's people.

Some of you had your pictures taken that day that we asked you to take your pictures and couldn't fit you on there.

Some of them, your significant other asked that we not put your picture in there because it was a really bad picture of someone in the family and they're getting mad, okay?

But, you know what?

I want you guys to know that there's nothing more important than people, than hearts.

That's why Kansas is going halfway across the world, isn't it?

People.

People matter.

People matter, don't they?

And so, I want you to see that's our church family.

That's a great representation of just kind of who we are.

And some of you, it fits your personality there, too.

I see Angel and Jim.

They're just like, hey.

That's good, Jimbo.

All right.

Next page.

Here we go.

Vision 21.

It's a million dollars.

Let's just go ahead and get that out.

Everybody say, oh, no.

Yeah.

Now you don't have to say it again for three years.

Now, before you get too crazy, too crazy, our current church budget, transparency, we're

this massive church.

You know how much our budget is every year right now?

About $290,000.

So, the growth that we're stepping out in faith for, it is a step out of faith, but it's not

astronomical.

We understand that God wants us to have a step of faith, but we also have to have reason.

And there has to be a reason to it, as well, too.

So, what we have is we have percentages of growth.

A 7% increase in 2019, a 7% increase in 2020, and a 10% increase in 2021.

And the numbers presented in those actually come up to $1 million, because I added it like

50,000 times on my stupid calculator on the phone.

So, there you go.

That's how creative I am.

A million dollars.

Now, I'll keep it on that slide for a second.

There's a couple things we need to talk about.

I talked about the budget plan and how we'll have a rollover, giving people the chance to

really have some vision and doing some creative things with their departments and their, the

the, the, the, the procedure.

goes to, uh, so many different things. We're going to, we're going to show you a couple things here in a minute. I want you to see the heart of this church, okay? And, and, and 2021, we're one, 2021, we're stepping it up to 15%. We want to get to a, to be a church to where we get to the point where we are, we are 20 and 30% of our entire budget goes to outreach. It takes time. It takes time. Because we've had to, we, we, we, we, I shouldn't say we hope. The Lord has led us. The Lord has led us. The Lord has led us.

The Lord has led us to take some steps of faith. And, and sometimes you have to incur some debt to be able to grow. Okay? These facilities don't just happen by themselves. We've had, we've incurred some debt on some of these things, but we also have some plans to pay these things off. Included in this, included in these budgets, please hear me on this. This is important. We are putting in this, in these budgets, a, a, a debt reduction line item. So out of this also in your faithfulness, we're also not just paying the mortgage, but we're

We're trying to get debt. We're trying to get debt. We're trying to reduce our debt. So a minimum of anywhere from 10 to $15,000 a year goes towards debt reduction. Because we have, again, under the guise of transparency, I'm trying to get the finance committee to look at things. Our worship facility that's attached to the, to the, to the refuge, that's attached to the old offices, that's attached to the mission wing, that's attached to the five, five acres out back.

That's, that's, that's under one note. Okay? We just incurred a separate note for the office spaces there that, that give us more mission, mission, uh, space room. We'll talk about that in a second. But that right there is a much smaller note and a new note. And so my, my, uh, encouragement is let's go after this first and get that paid off because that's a low, that's a much lower number. Let's get that done. Boom. Now we concentrate on some of the big things. Okay?

So understand that within our budgets, as we're increasing things, one of the things that we're increasing is line items to reduce our debt. Because if, can you imagine what you could do as a church if you were completely debt free? And listen, if there's someone here today who's, who has a family member that's very wealthy and is about ready to pass away, make sure they understand how to spell rhema. Okay? Okay? We, money orders, checks, whatever. It's, it's, it's all good. We are,

we are a, we are a non-profit. They will get a tax deduction. Okay? All right. Let me just say that up front. Okay? There you go. And man, and who knows, you know, Kayon, maybe you got some friends in, in Jamaica you can, you can throw it out with us. Yeah. Some of those, some of those guys that fly back and forth that you don't ask questions about. Right? There you go. I'm just kidding. Just kidding. She's like, why are you picking on me? Um, one of the other things, one of the other things that we are going, Tom, will you come up here for

a second? One of the other things that we need to do as a church is we have, we have made things work for a long time with a lot of just part-time, part-time, part-time people. And so one of the

things that the elder body has, uh, has, uh, wanted to do, if you could use this microphone, that'd be very helpful. Um, and the elder body is making a

recommendation. I'm going to ask Tom, Tom, you can't get too much in front of the speaker or the feedback is, uh, this is coming from your elder body. And I want you to know

that one of the things that we need to do is to bring on, uh, an additional full-time staff person because

we need the help, uh, here at the church and with all the ministries we have going on.

So, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, yes, as Pastor said that we see the need for a full-time staff person

I think Curtis is age, about 15 years, and a lot of times, churches will go and put it out there in the church world to get staff members.

Well, we didn't have to do that because the elder body believes one of our own has been called a full-time ministry.

And that person is Taylor Owens, and the elder body wants to include Taylor, who is currently part-time, or full-time.

Dana Jury is...

I'm going to under-represent David's heart and David's feelings. Um, that Taylor has shown a great passion and love for our children, which flows from his passion and love for the Lord. He will do well. Our children need excitement about Jesus. They need an engaged teacher and leader who the Lord uses to draw children in themselves. They need someone that can afford the relationship, they can administer to their needs, and lead them in a relationship with Jesus.

Taylor, who is Taylor, who is Taylor, who is Taylor, who is Taylor. Parents need a partner and ministry who they can trust and have confidence, and one day in a strong relationship with Taylor, who will be that person.

For anyone that doubts his ability to lead a children's ministry, watch him on the floor with kids, they love him, and after all, they're in the presence of the lady that he loves. And of course, David is speaking about Taylor's involvement in our children's ministry, and he has brought stability to make it.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Those are two areas that I oversee, so I work very closely with Taylor.

And there's three things about Taylor you all need to know.

Taylor has a love for God.

He has a love for people.

And he has a call on his life.

And those things are evident.

I think those things are made evident.

What David said.

And on top of all of that, on top of his love for the Lord, his love for the people,

all that God has placed on his life, the dude gets saved up.

And so it's a perfect combination.

And all of our elders, Bobby, the foster, David, and myself, and I felt passionate about it as an elder.

We feel that we don't need to look for a full time mission for a guy that's the greatest in the world.

Amen.

Thank you, Tom.

Yes, sir.

Thank you.

Thank you, Tom.

I wanted that to be presented to you as well for some obvious reasons from the elder body and not from me.

I yes and amen that.

And, again, in the realm of transparency, this was a hard.

The rest of the elders were on board with selecting Taylor as part of ministry before I was.

Not that I don't love Taylor.

But I was always, I'm just scared of the whole nepotism thing.

I just, you know, he's my son-in-law of one week.

And so, you know, I'm getting used to liking him to begin with, you know, to be honest with you.

So there you go.

But the whole thing about it is, you know, I've seen scenarios where that was not healthy,

and I've seen scenarios when it does work.

And the bottom line is that Taylor has an undeniable call on his life, and we're looking for help.

And as we were praying through it as an elder body, Bobby Henderson, you know, he said to us, you know, one day,

because we had interviewed some people from Louisiana and some other things that we were looking to.

This was probably some time down the road.

Bobby says, you know, Pastor Curtis, you know, the word says that the Lord has equipped us for every good work.

And so if the Lord has equipped us, then what we need is within our boundaries.

We need to prayerfully look.

And we already knew, but it was just a validation.

And so we're excited at the possibility in January of bringing Taylor on board full time.

And Taylor will be over the children's ministry.

He will help lead our children's ministry and help love on the parents.

with the young adults in the college ministry as well. So there's a lot that we do that we just, we just, I just need some help here at the church. And we've been doing this as kind of a one, one pastor pony for a while. And we've grown. This is great book, all part of Growing Pains, but it's, it's a part of the big step that we're making in 2019 to increase our budget to get, get to the point where we need to bring someone on, on a full time basis. All right. So, amen.

Amen. So one of the, one of the things I want you to understand is within this budget, I told you that percentages that go to outreach in this community. We talk about this a lot, but I need you to understand how involved this church is in this, in the community. We are involved in this, in the community, both physically and financially. We get physically and financially.

