Archive

Author Archives: stacynewell

June 23 Coffee Church Highlights

By
June 25, 2013
Inspiration, Ministry
Leave a Comment

What a great and busy weekend we had!  June is packed full of grad parties, birthday parties, and BBQ’s.  My girls were so tired from a weekend full of adventure that they begged me to go to bed on Sunday night.  That’s how I like it!

My oldest daughter turns 9 this week…oh.my.word.  I know that all parents say it, but it goes SO fast!  It is almost unbelievable how quickly you blink and years have flooded by.  I am so proud of the young lady that she is becoming!  Such a sweet, kind, and considerate person who looks out for the underdogs in life!

Sunday our staff took personalities profiles and learned a little about how we each tick.  I laughed myself silly to see how everybody rated and how they all fit together!  We have a VERY interesting mix of personalities, which is probably why we can have intense conversations followed by rolling laughter within minutes of each other.  Above all else, we let our strengths shine and try to cover each other’s weaknesses, which is the best part of being a healthy team!

Baptism Sunday is on June 30th!!!!  That’s just 5 days away, so if you are ready to be baptized, please register HERE.  Also, please take note that all of our regular services move to the park this weekend, so plan ahead.  Bring a dish to share, a chair to sit on, and swim gear for the kids!

The Kid’s Camp forms were due on Sunday, but a little birdy just told me that she has room for a couple more if you are still on the fence.  Email kim@coffeechurch.com if you still need to get your kid on the list.  Camp is an opportunity for life change…grab a hold of it!

Our youth are currently at camp, so please be praying for all 35 people that are at Silver Lake.  I happen to know that both the Boy’s Cabin and the Girl’s Cabin won clean cabin this morning.  I am sure there are plenty of parents of teens out there wondering how they can motivate their teenager to take that prize-winning habit home with them….

I highly recommend our youth ministry if you’ve got a teenager…except don’t go this week because there isn’t one due to camp.  On a similar note, we are on our way to having a youth ministry at Battle Ground.  We are neck deep in the interview/planning process.  We’re excited to see a thriving youth ministry in a community we love!  More info to come soon.

So many great things going on and more around the corner!  It’s fun to serve Jesus!  Hope you are blessed as well!

June 16 Coffee Church Highlights

By
June 17, 2013
Ministry
Leave a Comment

Happy Father’s Day!  I love honoring Dad’s at North Creek.  So proud of who they are and the effort they put into leading their families to the best of their ability!  And I’m totally biased, but I think I married the most amazing dad.  We are blessed to have him pastor our home!

We grilled hot dogs for breakfast at both campuses yesterday for the men.  Yeah…it’s a man thing.

I sure think that we have some incredible sermons every Sunday.  I feel like Mark and Chris bring such different, but equally challenging perspectives each week.  Same exact thing for Pastor Jim in our Deaf Church as well.  What a team!  I appreciate all of their hearts as I watch them wrestle with Scripture and they fight within themselves putting together every sermon.  It is so easy to preach out of your own personal opinions, but it is much harder to read the Bible as it is and deal with the ramifications of what it is saying.

We honored our graduates at the Battle Ground campus yesterday.  Congrats to all of you!  Can’t wait to see God unfold all of His plans out before you.  Don’t get discouraged along the way…those plans unfold for 70 more years….not overnight!  Enjoy the journey!

I’ve been wrestling with God a lot lately.  If you aren’t wrestling with God, you probably aren’t reading your Bible.  If you are reading, you will come face to face with attitudes, actions, and complacency in your heart that Jesus wants to deal with.  Live a life of growth!

Who are you telling about Jesus?  The most exciting thing you can do is to share your faith with people who are far from God.  We have THE answer to the world’s problems.

Thank you for those of you who regularly give to our church!  We appreciate your giving and use it to the best of our ability to impact our community for Jesus.  Every time I look at a child marching into the kid’s class or meander through the youth ministry, I see your dollars doing their most good.  I love looking at the younger generations interacting with our God.  SO FUN!

It’s going to be incredible summer at North Creek!  Our mission is to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus…how could it be anything but incredible!?!?!?!

If you aren’t already our Facebook friend, click HERE as you go to like our page and keep up to date on our church!

Have a great week!  Especially for all of you students who get out of school for the summer!  YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

Back Against the Wall

By
June 13, 2013
Inspiration, Ministry
1 Comment

Over the last seven years on this amazing journey of starting a church, there has been some pretty hairy moments where we weren’t sure if we were going to make it.  These seasons all have felt the same…a messy mixture of hope, fear, panic, faith, despair, and fight.  It has been in those seasons where we have found ourselves feeling like our backs were against a wall.  Have you ever felt that way in your own life?

These crisis’ have come in many forms for our church – finances, facilities, strategy decisions, etc.  The circumstances vary, but the feeling is the same: we feel like we have been pushed to the point where we just can’t be pushed any further…we feel trapped by reality.  I am sure you have been there as well!  Options seem limited and the wall seems solid.

I find the next step is also familiar…my head drops, sometimes for moments, sometimes for weeks, the prayers float through my mind, and then suddenly my eyes open as my head raises.  The still, small voice of God ALWAYS says the same thing when we feel trapped… “If your back is against the wall, move the wall.”  It’s said as a mandate with a firmness that can only be from Heaven itself.  There’s no wavering, there’s no shaking in the voice.  “Move the wall.”

