Sermons tagged with Vision

This morning we really want to acquaint you with the ministries that we partner with. We want everybody to know a little bit more about what goes on behind the scenes kind of of grace because you've probably heard me say plenty of times that 10% of everything that's given goes to ministries operating outside the walls of grace. We actually have a missions committee full of people who have a heart for missions, a heart for seeing others come to know Jesus, and want to use the resources that we have to see that brought about. And their job is to find ministry partners for us to pair up with who are accomplishing the mission of God out in the world. And then they take the money that we give and we support these ministries in various ways. And it occurred to me, it's actually, we're doing this because Sarah Prince emailed me, or maybe a Facebook message. I forget how we communicate. Hey, we'll be in town. We'd love to share if we got the opportunity. And I thought, gosh, I think the church needs to know about all of the people that we partner with and what they do. And so we're going to highlight Jen Taylor. You're going to hear her story and what she does over at Refugee Hope. And then we're going to talk with the princes as well. But this is an opportunity. This is kind of a getting to know you. Let's learn who are we supporting, what are they doing, and how can we get involved, how can we pray. And so without further ado, this is Jen Taylor. She's with Refugee Hope Partners, which I think is, are you guys located outside of Raleigh as well? So we have families that have moved outside of Raleigh that we remain connected to, but our main location where we start all of our relationships with our refugee friends is actually five minutes down the street right behind the Falls of the Neuse Chick-fil-A. There's an apartment complex right there. Cool. So we're going to dive into that, but before we do, there's some folks here, even though you've been here for like your whole life, who might not know you. So tell us about your background at Grace. You grew up here. Your parents dragged you here all the time. So how was it growing up at Grace and all that stuff? Tell us about that, how long you've been involved here. Yeah, so I've been involved at Grace probably since the start of Grace. I grew up here in the youth group. I actually had Casey and Sarah as youth leaders back in the day. Like they're not getting enough attention. Exactly. But my parents were super involved. I even did, if any of y'all are back that far enough, the handbell choir. I was a part of that. Yo, we had one of those? We need to dial that back up. But yeah, so just grew up here. Had a family here. Y'all are family. And so I went away for a few years, but once I moved back to Raleigh about three years ago, it was just natural to plug right back into Grace Family and right back into the ministry here. So that's great. I'm now going to refer to you as the handbell chair. You're in charge of getting that rolling. So tell us just a broad view about Refugee Hope Partners and what they do, and then we'll kind of talk about what you do with them, and you can tell us about some of the families that you work with and things like that. So what is Refugee Hope Partners? Yes. So Refugee Hope Partners is a nonprofit right here in Raleigh. We work with over 700 different refugees from over 40, well, right under 40 different countries from around the world. Refugees come from these countries after being in refugee camps. They sign in with the UN and get placed by the U.S. government right here in North Raleigh. So they move into these apartment complex, specifically Cedar Point Apartments where we're located, and we help that transition. As refugees come in, they don't have the language that they need. They don't know the systems that are in place in America. They don't know how to read. So paperwork is a huge issue to get past. So we are there not just loving our refugee neighbors but really trying to help in everyday life build confidence, engage the community and really equip them so that they can become sustainable right here in the U.S. So we have tons of different programs that we do that through but some of them are medical, some are ESL, some are homework help. So we do tutoring for all of our kids. We have like 350 kids that we work with. So it gets to be a little bit crazy, but it's a whole lot of fun, and we do a lot of ministry. We have Bible study as well, and we share the gospel throughout. You said, I think, 40 countries are represented. What are the predominant ones? I'm sure that there's a majority there. So what are the top two or three? So we do have a very large group that comes from kind of Central Africa, the Congo, a lot of Swahili speakers. And then we also have a large group of Karenni refugees from Myanmar and Burma. That conflict is still going on. So they are 25 years deep in a refugee camp before they come here. And then we also have a lot of Middle Eastern countries represented. So a big group from Afghanistan has come recently. So we have a lot of Farsi speakers that come in as well. And as you love on them and help them and kind of help to pave a way to assimilate, I would suppose is the right word. How are you also able to point them towards Jesus? And with coming from so many different places, there's so many different faiths represented there. And I would imagine that encountering each faith has its own sets of issues and things that make it helpful and things that don't. So how do you, what do you guys do programmatically and relationally to point the refugees towards Jesus and to let them know that you're doing this because Jesus loves them and you do too. Yeah. I think the biggest thing that we do is we just love them. Jesus loved us first so that we can love them, and we love our refugee neighbors in so many ways. We are there during crises. Whenever those happen, we are right there, feet on the ground, loving them in the midst of it. And even in our programs, we don't shy away from the fact that we are a Christian organization and that we are here to love them no matter what they believe or where they come from or what their background is. That we have Bible studies that are geared towards all different groups of people. We have, even in our ESL programs, at least around Easter and Christmas, we tell the whole gospel story right there. And many of those people that are in our ESL programs come from Muslim world, Muslim background, and they're getting to hear the story of who Jesus is and how he loves us right there in our programs. That's wonderful. And what is your role now? How did you get hooked up with them? Did you start a volunteer? Was there an internship process? Or did you find them and go, that's a position that I think I might enjoy and so apply for it? And then what you started as, how has that morphed over the time that you've been with them? How long have you been with them? About three years. Okay, yeah. So when I started, I actually moved back to Raleigh and didn't know exactly what to do next. And I knew I wanted to work with refugees. So I went to talk to the executive director about volunteering. Where'd you go to school? I went to Chapel Hill. And got a degree in? Global Studies. She's using the degree, Pop. Okay, so I'm sorry. I just wanted to, so you saw that, you thought it could work, and carry on. Yeah, and I sat down for coffee, and within that coffee chat, the director said, well, we have a position for you. And so I got a job right after thinking I was going to volunteer. So it was definitely the Lord being like, you need to be here. I started out part-time doing more of the ESL program and then switched into program staff, which means that I do everything on staff. And then from there have moved into the volunteer coordinator. So I actually connect everybody that wants to volunteer. I'm the first person you see. I walk you through the whole process and all of our programs and what we do and get you connected in the programs that we have. What kind of volunteer opportunities are available? If you have 350 kids to tutor, I'd imagine you need some of those. Emil is great at high-level math, so bring him in for all your advanced students. But besides that, Zach, don't laugh so hard. That's mean, man. There's tutoring needs, I'm sure, maybe even some ESL