One Year Down!!

Well December 4th, 2012 marks the one year anniversary of Intersect Community Church.  One year ago we opened our doors to the Palouse to provide a joyous, safe, and healing community for people to grow in their relationship with Jesus.  It has been a prosperous year for us full of excitement, growth, and challenge.  If you want to see what it looked like, check out our 1 Year Celebration Video

Here is just a bit of what we have been up to over the last year and How God has blessed us.

• We have had 6 Community Service Opportunities
• We Delivered wood to low income families in Jan
• We Cleaned up branches in February
• We Built a handicap ramp and cleaned out the community center at Syringa in March
• We through a Spring Family Festival for our community in April
• We Pulled weeds and cleaned the flower beds at Lena Whitmore Elementary school in July
• We Cleaned the Nuart theater and bookstore in Sept
• On Dec 30th is a 5^th Sunday and we will be doing another Service Project in our community

We have had 10 Family Fun Events for our church community to come together and have fun with each other.

 We Changed church from Sunday mornings to Monday nights for the summer - so people can enjoy their weekends in the summer

We have done 4 Servant Evangelism events

• Spring family festival in April
• We helped put on a BBQ at Syringa trailer court in September
• In November we gave away 2 thanksgiving baskets to families in need
• On December 15  Christmas Party/ movie showing

We have given away over $1,500 to meet needs in our community

• Over $600 for the Handicap ramp
• Over $2000 for the Spring Family Festival
• We gave over $500 to a lady early in the year for her dog who had to have emergency surgery
• We gave $200 in wood away to people in need
• Unknown money in gas hauling branches, weeds, wood, people around to the different projects

In 2011 we started with 14 adults, 3 teenagers, and 8 kids
Our Launch team started with 25 and in one year we have almost doubled in size.
Almost 50 people in the Palouse consider Intersect their church

Praise God for all that He has done and we are excited about what will come this next year!!
Thanks for all your encouragement, prayers, and financial support, it is greatly appreciated.  Here are a few pictures of our group and our celebration from Sunday.

Intersect 1st Baptism's

On May 27th, 2012 Intersect Community Church held our first ever Baptism service. This was an exciting day for us because this is the reason we were called to the Palouse.  Baptism is an opportunity for people to declare their faith in Christ publicly and I am so proud of these three people for doing that.  Thanks to all of you who have prayed for us, supported us financially, encouraged us when we were down, walked with us as we blaze a new path here, and those of you who have believed in us!!  I am very excited about what God is up to here in the Palouse and I believe He is just getting started!  With God's help, these are the first of many who will come to find God's Love, forgiveness, and Grace.  Pray with us that God will continue to use Intersect to share the message of God's crazy love for the Palouse.  Praise God for all He has done and for all He will continue to do in us and through us!!  Take a moment and thank God with us and celebrate this time with us!!  God Bless!

Spring Family Festival - Part 2

Well here are just a few pictures of our day Sunday at our first ever Spring Family Festival.  It was an awesome day filled with a ton of awesome food, snacks, fun, laughter, crafts, great conversations, and lots of people from our community.  We figure we had well over 200 people come out to our event and many of which we have never met before.  There were young and old, college students, single parents, church goers and non church goers who showed up to the party.  We fed people Tri-tip sandwiches, gave them everything to make garden starts, offered inflatables for the kids, had everything you needed to make a wind chime out of recycled silverware, cotton candy, popcorn, and beautiful weather.  It truly was a day that God set up for us and He took good care of us.  In my previous blog I told you the story of how God provided the funds for this and that was the first miracle.  All week it said Sunday would be rainy and cold with good chances of wind.  Well when Sunday got here, it was cloudy skies until 11am.  Blue skies came out over our heads and it turned out to be 60+ degrees during our event.  We praise God for being our provider in every way. 

As you can see in the pictures, our "Workforce" was out working hard and I must say we do have an All-star cast of people here at our church.  No one complained, wined, had a bad attitude, drug their feet, showed up late, or anything else negative.  They worked hard, stayed till everything was done, loved people, smiled, actually enjoyed the time, talked with new people, and just did a phenomenal job, thanks everyone!!