What “walls” are in your life?  If you are like the rest of us, you probably consider that wall a boundary that you cannot get past.  It is your limitation and it’s not going anywhere….or is it?  Maybe you find yourself fighting what is in front of you, rather than turning around and taking the sledge hammer to the fortress behind you.  We often find that when our back is against those walls, God really never intended for us to fight what was pushing us to the wall; He wanted to get us to tear down the wall.

Here’s the reality:  That wall may look solid and it may not be easy to chip away at it, but that should not stop you from taking it on with a vengeance.  Whatever is on the other side of the wall is worth getting to.

The best thing I can do is to stop running from what’s pushing me and start swinging at what is stopping me.  Move the wall.

 

June 9 Coffee Church Highlights

By
June 11, 2013
Inspiration, Ministry
Leave a Comment

It was graduate Sunday!  What a great group of 13 grads we have this year!  This is the graduating class that includes the very first sixth graders in our church.  I am so proud of each one of them and their confidence in their relationship with Jesus.

Get your kids in church.  As parents, it’s our job to lead our kids and establish a framework for being a part of the body of Christ.  Thank you to Vanessa and Kim who pour their lives into growing our kids.

I am loving the sermons in the Protect and Serve series.  Bottom line: our lives are to be an example of Jesus – both in leading and serving.  It is a monumental challenge for all of us, but exactly what we should be striving for.  Do you want to be well known or worth knowing?

The other part of this series that I think is profound is to be aware and careful WHO you follow.  People put spiritual and emotional trust in others who are not healthy.  We are responsible to find people to follow who are following Christ.

Do you need to be baptized?  If you have decided to follow Christ and haven’t done that yet, it’s time.  The Bible doesn’t reserve baptism for people who are perfect, but rather it is one of the INITIAL symbols of change.  Messy people need to get baptized, so don’t wait until you have it all together.  (P.S.  You’ll never have it all together…)  Sign up HERE for our next baptism on June 30.

How’s your Bible reading going?  Here’s my challenge for you:  Read a chapter a day for the next month.  You can find some great reading plans at www.youversion.com if you don’t know where to start reading.  And don’t worry about it if you don’t understand what you are reading.  You might not at first, but if you keep reading, it will get clearer and clearer.  That is the beauty of the Bible…God reveals Himself to you at the time and rate that He needs to grow your life.  Give Him the opportunity to do just that.

Jesus changes lives.  Invite someone to church so they can learn about Him and have their lives changed as well.

Congrats to the Ericson Family on the birth of Aubree!  We love all of the new life at North Creek!  We also got to have baby Emilia in church for the first time this weekend as well.  So beautiful!

I love God’s Church.  It’s not timid.  It’s not lazy.  It’s not irrelevant.  It’s a force to be reckoned with and it changes the landscape of both our country and the world.  Be weary of allowing yourself to believe anything but that.  God’s Word says His Church cannot be stopped.  Period.

On that note…YOU can’t be stopped either if you are in line with God’s plan.  Be obedient.  Be humble.  Be unstoppable.

 

 

 

 

Learning Generosity

By
June 7, 2013
Ministry
Leave a Comment

Lately I’ve been praying to God to help me understand money and generosity better.  We tithe, we give, but I never want to assume that what I am doing is all that God wants for my life.  I always want to be asking God if He wants something else from my talents and resources.  Not in a pathetic, “I’m not good enough” kind of way, but in a “As long as I’m alive, I want to be growing” kind of way.  What do I believe about generosity that is limiting me and therefore limiting God?  Limiting God…that was an interesting perspective to dive into.  Can I really limit God?  I’ve been reflecting back on various teachings I’ve heard about generosity and trying to match it up with my own ministry experience.  It’s pretty interesting!

I’ve heard countless sermons about giving and how it’s about our own hearts, not because God needs our money.  I’ve even bought into the idea that God will find a way despite our personal generosity.

“He owns the cattle on a thousand hills…”

“It’s all His anyway…”

“Money doesn’t limit God!  We give to unlock our own issues with greed!”

But what if it doesn’t work that way?  What if our inability to obey in this one area DOES limit God?  What if people don’t know Jesus, simply because the vast majority of His people don’t understand that generosity really does further ministry?

As I was praying about generosity, I got a mental picture of the cattle on a thousand hills.  What if God gave them to me and I put up a fence with a padlock on them to keep them for myself?  They may be God’s, but His ability to bless others with them has been limited by me.  As long as I hold the key to that padlock, those cows are mine and mine alone.  Now I understand that I serve a God who could tear down my fences or take back the key to the padlock, but I also see in scripture that isn’t the way it works most of the time.  God loves ME so much that He gives me free will to do what I want with what I’ve been given.

Being on the backside of a church I see this all of the time.  There are very few other limiting factors in ministry other than the generosity of others.  If God’s people were truly generous…if I was truly as generous as I could be…the world would simply be different.

So, here’s my challenge of the day…how can we all be more generous?  Where can we start or where can we grow from?  One of the ways that Mark and I try to work on this area in our spiritual growth is just to give more this year than last year.  Tithing 10% has always been the foundation of our marriage.  We just write the check every month like clockwork, but that’s not where I want to be in the end of our story.  Where I want to be is at the place where I understand the heart of God for people, not possessions.  I’m not there yet, so the solution is to keep giving until I am.