needs, but what else? What other kind of volunteer spots are there? Yeah, so you can plug in anywhere. We have a medical ministry that helps drive families to doctor's appointments. So if you can drive a car, you can volunteer with us. We have a bridge mentorship program that literally pairs volunteers with a high school student and helps them move into those next steps of what do I do after graduation? What is my career? What could that look like? We have ESL for adults. We have a preschool, like a preschool for our three and four year olds. We have childcare during the ESL times. Anything that you would like to do, we have it and we would love to get you plugged in. And it really is any schedule as well. We run programs that are on a weekly basis, so you can plug in and really get to know people on a weekly basis. But then we also have programs that are come as you can. Show up once a month, show up once a year, that's okay. We'd love to have you be a part of our programs and really get to know the community and the refugees there. So as you think about, well, I guess I would ask you this too. I think this is relevant of every organization. What were your specific unique challenges during COVID? Because I can imagine in an apartment complex with refugees, folks who are not yet fully assimilated, that that had its own unique set of challenges. What was the biggest challenge during the heart of the pandemic? And now what are you guys thinking about as we move out of it? Definitely at the very beginning, the biggest challenge was just feeding our families and making sure that those that were unemployed were able to pay rent. That was a huge thing at the beginning of COVID and all that happened, and we were right there. Grace was with us actually donating on a weekly basis groceries for some of our families. And then as we transitioned into online school, that was a giant mess for us. I bet it was. Even just Wi-Fi and tablets, right? Even just Wi-Fi and tablets. So we were the main access for schools to help kids get computers, get internet, get connected to their teachers. We had different classrooms running all year long of if you can't get internet working or something's wrong, you come to us and we'll actually have school right there. So every morning we would be trying to sign in five different students at once to one teacher and say, no, they're here, they're attending, I promise. So just getting through that process was a big challenge. Thankfully, they're in person now and we don't have to worry about that anymore. I can't imagine what a challenge that was. I'm curious, in ministry, in my experience, you have stories or experiences that sometimes will anchor you in what you're doing. They encourage you. They kind of God-breathed into those moments, into those families, into those relationships. You see someone come to Christ. You see a family strengthened, or you see some prayers answered in a big way. And those stories kind of, they anchor you in the not so easy times. And I'm sure that you have a couple of those. So as you look back on your three years with Refugee Hope, tell us a story or two of someone that you saw come to Christ, of a family that you saw strengthened, of some prayers that you saw answered. What are your kind of anchor stories? Well, like I said, I started out in ESL. And while I was there, one of the ESL moms who comes from, she grew up in Pakistan and Afghanistan, kind of switching over those borders. That sounds like an easy background. Goodness gracious. So she and her family have moved here, and they got really connected to our ESL volunteers. And one volunteer in particular was able to share the gospel with her to the point that they do a Bible study on a weekly basis even still. And her family has moved not only from being able to speak English. She actually wants to become a nurse and wants to go back to college and get a degree. And then her family was able to, through the years of learning how to save, learning how to speak English, learning to get better jobs and fill out applications, they actually just bought a house six months ago in Nightdale and are now living on their own, sustainable, and still bring their kids back every week, at least twice a week, for violin class that we have running and to be a part of ESL and encourage the other families and moms to be a part of it. Gosh, does anyone else feel terrible about their life right now? Holy smokes, that's unbelievable. And here's what's really cool about what Jen just did. She told a story about something that someone else did. You don't think that she's had those conversations too? And she just took the spotlight that we put on her and she was like, well, this volunteer one time did this thing. That's really, really cool. As we finish up our time with you, what are we hoping for next at Refugee Hope? And what can we as individuals, not Grace as a church, but what can we as individuals do to be a part of whatever the next season of life is at Refugee Hope? Yeah, so right now we're getting, gearing up to go back to school. So one of the big things that Grace is already going to be a part of is our back-to-school drive and sale. We're actually going to equip our 350 students with all that they need for school. And so Grace can be a part of just helping supply some of the supplies, and that information will be soon to come of exactly what we are asking for. But then just prayer. Our ministry is growing continually, and we're looking at strategically how we can grow and love on our refugee neighbors, not only at Cedar Point, but all around Raleigh. So it's moving. The Lord is moving in this place, and it's really cool to see. That's awesome. I also just kind of feel compelled to say, I don't know to whom this might apply, but if you're in a position where you need workers that folks like this may be able to fill, I would imagine that you could reach out to Jen, and she could hook you up with some pretty good folks. So to whomever that might apply, I think that would be something good to keep in mind for Grace. Thank you so much for coming and sharing with us. She will be in the lobby immediately following the service, so you guys can bombard her there and we can find out more ways to get involved. And we're going to end the service with talking about a volunteer team. So if you're hearing about, like, well, Grace is involved in school supplies, and you're going to see a video here in a minute from Fox Roads, something that we did for them at Christmas, and you're like, I want to do that stuff when that's happening, you'll be able to. So we'll get to that in a minute. But before I let you go, I just want to pray for you as a church. Let's pray for her and everything that's going on at Refugee Hope. Father, gosh, we are just so encouraged by the work that you're doing just down the street from us. God, I can't imagine what it is to be a refugee. I can't imagine what it is to grow up on the border of Pakistan. I can't imagine some of the things that these people have walked through. And yet you've brought them here and they have people with them who love them. And God, we pray that they would continue to see your love in Jen and the folks that she works with and the folks who volunteer over there. Lord, if any of us are compelled to be a part of what you're doing there, I pray that you wouldn't let go of us, that your Holy Spirit would just tenaciously get after us as we get more involved in what you're doing over there and get front row seats to watch you work in the lives of these people. We pray that you would bless Jen. I know that it is fun to share success stories and it is fun to talk about what's next, but God, I also know that it is hard. And so I pray that you would be with her in those times and in those moments as well. We thank you for her, for her humble example and witness and ask that you would just encourage her and give her many, many more stories of folks who came to know you through what they're doing over there. