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Author Archives: stacynewell

Two Things Coming Up!

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October 18, 2013
Inspiration, Ministry
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There are two calendar things coming up that are really important to the mission we are on to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus.  They are on two opposite ends of the spectrum, but we’d love for you to engage in both!  Here it is!

Potential New Building Visit

We have an opportunity to buy a church property just 16 blocks from our current location that would serve our church for the next season of ministry.  We have an Open House scheduled for Sunday, October 20 from 4 to 6:00 pm where we will have a chance for you to walk around, hear the stats, and give some input.  You don’t need to be there for the whole 2 hours, but plan to give yourself at least 20 minutes to walk through.  Also, you are welcome to bring your kids!  The address is 811 NE 88th Circle, Vancouver, WA 98665.  From Hwy 99, turn on 88th towards I-5.  Whether you are from the Hazel Dell campus or from Battle Ground, we value your input!

Charity:Water Benefit Concert

Tour

We have a concert scheduled for November 5, which will be amazing!  Even more importantly, it’s for a great cause!  Charity:Water provides clean drinking water for people all over the world, which saves lives every day.  We look forward to supporting them!  You can purchase a ticket and then bring some extra money for some over-priced-for-a-purpose concessions and an opportunity to donate.  If you can’t make the concert, just mark your giving for Be Present via Sunday giving or online at www.coffeechurch.com.  We’ll be glad to direct your money to this world-changing cause!

Although a church building and drinking water seem very diverse, both are an opportunity to Be Present in a unique way.  We would love to have you as a part as we seek to change the world right down the street and around the globe!

How To Read the Bible

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October 11, 2013
Inspiration, Ministry
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We are in the middle of a series called Hunger at church that I am thoroughly enjoying!  Part of it is very simple in the fact that is an attempt to inspire you to pick up the Bible and read.  As we were discussing this with our team a month ago we asked them about their own spiritual disciplines and what works for them.  It may encourage you to know that there were 20 people with 20 different answers to how they approach Bible reading.

The one thing that we agreed on was that regardless of how you approach getting into the Bible, it is fundamentally necessary for a committed Christian.

My story is that I didn’t grow up going to church, so I vividly remember my journey of Bible reading that began when I was about 11.  In fact, I still have the first Bible I was ever given with it’s deeply highlighted pages and a missing cover.  It was just a New Testament, but it included a Bible reading plan, so I started with that.  I really didn’t know that the Old Testament existed for years, so I just kept re-reading the New Testament with the same reading plan.

When I started going to youth group, I got my first complete Bible and my youth pastor told me to read it.  So I read it.  The whole thing in one year!  I will be the first to admit that I didn’t understand much of what I was reading, but something magical happened in the midst of my habits…I became confident in the pages of His Word.  I knew what books were being referenced in church and I could flip to where that book was.  I began to feel like the Bible was a piece of me and found great comfort in my minimal familiarity.  The Bible was no longer far away from my scope, but it was an old friend.

At 18, I went to Bible college so raw in my Biblical knowledge, it was probably hilarious!  I was surrounded by a lot of people who had grown up in Sunday school, and there I was, learning about David and Goliath for the first time.  I went from an A student in high school to getting my first C in Christian Doctrine.  I was swimming just trying to catch up to the timeline of events and main characters, but I was loving it!

It was in my senior year of college that I decided something that would change my life forever….I would never miss a day of Bible reading again.  No matter what was going on or how tired I was, I would ingest the Bible like a good meal.  My framework would be at least one chapter a day, every day.  I have continued that for the last sixteen years, including when I was in labor with my kids and a few days with the flu when I could barely hold my head up.

After 25 years on this journey of understanding the Bible, I will tell you that I still feel so inadequate in my understanding that sometimes it makes me laugh.  However, on the same note, I have a great deal of comfort in the fact that I’ve spent a quarter of a century trying to understand God and all I have to show for it is that I’m really small and He is really big.  I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing to boil down to in this life!