Here, on the next page are some of the, begin some of the ministries. I'm not going to go through all these things. But I also want you to know, as we go through these, this booklet is already outdated.

We have four other, either individuals, because Kansas isn't listed in here, Pioneers is, but, but there are four other ministries, isn't that correct, Tom, that we are now involved in and will be involved in in 2019 that didn't even make it in here, okay?

So I want you to understand that we, we know what it means to be, to, to look, live in love beyond ourselves, beyond ourselves, all right?

So we have Jim, Jim ministry right there. So we got the, the Imperials that we're supporting over there, part of our church family that we sent out to Germany.

And they're, they're ministering to the, to the refugees, Syrian refugees over there. And we, we stay in contact with, we have Pioneers, next, next one.

We have Doors Ministry in Uganda that we're, that we're a part of. We have Jubilee Kids that we're a part of in Haiti.

So it's both locally and nationally. Next page, we have the Remedy Project, which is a local outreach project here for men and women with substance abuse and, and those types of things.

We open up our facility on Mondays, give them a free place to, to meet. And they meet on Mondays at, at six o'clock over, over in the refuge.

Great, great ministry there. Team effort, student missions. Team effort, student missions.

That's one of the reasons why we purchased the, the office space over here and gave up our old office space to create an overflow room because we, we don't have enough space

to, to house all the students that want to come here and stay here and, and work during the summer.

So this is a great problem to have. So what we do is we, we, we house approximately 415 currently students the months of June and July

that come from churches all over the, the, not just the Southeast, but as far away as, like this past year we had Pittsburgh and we had Iowa, we had Indiana.

They come to stay here for a week and they work in our community. We work with them.

We have a girls dorm, a guys dorm, a staff dorm, and now the old office is going to turn into an overflow, uh, uh, dorm to where it's just going to be a single gender.

There's no shower in it, but they can walk next door and shower, but it allows team effort to give us maybe 15 to 25 more students per week that we can send out and work in this community.

And so again, and these kids come in and they're, they're painting homes. They're, they're fixing up, uh, home repairs.

They're building wheelchair ramps. They're doing things within the life of this community and they're serving ministries, uh, in this community.

That's with team effort. Uh, the next page, his ministries downtown where Bill Thomas downtown doing a phenomenal job.

Tom's on the board of, uh, uh, advisors there faithful love, uh, faithful love. Judy Riccio is part of that and faithful love is, is, uh, uh, has a house downtown as well too,

where they get help get women off the street that have, uh, addictions and prostitution and be able to love on these women to understand that there is an answer to, to the choices that they're making.

And there's a better way. And Jesus is the answer. And so, but that take that, that takes building relationships.

And these ladies are down there doing the hard part. Uh, next is Skylark. It used to be, uh, what it used to be again?

Karenette. Yeah. Thank you very much. Everyone's from pretty, pretty much with the, um, the pregnancy care center there.

And so then we have CIA sports. The next one is, uh, the good news club. Okay. And we, we currently can't have a, a, a, a slot in every school.

So we concentrate.

kingdom work we see god's hand involved in these ministries and it's the old henry blackaby uh

challenge from the experiencing god bible study find out where god's working and join him we don't

have to go create these ministries there are already people who've created them they said we

have a need we're doing this and we say we see the god's fingerprint on this and so we're involved

with it and so these are how we put these in the brochure so that you'll know how you can be

involved as well too maybe you'll read about it i never knew anything about that how do i get

involved in that i'm glad you asked we need more help i get you know what i i get off early on

oh it's this good news club all they do is uh kind of love on some kids and read them but i can do

amen we need some help with that we need some help with that so next picture next picture in the

brochure i wanted you to see this is where our little church is involved this is the map i know

most of it's uh concentrated in the brunswick area but this is where your your heart is involved the

heart of this church is involved all these areas so you can look at that i'm going to fly through this

um next picture moving forward together this is our back five acres jill's aunt who lives in france

did this drawing for us um jason did some drone pictures for me and i sent them to her in france

and she made the drawing of this and so when we finish at the end to end of the service today

uh we did this almost a year ago we're going to walk out this back door even if you got to just walk

back in just we're going to make everybody walk nobody leaves where's my security team this morning

there's ben nobody leaves to that door ben everybody walks out this door i want you to see