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. who haven't been at Grace for as long and don't know who the princes are and why we get excited. So now they get to share with us and everybody can be excited together, which is great. So tell us, where'd you grow up? How'd you get to Grace? When did you realize you were in love with each other and you needed to move to Africa because this is just what God wanted you to do. So go. There's a lot of steps in one question. So I think like I was part of the, I would call it the St. Grace crowd. So Chris Sasser sort of lured me into youth ministry as a high school student. And then I felt a call to youth ministry very as like a teenager. And so he sort of nurtured that. And I interned a couple summers, and then basically we sort of always dreamed of conspiring so that once I would graduate, I would come on staff. You and Chris would... Chris and I would... Yeah, we conspired together, and that worked out. And so I used to sit between he and Karin and sort of mediate their marriage and relationship up in the old loft. In the aughts. In the early years of Grace, Chris Sasser was the student pastor here. And they were going and blowing. I mean, they were doing some really cool things. So he was doing high school, she was doing middle school, and I sat in between. And it was a dangerous place. But it was an amazing experience. But yeah, I mean, Sarah had interned as a college student as well. And then as she was at Seminary at Duke, we were also conspiring to figure out how to get her on staff. So as you're on staff, there's an attractive intern, and you're now conspiring. No, no, no, no. I brought the intern. Okay, all right. So basically we met at Fun in the Sun, the camp we used to take kids to. And she was from Lakeland, Florida, and they had a lot of pretty girls at her church. so I spent a lot of time talking to the girls at her church. You made your way over to the Lakeland crowd. Yeah. So then we moved back to Raleigh and I started working at Grace and she started seminary. I think what was a mutual attraction was we both just loved kids. We both loved ministry. I mean, we met where we were both interns, you know, loving on kids. And so that's always been a part of our life is that we just love loving on people together. We love having people in our home. And we lived, you know, five minutes from here and literally would always just have people in our home, a lot of kids, a lot of adults. And, I mean, we're just so grateful for this place. I became a pastor here. I was ordained here. We grew up a lot here. And I feel like, again, this name lives up to its name. I received so much grace in this place as we just kind of clumsily figured out what it looked like to be pastors and to love people and to be newly married. As some of these now adults can attest to on mission trips. We had some marital strife over, you know, pranks and Chris Latta. And so, yeah, we just... He was usually the center. Just strife specifically over Chris. Yeah. Usually he's in the center. Yeah, specifically. But we grew up here. It's not just your own marriage. You got other people's too now. For sure. 100%. Yeah. So we're grateful. I mean, just to sit here and to look out at so many old faces and so many new faces, it brings us so much joy. And we're just so grateful that you guys loved us while we were young. And now that we're old, that you love us from afar, it's such an incredible thing. We're the same age, I think, and we are old. What year did you guys get married? 2002. Wow. Okay. And then when did you go to Africa? So, yeah, basically I think the thing is that Grace nurtured this heart for mission because we were taking students on all these mission trips. And that was our excuse for not doing it ourselves is that we were taking Jen and we were taking Colleen. And so that's cool. We've done our part. And unfortunately, God was continuing to stir that. So she went to Uganda in 2007 with some girls who had been sort of involved with Grace. I somehow let my wife and three college girls go to northern Uganda by themselves. It's very irresponsible. I don't feel like you had a lot of choice. I don't choice. He did not. Also true. And so that was kind of a make or break moment. Either this is going to die down or this is going to get worse. And it got worse. And then she basically said, I'm going to stop working at church. And, you know, so she went to Jeff Hancock, the pastor at the time, and said, look, I'm going to stop and we need to go do something. And he had heard about this organization in Cape Town. So, hey, why don't you try them? And so the church was just unbelievably gracious to us to not only, you know, let her quit, but also just to, I mean, I took a three-month leave of absence, and they just supported that and said, cool, we'll hire someone to replace you to help the thing keep going, and go do it, go explore, and go sort of figure out what God is doing. And so it was just incredibly gracious. And so in that period of time, working with Living Hope and meeting a guy named Michael and him just sort of answering that prayer that we were having of, okay, if God, you want us to be here, what would we ever do? And so that's sort of where Ubuntu was birthed in us and then came back and told people. And I think people there advised us, you need to tell people there. You can't decide here. You must decide. You must really hear from God there. And so as we told people, everyone said, well, we hate the idea that you're going to leave, but this sounds like exactly what you should be doing. Knowing you, this is what you should do. So it was very affirming and, yeah, pushed us out the door. And what year was that? So we left in 2009, October of 2009. Okay. And my understanding is, correct me if I'm wrong, you went over there with Living Hope. And Living Hope is an organization that was founded by a pastor in Cape Town, South Africa, and initially was doing a majority of its work in the HIV community because it was, for a while, the highest case per capita in the world. And so that's where it started, and then other programs got built out of that, and now it's this whole big thing. And so you guys originally went over there partnering with them, and then at some point or another transitioned to Ubuntu. Yeah, like our 2008 time was all with them. And then in 2009, we kind of went back saying, I'm going to do, I'm going to start this Ubuntu thing eventually, and she's going to work with Living Hope and with the Methodist Church and, and, and. That's always and, and, and. Always and. Yeah, right. There's lots of ands. Yeah. I mean, I think there's been a, there's been a couple paths. I mean, Ubuntu is a path which Casey can obviously really share about what that is and even what that word means. But us as a family, we studied missionaries. I studied at Duke race and reconciliation and justice things. And we thought, let's try it out really doing this. And so we went to Cape Town the first time, lived in a cute apartment and did all the sightseeing. When we moved there, we actually moved into an impoverished community. So their apartheid has been lifted for about 20 years, but everyone is still kind of stuck in whatever community they were forcefully removed to. So in way deep in Cape Town, very south, there's a community called Ocean View, and it's mixed race people. It's colored. That's a PC term there. And so we had done work there. We'd made friends there, and we just thought, we want to try this. We actually want to live among people and try to be friends and try to be neighbors with the people that we serve. And people were like, you can't do this. People are crying. No, it's a death sentence. And we just were very stubborn. And we just wanted to give it a try. Also was serving at a Methodist church in the community. So we moved into the pastor's house. And that's really where our ministry manifesto, as I call it, was born because we showed up. I mean, someone literally, when we left, made a cake with South Africa on it. They were like, you're going to South Africa, save Africa. And we were like, okay, a little bit, we will. I mean, you just, you get this kind of hype. And so we show up in Ocean View and no one cared and no one talked to us and they were suspicious and they didn't need whatever we were selling. And so we sat alone in our house for a while and started to open the Bible and just say, okay, Jesus, this didn't happen to you. You know, when Jesus went from town to town, he had throngs of people following him, coming to his feet, touching the hem of his garment. So what are we doing wrong, Jesus? And I found myself in John 4 specifically, and it's really the woman at the well. And she doesn't want to know a religious guy, and