Making the Connection

What am I doing after another incredible TCC Sunday? Chillin over some unbelievable BBQ with my C-Group. The guy with the guitar is singing The King of rock n roll’s Suspicious Minds (my favorite Elvis song). I’ve always thought he protested too much.

Alyssa, Linda, Jeanette, Tom, Suzanne, Harley, Greg, Kohl, Jason & Rita, and Ben! Each one of them took the plunge today! It was one of the best baptism celebrations we’ve had. The river was on the chilly side, but it was good to be back out at 5 mile dam. It’s the most moving thing we do when people take that step because it’s such a direct, simple expression of faith and moving forward in Jesus. It also is such a big witness to all the people hanging out at the park. Plus, we had a lady come out to do face painting and a missionary, Roger Walker, came out to hand out some flowers that kids in the Tree of Life orphanage made in Thailand. And now, as soon as I get home, it starts raining. Perfect timing. Awesome day!

Passion is giving away a set of worship songs that you can download here featuring Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, and David Crowder. In the wake of the tragedy in Virginia, we all need to be reminded that our hope comes from God alone. As you listen to the songs, let it be a reminder to pray for the campus and families of those at Virginia Tech.

Remember Steve Martin in The Jerk?

Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!
Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.
Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 – Johnson, Navin R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

That’s how I feel right now. We just got in The Free Press Book of Lists for 2007. It lists all things Hays, including "Average Area Church Attendance (as reported by the church)" It’s funny they had to put the disclaimer, "as reported by the church." What? Do they think a church would spin the numbers? Naw. Well, some churches look like they put in their membership totals. Our membership is actually somewhat smaller than our attendance, which we believe is healthy. We always have more people coming in that we want to move toward membership. Okay, so we gave them our pre-Easter totals, but we made the list. We’re #7, the perfect number.

Okay, so as I’m sitting here thinking about it, I realize how off those numbers are. But if they were true, then this is what we can say: 8936 people from the Kyle/Buda area are in church on any given Sunday (that’s a huge stretch). But the population is over 32,000, so that means there are 23,000 people on any given weekend who are not connected to a church family. Our work is cut out for us. Let’s get after it!

In my younger years, I was a huge comic book nerd. Really, you can put a lot of adjectives in front of nerd, and that would describe my childhood. I’ve moved on, but Spider-Man is still one of my heroes. In fact, I remember walking into my high school English class one day, and the teacher reminded us that we were supposed to turn in a paper on one of our heroes. Quickly, I scratched out a page on Spider Man. When the papers were handed back out, I got an A+, which I thought was hilarious since I did it in about 2 minutes. That just shows how great Spider-Man is!

Okay, enough of that silliness. Spider-Man 3 is being released next weekend, and I can’t wait. Since it’s way too early for it to be a part of God On Film this summer, I’m going to do a message using the movie as the theme on May 6th. We’ll be talking about "The Deadly Effects of Revenge." If you want to go see the movie with me on Saturday afternoon, May 5, we’ll meet at Regal Metropolitan 14 in Austin for the 3:50 movie. I highly recommend buying the tickets online way ahead of time, since it’s sure to sell-out. You can buy them on Fandango.

This is one of those times that it would be great to invite a friend along so they can meet some of the TCC peeps and then you can bring them back for our Celebration Service on Sunday.