Beautiful Summer Day

July 8, 2008

One of the “problems” with living in Seattle is that the sheer beauty of it can get distracting.  It is constantly green, with changing skies and light that hits at that perfect angle - making the evenings and early mornings just buttery wonderfulness.  Being this far north does mean that the sun is up at a ridiculously early hour, filtering through our blinds and waking me up.  What a small price to pay to live in such a wonderful place.

Hello, world.

It’s been several months since I last blogged.  Part of it was a lifestyle that went from busy to crazy-busy as I juggled ministry, work and family.  Part of it was that things have changed a lot over those past few months.  When I last blogged, I was working 20-60 hours a week as an IT consultant, getting a stealth-mode startup up and running.  That was actually a lot of fun - I enjoyed the people and most of the work I did.  That contract came to a close last month, and I transitioned into full-time employment at Crosspoint.  What a blessing.

Full-timer

I had hoped that within a year or two my position at the church would expand into a full-time gig, but late in the winter our Assistant Pastor gave notice that he would be going off to Gordon-Conwell this fall to marry the woman of his dreams (Hi Sarah K!) and pursue a further research degree.  With his upcoming departure and the general needs that existed anyway, the leadership here decided to just take me on full-time in May so that we could transition his responsibilities to me.

So what do you do?

My previous role was to “Site Pastor” the Greenlake congregation.   This means that I had primary pastoral responsibility for the ~200 people who call Crosspoint-Greenlake their church home.  Leading worship on Sundays, holding meals, visiting people, counseling, etc…a lot of good hands-on stuff.  I also took on some Small Groups responsibilities and Christian Ed stuff.  It was a nice, full job…but now it has had Youth Ministry, oversight of the Mercy Teams, all of Christian Ed, all of the Small Group ministry and many other roles (for both the Lynnwood and Greenlake sites) tossed onto it.  It’s a lot, but we have amazing lay leadership who make a lot of those ministries “easy” to oversee.

I’m excited

Things have gone much better than I could have hoped.  Sarah and I are both very excited about our first 7 and a half months here.  There is a real feeling of “contentment”, that we can just focus on the ministry at hand and be faithful in doing it.  We’re also happy to be free to “dream” about future ministry that we believe God is calling us into.  We expect several years of service right here in what I am doing, it’s such a great place to be…learning, working, serving.

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