yet at the end opens up her entire life and her soul, and then goes back to her town and converts everyone. And it's just because Jesus came to this place, and this is our ministry manifesto, look, listen, love. You know, we go to save and to conquer and to, you know, rescue all the orphans, but God really, in Jesus, showed us you just show up and you look. What's around? Who's there? What's not there? What are people feeling? You listen. You get people to open up, share their stories, share their lives, and then, if God allows, you love them. And so because God humbled us, slowly we started to make friends. Slowly people started opening up their lives to us. Slowly people started letting us in. And it's changed our lives, that humbling experience of not having the answer, of not knowing the way, of not being the saviors, and just people slowly allowing us in has changed our lives, and now these people, 11 years later, are our friends. They're our family. We do a lot of life together, and one story, I was actually thinking about while we were sitting. So Bernadette is a woman we met the first time in Living Hope. She worked for Living Hope. We did HIV support groups together. We'd go into communities. She had these groups of people, all HIV people. She was supporting them, loving them. I would just tag along. We come back. Her son, Robin, comes to the academy, becomes a part of the academy. And while he's still in high school, they're in the front yard, basically, and someone next to him is shot dead. Robin is there with a friend. The friend is shot dead by a gangster. Bernadette calls, crying, weeping, for months. Obviously a lot of grief. Robin as well. So we walk a lot of life together through this trauma, through a lot of stuff. Eventually Robin graduates from Ubuntu after he comes here to America. Now he's in Portland. He is at school. Where is he at school? Corbin University. But just recently before I came here, I was having my own crisis, struggling with how to love people, what to do, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like I can't do this anymore. Who do I call? I call Bernadette. I show up at the Ubuntu house. She now works at the Ubuntu house. She's our cook. Bernadette, I need you. I show up. I'm crying. Help me. Guide me. What do I do? She sorts me out, and she says, I tell everyone, I have this white friend, and she's my white sister, and she lives in Ocean View. She said, but Sarah, you need to be colored now, and you need to toughen up. And she prayed for me. And that's our life. Our life is not about us saving anyone. It's about neighbors. It's about friends. It's about a lot of stories that are intertwined and us finding God sometimes more than we feel like we're even helping them. Sure, sure. I like to be colored and toughen up. That's great. Casey, can you tell us about all things Ubuntu? Just how did it start? How did it germinate? What has it become? What energizes you the most now that you're 10 years in? Yeah. So Ubuntu is really, it's born out of a desire to deal with fatherlessness. So 60% of kids in South Africa grow up without a father in the home, which is a very frightening statistic because it leads to then all of the other issues that come with it, gangsterism and drug abuse and alcoholism and massive unemployment, and it keeps going. And really, Michael, it's not really my idea. Michael Jenkins had the dream and the idea, and he saw a sucker who had all the background he needed to make it happen, and I took the bait, and so we did it. But really, we work with a small group of kids who, sort of elite footballers or soccer players. And we really try to walk from really almost nine, but they enter the academy around grade six. So kind of 11 years old through the end of high school. And it's really about now we run our own school. So we register with the Department of Education. And so you go through the normal South African kind of educational system. We train four or five, six times a week. We have amazing coaches. We have a residence for about 30 of the boys who live further in town to get there every day or who live locally in their home situation. It's just not going to help them be successful. So there's about 30 kids who live in the residence. And then, yeah, and then we just spend a lot of time on their character, leadership, and spiritual formation. How do we help them become the man that will, you know, be different than what the men are in our country currently? How do we help them raise a different heart for their own community, their own family, and the nation wider? And so, yeah, in February, it was kind of like our 10th anniversary of our first training sessions. We had big celebrations. And I think what's amazing now is watching, we have this sort of first generation of graduates, of guys who finished and the things that they're doing. So in August, we'll have 17 kids now studying in the United States. One of them is here. Yeah, you got one here with you, right? So Tarek is here. So if you want to bombard Tarek to get the real stories about Casey, you can. So, I mean, poor Tarek from the age of 12, even beyond up until last year, so until he was about 20, had like one coach. He got stuck with the same guy all the way through that process, and he loves me deeply still. Is that true, Tarek? Do you love him deeply? Okay, all right. So it's amazing to not watch those guys. There's about 10 playing professionally. We have our first Olympian. So if you watch the Tokyo Olympics, hopefully Luke Fleers will play and hopefully play well. So he actually brought Tariq to trials because we had seen Luke first. But, I mean, it's been amazing. But what's really amazing is to see the two guys who are training to be teachers and Josh, who's now a policeman, and the impact that they will have. But I'm also so excited because I know that we, after 10 years of bumping around and making lots of mistakes, are infinitely better at what we do now. We have a much, much stronger team. We have all these amazing teachers and house staff and coaches that are around it. Where in those first couple years, it was like me and Mike stumbling around, wondering when the adults were going to show up and help us run this thing. And tell you what to do. Yeah. And we're like, ah. I'm wondering that here, actually, in my role. We heard. Yep. So we have this amazing team. And what's been really great is now Sarah is actually a full-time Ubuntu staff person and on the leadership team. Can you believe it? That took a long time to lure in. We're going to get to Sarah in a second. I want to hear everything that you've done because it's been a lot of different things. The last year really showed us the need to really focus on formation. We were doing it, but it was sort of on the edges of everything we did. And I think, obviously, that is her heart and what makes sense. I know that that's going to drive the next 10 years to be even more amazing and that the graduates will be even more amazing young men than we have already produced. When you say formation, you're talking about spiritual formation, spiritual health? Spiritual leadership, character formation. And what are you guys doing now to key into that specifically? So we have some programs for all of that. So spiritually, it looks like a lot of different things. A lot of it's relational. It's work that our teachers and our coaches and our staff do, especially at our residence, through relationships, just inviting them to be in a relationship with God, modeling that. We have a Bible study that our very own Casey leads at the house once a week, which is incredible and really cool. And then we have other programs that we're really excited to launch. You know, it's been kind of just a few programs spiritually. We want to get even better about that. Leadership is also something that we're really starting to do. We don't want just to expect them to be leaders, but teach them what does it mean to be a leader and that every one of them is a leader. And then character formation is actually a program that we do once a week. They have an hour that they do it. And they're learning to really know who they are and live with integrity and live with excellence. These things have to be taught, especially because of all the trauma and bad habits that some of them have faced. They really have to actually be taught these things. And so it's