the back five acres and where we are at this point in time but i want you to see moving forward

together i know not all of you can have vision okay some of this stuff's already in place but this is

what we're doing with the five acres we didn't we could have built something back there for ourselves

you know a building a big kid's room a big something of let's put a gymnasium back there we don't need

a gymnasium there are gymnasiums that take up space all over this this town that don't get used okay

but what we what we are doing is we're putting together over here um on the side over there a

community uh orchard over there all citrus trees mr lonnie and i just went down to uh just south of

ocala and we have 44 citrus trees that are in the ground right now now most of them are only this tall

but you know what you got to start somewhere okay but we've already we've with your finances and how

you've given we and so the the citrus trees some of them are a little bit bigger okay but we have

44 trees and in a year's time next next season we will have some real fruit okay from those trees okay

so what are we going to do with all that fruit i'm glad you asked you're going to be you're going to

meet in a few weeks one of my very good friends her name is beth van der beck and some of you might

know beth van der beck but beth is the ceo of morning star youth estate right now she's doing a

phenomenal job of changing things around at the youth estate on 99 i don't know if you're familiar

with that they house about probably anywhere from 50 to 60 children on a regular basis and these kids

um they come from some well we have children children here they come from some broken places

okay and and morning star is trying to do a really good job of loving on them and there's it's a state

funded situation and so their income is just they don't have a lot of money so guess what they don't guess

what if you don't have a lot of money guess what gets uh skimped on good food so they don't eat

healthy and have you how many of you know that if you don't you're not eating healthy it affects your

brain development as well too and so we are going to the first year because we'll just have fruits

we're going to take all the fruits and we're going to bless them with all the fruits that we're going

to be able to get from these from these trees and and she was about in tears she wants to come and

say a few words in a few weeks and she's going to share with you guys and so because we are

living and loving beyond ourselves back there and so in and then this coming summer we're going to

have team effort help us we're going to build probably maybe three or four i don't know just

some raised garden beds back there as well too why not just put a garden in the ground i'm glad you

asked because the soil doesn't i is not always conducive for what you need to grow so when a raised

garden bed we can control the soil and it's a smaller area and for

we're all

trees get a little bit bigger and we have we'll probably have more fruit than we know what to do with with 44 trees out there to be honest with you but you know what that's a great problem to have all right we had about 15 pieces out there but between myself and Lonnie we picked most of those off and Caroline ate five of them in one day so there you go the other thing we're looking at doing out there we do we already have the basketball court out here and the kids are using it during the summer plus we have we have a group of Hispanics that live

um uh probably several blocks so i'm trying so hard to get them to come to church but they usually come here on the evenings and they bring about seven to twelve cars they all put they bring their whole families out here and they play basketball out here i walked out there a few weeks ago and they thought i was going to run them off i'm like no i just want to say thank you because you guys always pick up your water bottles and you don't leave trash sitting out here thank you for um doing it doing that they keep promising me they keep out here are you the are you the preacher i said yes yes we're gonna come i'm like you're saying that because i'm standing right here

one day one day one day they will come i believe that we just continue to love on them okay most of them it's hard to probably for them to understand english and i talk really fast sometimes so there you go but we got the basketball courts are already out there you see the there's a little retention pond you'll see out there we have our hopes and dreams we're already pouring water in two hours a day into that pond we've been told that we can raise the level of that pond approximately three feet now why would we want to put water in there well we're going to

raise it because we want to raise it because we want to build a walkout dock i'll get randy lewis to help me on that he's really good with docks on that we'll build a walkout dock onto onto the pond out there and then for eight hundred dollars once we have a little bit more water in there for eight hundred dollars the state will come and stock that that pond there's already fish in it there's bass and stuff in that in that pond but we'll we'll put um um the state will stock it for us and then we'll plant it so that it'll be on a weekend where we can have hot dogs and hamburgers

and then what we'll do is we'll uh we'll have a mass plea to special needs children and get the families out here get the dads out here to be able to give them a cane pole and let them just fish with their kids these kids who would never ever i mean you stock it out there you throw a hook in there you know you'll catch something you know these you know you don't have to be a fisherman