So I always promise you the inside scoop here on the BLOG and I don't want to disappoint you, so here it is.  As some of our people reflected about the event to me, there was a theme.  It seems like everyone from our church who talked to people kept hearing the question, "why did we do this?"  So many people wanted to know if they could pay us for the food and fun and others struggled with why a church would do this on a Sunday of all days.  Its funny how our world has a hard time accepting "a free gift".  People want to pay for it, earn it, or feel bad taking it... and all we wanted to do was love them in a way that came through loud and clear.  We wanted to do all this for our community to see how much God loves them.  We wanted to tell people in a way that came across as "Good News"!

When we started this church, I told our group if we want to clearly communicate to our community that God loves them and we love them too, then we will have to speak their language and I believe the language they speak is time and money.  Our Spring Family Festival spent thousands of dollars on our community and our church community volunteered their time to serve them and offer them the best of what we had.  I think its pretty cool to hear of 1 more church spreading the Good News to those who God misses most in their own language!!

Thanks to all of you who gave $$ to this!!
Thanks to those of you who prayed for this!!
Thanks to those who served at this!!
Thanks to those of you who came and let us serve you!!
Thanks to those who helped plan this!!
Thanks Deb for all your hard work with all the behind the scenes stuff!!
Thanks Anna for all you did, words can't describe all the work you did and all the thanks you deserve!!
Thanks God!!  You truly do know how to give good gifts!!

Isaiah 58:6-10

New Living Translation (NLT)

⁶ “No, this is the kind of fasting I want:
Free those who are wrongly imprisoned;
    lighten the burden of those who work for you.
Let the oppressed go free,
    and remove the chains that bind people.
⁷ Share your food with the hungry,
    and give shelter to the homeless.
Give clothes to those who need them,
    and do not hide from relatives who need your help.

⁸ “Then your salvation will come like the dawn,
    and your wounds will quickly heal.
Your godliness will lead you forward,
    and the glory of the Lord will protect you from behind.
⁹ Then when you call, the Lord will answer.
    ‘Yes, I am here,’ he will quickly reply.

“Remove the heavy yoke of oppression.
    Stop pointing your finger and spreading vicious rumors!
¹⁰ Feed the hungry,
    and help those in trouble.
Then your light will shine out from the darkness,    and the darkness around you will be as bright as noon.

God Bless!!

PRE- Spring Family Festival

This will be the first of two blogs about our Spring Family Festival.

As Easter approached this year our leadership prayed and sought God's face on what we should do to be a blessing to our community.  As we looked into possible ideas that sounded awesome, none of them panned out and we started growing discouraged.  One day I felt the Lord tell me that Easter was the best day to promote what was to come.

I heard the Lord say this as I was reading one of the books that has been inspiring to me. In one of the chapters I came across how a church back east through their town a Spring Family Festival.  As I read about it, the Lord whispered in my heart that this was what He was waiting to show me and why our Easter plans all fell through.  So our leadership team met and began to dialog about what we would want to do if we were going to do something like that here in the Palouse.  Amazing ideas came out through our brainstorming, like:

- making wind-chimes with recycled glass bottles and old silverware
- having a BBQ and along with serving the traditional hamburger and hotdogs, also serve Tri-tip           sandwiches
- having everything for people to make garden starts
- inflatables and coloring contest for kids
- AND EVERYTHING WOULD BE FREE!!

Soooo... On Easter I informed our church that we would be throwing a Spring Family Festival on April 29th.  Its a Sunday morning and its the 5th Sunday of April, which means we take church to the streets.  Not only would we be doing this on a Sunday but we are doing it during church hours from 11am-2pm, so we can target non church goers.  So Last week Anna shared more of the vision and specifics of what we wanted to do and told our group we don't have the money for this, but this is who God has called us to be and we believe He will provide it.  So we stopped right then and prayed and asked God to supply the money and everything we would need because we figure we will need $2000 for this to happen.  By 7pm that night I had a check in my pocket for $2000, funding the whole thing.  How cool is that.   The generous person who felt led to give the money said to me... "turns out that the money I have is not mine, it belongs to Him!! 

So praise God with us!!  He is God the provider.  Mark Batterson says in his book "The Circle Maker" that as a leader to never forget the phrase "vision beyond your resources".  That is exactly where this Spring Family Festival came from.  I knew God gave me the vision to do this, but we didn't have the resources until now... God just provided them! So Rejoice with us and pray that this event will be a time where our community gets spoiled in the name of Jesus!!  May we love our community the way God wants them to be loved. 