really exciting to now look at who we want the Ubuntu 30-year-old man to be and then intentionally and strategically create a pathway to that place. It's really exciting. That is really, really cool. And now briefly, as we are out of time, I am interested in the chronicle of all the different positions and things that you've done in your now decade in South Africa. So run us through it. And then now, I believe you just finished a book, yes? And now you're on staff with Casey. So what have you done? A lot of different things. I'll say most, a lot of pastoral stuff, really. I learned in South Africa that even if no one thinks you're a pastor, even if no one gives you a title or, you know, a cool cloak or whatever a pastor is supposed to have. We're supposed to get cloaks? Yeah, I had one. I had one back in the day here, but it's just who you are. And so, you know, people in Oceanview call me Pastor Sarah, and I don't pastor a church anymore. And I'm so thankful. I'm so honored that they call me that. So we were at the Methodist Church for a while. We've been at different churches, but we're now at a local church. We actually want our kids to now just be involved in a youth group and have that kind of stuff. So I've done a lot of things, a lot of stuff in the community, in the high schools, in the different kind of organizations of Ocean View. My book is actually about our journey with special needs because, as many of you know, our son Keller, who's now was one was diagnosed with autism mild autism and so we walked this unexpected journey where literally we googled autism after we got the diagnosis from the doctor to getting totally integrated in ocean view with the schools we got a team of therapists and experts and this really extraordinary thing happened where people just came into our house daily and changed all of our lives, most all my son. So he lost his diagnosis when he was five. And it's a miracle, but it's a miracle of community. It's a miracle of people coming into all of our lives. And it's a miracle of God saying that Keller is fearfully and wonderfully made, autism or not autism, and watching that come out. And so I finished the first draft. We're hoping to launch it next summer. It needs a lot of work. But it's really also my story of an unlikely mother, very unlikely. I didn't even know if I wanted kids. And now here I am, the mother of a special needs son. And so it's been a journey. You've got your daughters here. Are you happy that you have her? So happy. We thought she was going to be a boy. We were certain God loved us and it was going to be a boy, and now we have this incredible daughter who loves Jesus, loves acting, singing, dancing, is a leader, is kind, is this incredible person. So I don't know how he did it, but I feel like it's made me more than it's made them. And so I really want to share that story of what God has done in my life and how I found a real God in the midst of real trial. And now I'm the mother of Ubuntu. I never would have wanted to be Tarek's mom. And Tarek and I had a deep and real, even last night. There's fireworks and bourbon flowing last night, and Tarek and I are in having this deep conversation because I'm the mom. And that's what I do. And I am so humbled to be the mother of Ubuntu. Again, never would have expected it, but it's my best job I've ever had. It's the one that brings me the most joy. Best boss I've ever had. He really is. That's great. That's great. I wonder if he feels the same about his employee. Okay, Princess, thank you so much for sharing a little bit of your story. I have one more thing. Okay, let's pray. No, I'm just messing around. I just want to, I think, like, affirm and honor Grace, because, you know, like, hearing Jen share and Colleen on the video and, you know, Suzanne's work with Anastomari and stuff, it's a reflection of who Grace is. And so, you know, Suzanne and I came through the youth ministry and Beth and Bill Gentile tried to, like, ruin us at young, young ages, and they didn't. But all of that practice we then got serving people because of grace, it shaped our hearts. And now seeing kids you invested in, like Jen and Colleen, doing a really amazing work. I know that those seeds were planted by amazing parents, but we got to throw a lot of water on it for a period of time and really do something. And their reflection of that and their response to that is exactly the picture I want for Tarek and Vazumzi and Luke, that they would, through that, somehow, our feeble efforts, water something in them that when they finish, that they would change and transform South Africa. And it's a silly kind of vision we have, but I really believe it's possible. And I believe it's possible because I've seen it now in kids that I got to water the seed and that they were doing it. So today is such a perfect picture and it's such an encouraging picture for me that it really is possible that for seven feeble years of really only having one or two days a week with someone, I got to water something. And now I get, I mean, they're stuck with us all day, every day. So what does that mean I can, you know, our staff can do? And so it's such an amazing picture. But I want to honor what you've done over years and years as a church to do that. Thank you. And I would echo that and just say we really have a very strong group of folks on the missions committee who care deeply about this and are kind of the stewards of this culture that Grace has fostered through the years. And it's one of my favorite things about our church. You guys are having an event tonight here. We are. We're having an event at 7. And we're just going to share some more stories. Vazumzi Plamana, who was here actually two years ago sharing, he is now at NC State. And he actually couldn't be here because he's at his church today, and so he'll be here tonight. And so we're so excited to just share a little bit more about what God's doing. And we wanted to say thank you. Look, Listen, Love is the organization that Grace started to launch out missionaries. And so when you support Acts of Grace, sorry, Look, Listen, Love is manifesto. Acts of Grace, thank you. And that's the way that you support us so that we can keep doing what we're doing. Ubuntu is its own 501c3, but Acts of Grace just keeps us there and allows us as a family to keep doing what God has called us to do there. So we'll share more about that tonight, and we're so thankful. Wonderful. Thank you. And they'll stick around, too, to chat with after the service. Let me pray for y'all, and then we're going to suffer through Alan Morgan together, and then we'll eat some tacos. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you so much for all that you're doing in South Africa, in Ocean View, and in the ways that you are using the princes and also drawing them more near to you. God, I pray that their walk with you, that their exuberance to follow you, that their joy that they find in you would be contagious as they move in and out of circles and relationships in what they're doing in South Africa. God, we pray for Sarah in her new role, that she would thrive there. It certainly seems as though all the experiences that you've given her over the years have prepared her for this in really incredible ways. And we lift up Casey as he continues to plug away at this thing that he's done now for a long time. I pray that you would give him new and fresh excitement and motivation and that he would wake up tomorrow as excited about Ubuntu as ever. And God, we thank you for bringing them here safely, for them being able to share their story. And we pray that you would write many, many more good stories through what they're doing down there and that you would just draw these young men and these folks in the community to your son Christ through what they're doing. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning and happy Father's Day. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. As I think about dads and wishing people happy Father's Day, I really think of two groups of people most of all. To those of you who are expectant fathers, this is your first kind of official, unofficial Father's Day. Boy, that is exciting. So good for you guys. I think of y'all today and I'm very excited and hopeful for y'all. And then I also think of those for whom Father's Day is hard because while everyone else celebrates their dad, you just miss yours. And that's hard too. So I'm sorry about that. And I'm praying specifically for you today. This is not going to look anything like a Father's Day sermon. As a matter of fact, I would even tell you that this isn't even a sermon, okay? A sermon is designed to teach you the Bible and point you to Jesus, point you to God. That's really what a sermon is. This is more of a message. This is more of just something that as your pastor, I want to communicate to our church. So I would also say this, that this morning is unique. It's different. We're pausing from the series that we've been in. We've been doing a series called One Hit Wonders, and we're taking a break from that this morning. And I have a special message, some things that I want to communicate with you. In light of that, I would tell you that this morning is for the partners of grace. If you don't know what that means and why I'm saying partners of grace, it's because at grace we like to say that we have partners, not members, because in membership there is this attitude of rights and privileges. I'm a member now. What do I get to enjoy? What rights are bestowed upon me? But partnership is a sense of ownership. I'm partnering with this organization. I'm taking ownership of the success of this place. What can I do? How can I ply my hand to move it forward? So we say at Grace that members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. So we have partners, not members. And so this morning is for the partners of Grace. Which means that if you're here, your dad drug you here, you're visiting, you've been kicking the tires, you've been watching online, you wouldn't yet call Grace home, then I have good news for you. You picked a great Sunday. Because this doesn't apply to you. You don't have to do any of the stuff that I say. All right. You had, you feel no guilt. You feel no shame. You feel no sense of compulsion. You don't have to worry about it. You just kind of sit back and take it in. And you also kind of get a peek behind the curtain to decide if this is the kind of place that you want to be involved with. So please know if you don't call grace home, if you don't consider yourself a partner of grace, and if you're thinking to yourself, gosh, am I a partner? Listen, I always say a partner is what a partner does, all right? So I don't know about official classes and things and anointed and stuff. If you act like a partner, you're a partner. So if you consider yourself one, you are. If you don't, then you're not, okay. Now, if you're not, just take it in. Okay. The things that I'm about to say, I'm not saying to try to compel you to do anything. You just enjoy it. For the partners of grace, I wanted to take a Sunday and talk to specifically you, whether you're here in person, whether you're watching online or you catch up later this week, because there's just some things that have been on my heart, and I've been thinking through, gosh, how do I address those things? How do I share with the church about those things? And as I began to think and pray through that, I had a couple key conversations that kind of, they didn't intend to do it, but it pointed me in this direction, and I thought, I just want to take a Sunday and talk to the partners of grace. Kind of a State of the Union address, as it were. The State of Grace. Carly did a great job throwing that together last minute. Good job, Carly. And really, my desire to talk to you guys this morning as partners comes from this question that I get all the time. I get this question from people who love grace ask me this question all the time. Whenever we get one-on-one time in the lobby or I see you through the week or we hang out or whatever it is, at some point or another, people who care about grace always lean in and they ask me this question. How's grace doing? How's grace doing? That's what they want to know. A lot of you guys have asked me that. How are we doing? How's it looking on Sunday morning? What's it like in there? How's grace? And it's a fair question, right? Because here's the thing. Nobody really knows. We've been in a pandemic for 18 months. We were at this all-time high in February 2020, and then we just stopped meeting for 15 months, right? And listen, nobody knows how Grace is doing. I make the joke with other pastors. I've heard them say it too. I have no idea who goes to my church. I have no clue. I think of people every week that I haven't seen in 16 months, and I'm like, gosh, I don't think I've seen them at all. And I'll ask after them. I'll ask Erin. Erin's our children's pastor. She knows everything about everybody in the whole church. So I usually ask Erin, Erin, the sons and sisters still go here? Oh yeah, they're good. I was talking to them last week. They're still engaged. They just haven't come back yet for, you know, X, Y, Z. And there's all kinds of good reasons out there and that's fine. But it's good for me to know that they still call grace home. But the reality is, it's a fair question because it's difficult to know how is the church doing. So I wanted to let you know that we're doing pretty darn good. Grace is doing pretty well. I'm pretty proud of us. This last 16 months has been hard, man. It's been hard on a church. It's been hard on pastors, but it hasn't been as hard on this pastor because you guys are great. I think maybe the thing I might be most proud of about our little church is the unity that we've displayed in this last year. We've faced a pandemic together. We faced COVID together. And you guys were keeping up with it with all those addresses I did. I'll do little videos in my office and send it out to the church. Hey, here's how we're going to handle this. It'll hearten you to know that I have friends who don't go to the church that I used to work with at my other church who now make fun of me for those videos. Every time I send out a video, it shows up on their Facebook feed and I get texts with them making fun of me for them. So that's a thing that's going on in my life. So I've sent out a lot of those. I'd like to be done so my friends will quit making fun of me. But in every one of those videos, when I have to say, hey, we're going to come back in person. Hey, these are going to be, this is the caution that we're going to observe in the room. Hey, we still need to wear masks. Some people need to, some people don't. Hey, this is how we're going to sit. This is how it's going to be. I've known with every video, the elders have known with every decision that we've made that there's going to be some people who aren't happy with it and some people who are. And to watch a church full of people who at some point or another in this last year have been unhappy with one of those decisions, still come here and still call grace home and still love this place and still believe in what God is doing here and still trusting us. That's pretty great. We're a pretty darn unified church in a time when it would be really easy to start being a fragmented church. And it's not just COVID, right? This last, during the pandemic, for whatever reason, it felt like things came to a head politically, and our country is more divided and entrenched politically than it's ever been. We've walked through that with people on both sides of the aisle in unity. Racial reconciliation was thrust into the forefront of the national conversation in a way that I would argue it hasn't been since the 60s. And yet we remain strong. We've been unified this last year as a church, and it heartens me, and I think is maybe the most important thing that we could say about ourselves, that we still love Jesus, we still love each other, and we still love this place. I've been heartened to see momentum building on Sunday mornings. Every week a a few more people come back. Every week, I meet some new people who have been watching us online, who have come back again. Every week, I get here really early in the morning, earlier than I should because I don't want to mess up my sermons. I get here, and then I sit in my office, and I kind of slowly watch the parking lot fill up. And I kind of, who's going to come this week? Who do I get to see? Whose neck do I get to hug? I got to see Miss Ginger Gentry this morning. She came back. Oh, my gosh. It was so great. And I wonder at what's going to happen, right? And every week, it feels like a little bit of momentum gets picked up, and