Cherry Garcia

Hello all! Now I’m almost officially a pro at not posting anything for months! Actually I should use “weeks” instead of “months” because it has only been two months. anyways….

Just thought I should drop in a note and let everyone know that I’m still alive and well. A lot has been going on since we’ve moved to Colorado Springs. Our church began services November 9th and since then has been doing really well. With only one other full-time staff member, things can get pretty busy for us. But the excitement of hasn’t died off!

No one really understands what kind of things happen to a beginning church, the phases we go through, unless you experience it for yourself. We spent four weeks having services with previous church members. But now that they have seen what we are doing, some of them were unfortunately not as thrilled and ended up leaving (phase 1). But we had a lot of visitors come on the launch date and a majority of them have continued coming! We also had some people talk about receiving salvation!! And that is what we are excited about! With all the other stuff that has been going on around here, we’ve hit the “sophomore slump” (phase 2)….meaning we got ready for the launch and it came and left…..now what? We’re now spending time working on outreach to the community. (Any ideas on outreach?)

We truly believe God has blessed us as we’ve begun this ministry. It’s been awesome seeing God work in the lives of people and in our lives as we trust Him. One of the things that’s difficult to do while beginning a new church is remaining focused on God. We hear lots of people talking about loving God and loving people (which is our motto – Serious about God. Crazy about people.) and we are supposed to do that. But sometimes it’s difficult to keep God as our main focus when we are trying to reach people. The desire we have to bring people to a relationship with God can sometimes get in the way of what is supposed to be our main focus – God. We might have a tendancy to want to please people so they’ll keep coming or want to come back. But trying to please people is fruitless and a waste of time.

So we’ve revamped, refocused our energies on pleasing God above all others. And there’s that verse in Luke 12 that says, “Seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.” Realizing that our main focus needs to be on the first and greatest commandment (loving God with all we are) and people come second has really helped our outlook on ministry here. We’ve basically given up trying. Now we are making sure that we are pleasing the Lord.

Well, the reason I’ve given such a title to this post is because I’m currently drinking a Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia milkshake. I’ve tried the double fudge brownie thing and that is just good. But this drink tastes more like milk infested cold medicine. Anyways…

Keep Him first!