Thanks for taking a moment to celebrate with us!!  Blessing on you

Handicap Ramp CSO

WOW... I am excited about this!!  In late February we heard about a lady who was home bound because she is in a wheelchair and her home is not wheelchair accessible.  That didn't sit well with me and if I am honest with you, I didn't pray and ask God if we were supposed to build a ramp for her, I just volunteered our church to take on the project and believed that God would take care of the details.  It was one of those situations that I felt like it was better to ask for forgiveness then ask for permission.  After I committed to take on the project, we went and visited their place and saw they had made a make shift ramp(first picture above) and that sealed the deal for me, we had to do something.  While I was visiting some very close friends in the Treasure Valley, I shared about the opportunity and they said, "We want in!!"  So our Friends, The Kuhn's came up to sponsor and lead the project for us.  Michael (he is the one with the pencil in his mouth in the pictures above) is in the remodeling and restoration business, so this was right down his alley and he led our people in building the ramp.  Thank God for providing us with him and his family. 

While us adults were working on the ramp, our kids were at our house making doggie treats, cupcakes, and cards for the family and their three dogs.  How cool is it that our kids got to help bless their family and got to be apart of the whole experience.  If that were the end of the story, that would be an awesome story, but we had so many people show up on Saturday to help build that we ended up sending half of our crew into the Syringa Trailer Park Community Center and hauling 6 truck loads of garbage to the dump for them.  And still there is more, check out the rest of the story...

If you don't live here in the Palouse, you wouldn't know that we have been hit hard by a lot of rain, snow, sleet, hail, etc for the past several weeks and as you can see in the pictures above we are a muddy mess up here.  So I knew the possibilities of working out in the rain was real and when I started checking the weather for the Saturday we were supposed to build the ramp, it said 100% chance
 of rain.  I was nervous because the rain had been intense all week and I was afraid it was going to make building the ramp impossible.  As the leader, I talked a big game and told our people, "we will not be rained out, we don't just serve our community when it is convenient, etc", but inside I was a wreck because I was so afraid the rain would be too intense to work in.  Michael told me Thursday that he prayed and asked God to just give us good weather till 3pm on Saturday and he was confident that would happen.  We went to bed Friday night with hard rain but we awoke Saturday to partly blue skies and calm winds.  We were able to build the whole ramp without one drop of rain and at 2:55pm the first gust of wind hit us and by 3pm when we were driving away after finishing the ramp, the rains started and it became intense for the rest of the weekend.  God did not just provide us the opportunity, the man power, the finances, but He also gave us the perfect working conditions!!  How cool is our God right!?!  We truly have a God who cares for us!!

I want to thank all of you who came out and worked on Saturday.  I want to thank those of you who contributed financially to the project.  Thank you Kuhn Family for all of your involvement, support, and contribution!!  Thanks to Deb and Anna who worked with our kids and brought the workers lunch.  Thanks Syringa for letting us come into your community and show off God's love.

I can't wait for the next opportunity God gives us in our community because we have an All-Star cast here at Intersect!!  When the next opportunity arises, and it will, you will hear about it!!  God Bless

Clean up Moscow

In late January, Moscow was hit with a big snow and ice storm.  There was so much precipitation that came down that as you can see from the pictures above, it created quite a mess around town.  Some branches were so big that it knocked out power in places and blocked some streets.  After about a month, there was still so much debris along the roads and in peoples yards that our church decided to jump in and help with the clean up.  So last Saturday about 20 of our people got together and for two hours we drove around town and hauled away as many limbs and branches as possible.  We hit 20+ houses and hauled 12+ loads of debris to the dump.  There was so many limbs on the ground, that we could have worked all day and still had more to do, but every house we helped out appreciated it and some even offered money for our work.  I am so proud of our people, they had great attitudes, worked hard, got dirty, and gave God all the glory.

When we decided on a name for our church almost a year ago, we decided to add the word Community and that was important because we want the Palouse to know that we want to support, care, and love our community as God has loved us!!  So these kind of events are important to us because we can show Moscow and the surrounding cities that we are serious about being a COMMUNITY church!!  I wanted to share this with you because some of you are praying for us, some of you are financially supporting us, or some of you are just interested in how its going up here.  So here is just one more thing to let you know what were up to and I also want to thank all of you who are joining with us in  prayer and supporting us.  Your prayer and support is working and Gods name is going out!! So thank you and Praise God!!  Until next time!!