every week, the room feels like it's getting a little bit more full, even here in the middle of the summer. And I think that we could be doing better about that. I'm going to talk about that here in a little bit, but every week I feel a little bit of sense of grace kind of coming back to life. And if we think about coming back to normal, I don't think we're going to see February 2020 for a long time and I'm not worried about it. February 2020 was an all-time high for Grace Riley, and then we stopped meeting. So I'm not worried about that. I'm excited to see what the new normal is going to be, and I think we're going to see it in September. I think what we have in September is what we're going to be, just so you guys know where my thinking is on that. But I've been kind of anxious to see Grace kind of come back to life. We're doing incredible in our kids' ministry. Our rooms are full. I don't know if you know this. Our kids' ministry rooms, they're full like every week. When we had to take out chairs to meet and be able to socially distance, we took a room up in there with all the chairs. And about a month ago, Erin came to me and she was like, yo, you gotta get your chairs out of my room. Like, they gotta get out of there. I need space. I need this room. Our children's space is filled up every week. Our small groups have continued to grow. Our small groups have continued to meet and graft in new people. We've actually added to our small groups rather than detracting from them in a time when we can't even meet together for a large period of time. Many of you know that right as we went into the pandemic that we did a campaign because we believe that it's time for grace to go home. We believe that it's time for grace to have permanent roots in the community that we love so much. And so we pledged $1.5 million to that end. And in a year, when we didn't even need a building, we've raised nearly a million dollars already for a building that we think that we will need one day. I think that's amazing. And we haven't even talked about it. The chair of the campaign committee emailed the elders and said, just keep doing the nothing that you're doing because it seems to be working really well. And we have. I think we're going to crest a million dollars in September thereabouts and we'll let the church know about that and we'll make this final push to February when the campaign will officially be over. But all those things are going well. And I think that the pandemic has been hard on every church in the country. And the pastors that I talk to, it's a struggle. But I think for us, for Grace, we're doing very well as a church. I also think that there's some areas of the church that need our attention. I think there's some areas of the church that our partners need to focus on. And I want to talk to you about those areas. I think we've got some work to do, some parts that are maybe broken down a little, and I think it's time to get to work and to fix them. To talk about those areas, I want to share with you a ministry principle that I learned years ago. I learned this, I don't know where, but somewhere back in church world, somebody taught this to me and it stuck with me, and so I'm going to teach it to you. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Luke chapter 5. We're going to look at verses 1 through 6. This little interaction, we're going to focus in on one part of it and kind of use that for the ministry principle that is going to apply to the whole church today. But we find it in Luke chapter 5. Steve is going to be mad at me. I'm reading out of the King James Version. You're going to see the English Standard Version on the screen, so it's not going to make much sense. But this is my dad's Bible. I keep it in my office. And I thought it would be pretty good to preach out of my dad's Bible on Father's Day because I love that guy. So bear with me. If you're mad about this, shove it. All right. I didn't mean that for Steve. Steve, I love you. I don't know where you are. I didn't mean that for you. Oh, no. All right. Luke 5. And Simon answered, said unto him, And when they had done this, they enclosed a great multitude of lake, and the people are pressing on him, so much so that he's kind of like backing into the water just to get some space. So he looks and he sees two boats and he sees the fishermen, the owners of the boats, washing their nets. And he asks them, can we get in this boat and can you push off a little bit so I can get some space? And then he finishes teaching. And then he says, hey, go throw your nets out there. There's going to be a big catch. And Simon, who we know him as Peter, says, we've been toiling all night long. We've been out there all night. Like, we're done. We just did the night shift. We're finished up. And Jesus says, no, go ahead and throw them in the water again. And Simon Peter says, all right, fine. And he goes and he throws his net back into the same place where they've been fishing all along, catching nothing for hours on end. And then all of a sudden their nets are filled so full that they begin to break. And they have to call over, if you read the verses following, they have to call over some other guys in the boats and say, can you help us with this catch? Now what I want us to focus on in this story is this principle that was taught to me years ago, that when Jesus looks at Simon Peter, who is later to become a disciple, when Jesus looks at the disciples for the first time, they're washing their nets. This is a thing that fishermen have to do. Another way to think about this is mending the nets, because when you go fish for a night, you get debris in the nets. You get stuff in there that could cut the nets. You get stuff in there that could clog it. You get things in there that could tangle it up. So you've got to do the tedious work. Can you imagine how annoying it would be to take a net that's been used over and over again all night long, a huge fishing net, and spread it out and tediously undo all the knots and tediously mend it, grab new thread and reattach it and weave it back in there and care for these nets and wash them and get them ready for the next time. But listen, what those fishermen knew was if they don't mend the nets, if they don't prep them, they won't be ready for the catch. So from this, I've learned the ministry principle that we have to mend the nets to prepare for the movement of God. I've known as a pastor that if we're going to prepare for the movement of God, we have to mend the nets. We've got to get ready for the catch. This is actually a biblical principle. There's a verse I have highlighted in the Old Testament that says, I am the ax and God is the one who hews me. And so I have a note in my Bible, stay sharp, be ready. We don't know when the father is going to pick us up to use us for his will, but let's be ready when he does. Simon Peter had no idea that Jesus was about to tell him to cast his nets out and have the biggest catch of his fishing career. He didn't know that was about to come, yet he was still tediously preparing the nets for the catch. And so what I know about ministry and about church is, if we want to be ready for the work of the Lord, for God's movement, then we have to mend our nets and prepare for the catch. The first time I really felt this impressed upon me, it was a principle I've been familiar with for years, but the first time I really felt like God pressed this on me was actually in this room. In the summer of 2017, I got here in April of that year. In the summer of 2017, I was in this room during the day and I was praying, as I'm known to do on occasion. And I was just pacing around and praying for the church. And I felt God impress upon me. I'm not going to say speak to me. I'm not a God speaks to me guy. I get scared when people start claiming this just as a disclaimer. But as clearly as I've ever heard God in my life, I felt him say, mend the nets. Mend the nets. Get ready. There's a catch coming. Get things in order. Which was a tall task. Because at the time, if you were here, you know, we didn't have a staff. We didn't have a reliable microphone that I could preach from for an entire sermon. It used to cut out all the time. I literally yelled my first Christmas sermon ever at you guys because my mic cut out halfway through it. We didn't know if our songs were going to work. I didn't know