but just another way of giving back to the community to to begin to uh build relationships with the community to show people that we care and and are we doing it so that someone will come to church here no no if they want to then that's great but we want them to know that they matter that they matter and what a great opportunity for a dad to come out here to a safe place with their son or daughter and take them fishing and have a hot dog and run out in the field

and just have some fun and get a break from life and so we want to be able to do that we want to be able to build a couple of pavilions out there as well too so that yeah we can have some outdoor things as well for us but it's really primarily for a team effort during the summer to give those kids a chance to have a place to go outside and to eat and for different community events out there to be able to have different wedding events and stuff like that i know

uh um i think uh derrick and becca were talking about under the tree out there in may doing their doing their wedding out there as well too so being able to do those things like that again we put that on there so that you can see you can see in the days ahead what could be okay all right what time is it 12 oh we're late okay here we go we're gonna wrap this up the next page the next page is uh vision 21 it's it's disciple making okay this is a real important

page because it gives you a rundown about uh some of the key ministries here in our church

children's ministry young adult ministry hospitality ministry the student ministry and home groups home groups home groups home groups you want to get connected home groups uh see taylor see brandon um these are some of the things you're gonna hear about in the next few weeks

um the next page shows you our core values these these are these are huge for us and uh i really want you to know that these are our core values that and we go through this on our foundations class uh hold on before you go to the next one we're just going to show the next one really really quickly because miss luann doesn't like how big her picture is on the page but there you go on the next on the next next slide we have miss luann there we go but it's a test

miss luann's just given it

miss luann's just given it

miss luann's just given it

miss luann's just given it

miss luann's just given it

um and we put my cell number on the back of this thing right here so everybody in the world has my cell number so there we go all right so there we go so i'm gonna casey's fired uh this week from putting my let me let me go sorry casey i'm just i'm just kidding um as the uh as as a worship team comes up we're gonna close out this morning i know i've given you a lot of information i've gone through a lot of things really really quickly

and um but proverbs says that it that without vision people perish amen without vision people perish and um which is is josh in the back serving this morning yeah grateful for josh and summer um i was i wanted to read a passage of scripture from um habakkuk and that's one of his

favorite books so i was i was like josh why don't you just read this yeah he loves this book so but in line with what we're talking about today the old testament prophet the minor prophet says that look among the nations and see and wonder and be astounded for i am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told god is god is giving your elders and your leadership a vision for the days ahead

we're not just we're not just trying to piece together something and keep a church afloat i don't want to be a i've been a part of a church like that before

i i i got no time for it i got no time for it life is short

and these are important days and so what we're doing today is giving you an invitation to come with us

come with us because none of this is possible without you

none of it's possible without you but that's the beauty of it is you get to be involved and not what

we're doing but what god is doing because god is speaking to our hearts we're not making this stuff

up and trying to think think of creative things to do you know the spirit of god is leading us

and and and and it goes on to say that he says write the vision

the lord tells the prophet write the vision make it plain on tablets make it plain on tablets

taylor get your people up get your people up who are going to help you this morning hand these things

out they're all sitting right there we're going to hand these out to you and and and know that i'm

going to come back up after this last song and we're going to we're going to dismiss out this door so

you can look even if you stay out for two seconds it's 62 degrees outside it's warm enough now so no

whining caitlin write the vision make it plain on tablets so he may run who reads it so he may run

who reads it for the vision for still the vision awaits its appointed time

if it seems slow listen if it seems slow wait for it

for surely it will come it will not delay it will not delay father we just come before you in the name

of jesus and we just ask that these plans be your plans we trust that these plans be your plans

give us a heart for people lord give us a heart beyond ourselves thank you thank you thank you for

the people that that make up the heart of rhema community church thank you lord for giving the

elder leadership a three-year vision of where we're going in the days ahead and we are trusting and we

are believing you for every single thing that we need lord we know you've already written every check

we know that you've already you've already taken care of every need that we have to make your vision

complete and god i just pray that you would just shock us and give us a vision beyond what we even

think we understand right now i thank you for how you have given vision to a young lady and i thank

you so much for just the heart of kansas today and i'm just going to ask lord kansas if you just come

up and i just want to just as the song is going on if you feel led to pray over and with kansas come

and join me know that i love you know that i love you know that you're special

you

you