So, here’s my tip for you today…do something.  Just pick up the Bible and look through the Table of Contents.  Get familiar with the 66 different books held within it’s pages and then choose one to read.  Read it whether you understand it or not.  And then tomorrow, do it again.  What you’ll find is this…you’ll begin to change.  Maybe not today or tomorrow, but over a lifetime you will see the Words of God mold and shape you in a profound way.  So face the confusion and jump in!  You can do it!

October 6 Coffee Church Highlights

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October 8, 2013
Ministry
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Great weekend, as always!  We have such kind people at our church who I look forward to seeing every week.

We are in full swing with our next series on Hunger.  I am LOVING it as we talk about seeking after righteousness and making our spiritual lives a matter of priority.  Good stuff!

As we have announced, we are still in process for a potential building for Hazel Dell.  It’s a slow start as we navigate a commercial building purchase, so if you feel like you are missing something…you’re not.  That being said, we need you to be praying right now.  First and foremost we want to do whatever God wants us to do, so in the “meantimes” of life, we can be praying for His wisdom.  You can drive by the building at 811 NE 88th Circle whenever you want to.  Times/dates to see inside are still in limbo, but they will be coming!

All of our small groups are off and running for a great semester.  I am really looking forward to hearing about how God uses each one to mold and form lives!  There is value in everything from Bible studies to Bowling Leagues in the Kingdom of God.  He uses our brushes with His people to make us more like Him.

Mark and I’s small group is focused on finances, so that will be a lot of fun!  Money is taught so poorly in this country that by the time you figure out about interest, saving, and spending, you probably already have credit card debt and you’re probably only about 21 years old.  It’s a shame!  There is freedom in living a Biblically-structured financial life.  We are looking forward to the next 9 weeks with a really wonderful group of people.

Speaking of being more like Jesus, are you ready to get baptized?  We have a portable hot tub that we fill for baptisms any time!  You can sign up HERE.

We also have a thriving email prayer ministry that you can be a part of.  If you have a prayer need or would like to be added to the email list to pray for people, just send us a note at prayer@coffeechurch.com.  Over 200 people pray for those needs that come through!  There’s power in our prayers!

We have a lot of new volunteers making their way onto our team this fall.  Thank you so much for serving at North Creek!  We LOVE having amazing volunteers involved in the lives of people of every age.  It makes everything more fun when there are a lot of people!

Well, so much to do and so little time!  Make every moment count and do it all for Jesus.  Have a great week and be blessed!

 

 

 

 

 

 

September 29 Coffee Church Highlights

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October 1, 2013
Inspiration, Ministry
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It was National Coffee Day on Sunday, which means we should probably have had a marching band or something at the Coffee Church…Do you ever wonder who gets to declare a day something?  It was nice of that person to honor my favorite drink.

On another note, we had two great sermons last weekend.  Battle Ground heard about being a part of God’s best plan to save the world, His Church.  Hazel Dell started off the Hunger series about learning to seek after righteousness.  Looking forward to more in October!

Small groups kick off all this week!  SUCH great groups of people that I am sure will enjoy getting to know each other and experience life together.  It’s going to be a good semester!  If you missed signups, we’ll open a whole new round in January.

We also made a big announcement at church about a potential move for Hazel Dell.  We have an opportunity to buy a building (811 NE 88th Circle, 98665).  They have come down significantly on the price to a point where we could buy it and have the same mortgage payment as our current rent.  We will be doing our best to get you details quickly, but we are just at the beginning of this process, so stay tuned for some times/dates for info meetings and opportunities to see in the building.  Here are some facts for you:

  • Facility has approximately 10,493 SF of space (5,252 SF on main floor, 5,241 SF upstairs).  The upstairs is not ADA (wheelchair) compliant, which it needs to be, so we need to have an architect let us know the costs of solving this issue.
  • It’s location backs up to Interstate 5 and its access is off Highway 99.  It is 16 blocks south of our current building.
  • It was renovated into a church in 2007 and contains an auditorium, office space and multiple classrooms.  The interior is in good condition, but the auditorium is smaller than we’d like.  We need to look at options to help with this issue.  The kid’s and youth space would be a significant upgrade.
  • Building sits on 1.4 acres and is zoned General Commercial (GC) with generous parking, but the parking lot is a mess.  If you are a fan of blackberry bushes, this might be your church…

Right now we are renting our current building.  Our attempts to potentially buy it have been rendered impractical when you weigh out what they would like to sell it for and the necessary renovation costs to make it appropriate for assembly use.  In light of that, we have been actively searching for a solution that would allow us to move forward in creating a building that is clean, well-maintained, and meets our needs for the next season of North Creek Hazel Dell.  As a church, we will spend the next 45-60 days deciding if this new building meets that criteria.  We covet your input at every turn.  We’ll be using this blog, facebook, and email to let you know when you see the building.

Exciting things ahead for North Creek Church!  Thanks so much for your prayers!  We love pastoring this church!

 

 

 

Countdown to Year Seven: Double Blessings

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September 27, 2013
History, Inspiration, Ministry
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We are in the midst of celebrating our 7th year anniversary as North Creek Church!  Over the last week, I have been sharing highlights from this incredible journey.  Here’s the next chapter in our story…

After we moved into the old nightclub, we had a fairly calm next three years.  We worked on our systems, continued to grow, and established ourselves as a church.  At about the four year mark, we noticed that God was bringing more quality leaders into our midst, but we didn’t necessarily NEED them at the time.  Because we don’t fill our staff table out of need, we just began to listen to God and ask certain people to come to our staff meetings without a job or a title.  It seemed strange at first, but a year later, it all became very clear when we had a divine opportunity to add another campus to North Creek Church.

IBattle Ground launchn January 2012 we began the process of merging with a declining church in Battle Ground to create that second campus.  We were about to become a church plant-multisite-turnaround-merger church.  If you are wondering who to ask for advice in that particular situation, let me tell you that it’s complicated.  Once again, we were setting off into a new realm of ministry with a whole lot of faith, very little experience, and as much advice as we could get.

Over the next year we would learn a lot about things like a multisite church structure, about what makes a church decline in the first place, and about how to divide a very tight team in half but maintain unity.  We would wrestle with systems, mentalities, and our own leadership limitations.  We would have one difficult conversation after another and resolve to fight for the culture we believed in.  We would watch our team stretch past their own weaknesses and we would navigate through all of their (and our) insecurities.  In the midst of that we would watch the people from the merger church acclimate to a new leadership team, a new direction, and we would watch helplessly knowing that we were intentionally creating a completely different church.  I will admit that there were the darkest days of North Creek mixed in that year for us.  We were torn at every turn with a deep love for all of our people, but a deeper love for the mission of God.  There were so many moments when we wondered what to do next.

WIMG1401hat do you do when you don’t know what to do?  Simple…do the last thing God told you and don’t waver.  So, that’s what we did.  We held to the vision that God had given us to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus by creating a church that unchurched people want to go to.  We poured ourselves into getting Battle Ground molded into the vision that God had given us for North Creek.  And then we watched as God flooded the doors with families, stories, and changed lives.  We watched as our team began to thrive and our people began to LOVE their church.  We watched as the volunteer schedule began to fill up and ministries began to have solidarity.  We watched it work.

Even as I type this, we are still writing this story.  We still have a youth ministry to launch, more volunteers to train, and a deeper leadership structure to establish.  All that being true, I am so amazed at North Creek Battle Ground.  It is a constant reminder in my life that this thing that God has asked us to do is bigger than me.  It’s bigger than Mark.  It’s bigger than the sum of all it’s people.

It is God’s holy, amazing Bride and His one and only plan to reach the world.

 

To Be Continued