Seeds Planted

What I've learned about Church Planting over the last three years is that you sow seeds in new ground, and it takes a while to get a harvest. But I have always believed that the harvest is coming. This week we saw some of our first seeds sprout. I just thought is was so cool I wanted to chronicle the event.

Saturday I checked our analytics provider on severnriverchurch.com and saw that several first time guests had check in on the site. In fact, some of them had spent seven or eight minutes on the site. (That may not seem like a big deal, but by web standards it is a pretty thourough review.) So Sunday morning during my pre-service prayer I checked in on the analytics again and noted that there had been activity on the site that morning. I suddenly had a feeling that we would be having a guest for the morning.

I went into the hall where Diane was greeting, and said to her, "I'm expecting a guest this morning." In addition to the web hits I have been handing out invite cards. (Wallet's empty had to reload yesterday.) And within two minutes a new couple came in the doors. Praise the Lord! We had a great morning getting to know our new friends, and it was a blessing to minister to them.

Let me explain how the seeds of their coming were planted, watered, and given increase. Three years ago I asked Matt Boyer to come and help me plant the church. When Matt was here he discovered an employee at the local paper went to High School with him. She put us in contact with John Singleton a contributor to the paper. John wanted help with Video capture and edit for a short film his sons were making, and Matt had the expertise so they connected and built a friendship. John came out and covered our Compassion Journey which is where he and I connected. He wrote a gracious article at that time, but has contacted me a couple times since. Most recently was three weeks ago when he asked me to write a 200 word post for the paper. I wrote it, edited it, and edited it some more to get it down to the limit and submitted it. Last week this couple was reading the paper, saw the article, and came to check out the church.

That's quite a route to take to connect people to a great church, but God's plan sometimes takes longer than we expect, is harder than we plan on, and goes in a different direction that we bargained for. But God's plan is always going to bring a harvest.

--Ben