if ProPresenter was going to pull up on the computer. All of our ministries were in disarray. There was a lot of net mending to do. And it didn't seem like at the time we were a church of like a hundred and it really didn't feel like anything big was about to happen, but I felt like God impressed upon me, hey, mend the nets, get ready. And I can tell you that he told us to do that because he had a catch prepared for grace. The first time I stepped foot in this room was in February of 2017. I was being interviewed to be the senior pastor. There was 96 souls in this room. Remember, I counted twice. In February of 2020, the last time we were normal, we averaged 335 people in this room every Sunday. That doesn't count the record number of about 45 kids a week that we were running. God brought a catch. He had me, he had us mend the nets for the reason. I'm not the only one that was working to mend the nets. I was just the only one who was using that phrasing in my head to get ready for what God was going to bring. And so now as we sit here in 2021, I feel the Lord pressing upon us again that we need to mend the nets, that we need to get ready, that we need to prepare for the catch that he is about to bring us. Except this time, I don't want to be the only one that's thinking about it. This time, I don't want to be the only one that's using that language. I want our partners to use that language too and let us build the nets together. I think right now in 2021, we need a church full of net menders. We need a church full of partners to work alongside and to get ready for what God is about to do. Why do I feel like God's about to do something here? First of all, I think we're incredibly strong as a church. I think that we're doing incredibly well coming out of a pandemic. I'm very proud of Grace. I'm not lying to you or exaggerating to you when I tell you that every week that we meet in person, I meet somebody who is here for the first time. I meet somebody, I have a conversation that goes something like this. I see a face I don't recognize in the lobby or in one of the seats because visitors always come in early, so I can kind of be in here and say hey to them. They don't have anything else to do. And I'll walk up to them. Hey, I'm Nate. It's nice to meet you. And they say, yeah, we know. We've been watching you online. It happens every week. Every week new people come. Every week you're inviting your friends as things open up again. Every week God brings us more families. I don't know if you know this, but on Mother's Day, we did a child dedication. It had been a year since we did one, so it was a lot. We dedicated eight children that day from nine different families. Now, some of y'all might not know this, but before we were Grace Raleigh, we were Grace Community Church. In December of 2017, we changed our name to Grace Raleigh. And do you understand, do you know that of the nine families that dedicated children on Mother's Day of this year, eight of them have only ever attended Grace Raleigh? Eight of them God has brought to us in the last three years, three, four years. We are growing like crazy in that area of the church. God is doing a thing. And we've got a group of 20-somethings. They're about to start getting pregnant too, and they're going to just add to the trouble. When we go back to normal, when things open back up, I think there's a chance we might have to go to two services in the fall. I think people are ready and chomping at the bit. I think people are ready to start meeting in person with their small groups again. I can feel, you can feel our culture just yearning for normal. And I think a big part of that is church. So I think God's about to do big things here. Even more than that, just the reality of this, this is long-term thinking, but while we're here, we already have a million dollars in the bank ready to buy a building when God presents an opportunity. When we set down permanent roots, when we have a place, when we have a building, that's going to bring some people. That's going to bring some tire kickers. Y'all are going to get excited about grace and be willing to put up with my sermons again and start inviting your friends to this thing that's happening. We need to get ready, guys. Somebody was asking me, a dear friend of mine who's a partner here, we went out to lunch and he just kind of said, hey, what's the vision of grace right now? Like it kind of feels like we just kind of go week to week. We're just kind of going along, maybe hoping for normal again. Like what's the vision of grace? Like what are we doing? And I thought about it for a while. And I thought, gosh, I'm not floating along. The staff's not floating along. The elders, maybe. But the rest of us, we're not floating along. I felt like I'm doing everything I can. I'm fighting and scratching and clawing for this place. Every week I want to see who comes. Every week when somebody does come, I wonder are they going to come back consistently or are they just dipping their toe in and then we'll see you in a month. I wonder when is this place going to come alive again. Every week I'm trying to preach my little heart out to bring people back, to give you something worth showing up to. Every week Steve's doing the best he can to lead us in worship with who shows up in the room. And so I feel like we're fighting like crazy for this place, but it makes sense to me that someone who comes on a weekly basis might not know that because I don't tell you. So I'm telling you, let's mend the nets. Let's get ready. So it makes sense to ask, what does a net mender do? All right, Nate, I'm in, fine. What are you asking of me? How do we mend nets? Well, the first thing we do is we prioritize Sunday morning attendance. We prioritize coming to church on Sunday. Now, this is honestly a thing I never wanted to preach about as a pastor. Because when I wasn't the senior pastor, I always thought it was real self-serving for the senior pastor to do the sermon where he guilts you into Sunday morning attendance. And I never really appreciated it. And so I've intentionally gone in the other direction, even at times making fun of the idea of coming to church on Sunday. I think it's possible that I've made the joke that if I didn't get paid to be here on a holiday weekend, I wouldn't be here either. But what I'm coming to realize is that I've really misled you in our attitude towards Sunday morning attendance. I've always had the attitude about people coming on Sunday that we, the staff, and the volunteers that make up the Sunday morning, we're going to do the best job we can to make it worth it for you to come here on Sunday. We're going to do the best job we can so that when you come on Sunday, you go home and you go, I'm glad I came. And my thought is, if we don't do that for you, then you're not going to come. So what's the point of trying to guilt you if you're not getting anything out of it anyways? And I still believe that that's true. And I still believe that the onus is on us to make it worth it, to get the family up and to come and to be a part of church. But I've also noticed this about our thinking about attendance. And this is really what I want to mention to you guys. I think it's really easy to think about the decision of whether or not to attend church. Isolated. As if it only affects you or your family. Do you want to go to church this Sunday? I don't know, I'm kind of tired. It just affects us, right? It just affects me. It doesn't really have any impact on anybody else. It's just a question for me. And I think that the pandemic and online church for a while has only exasperated that mindset. Because now it's become a thing that I can watch online. I can take part in church at the beach. And I'm still good. I'm still doing my Jesus thing. I'm still participating. I'm watching. I'm listening later in the week. And that's good. That's better than nothing. But I think increasingly the decision to attend church has become one that we believe is about ourselves and whether or not I want to consume the product that's being presented to me on Sunday morning. That sounds like member talking, doesn't it? Sounds like a consumer mindset. And that's hard for me to say because that's not what I do. If you've been here since I got here, you've been here with me for four years. I never talk down to the church. I never set myself up as moral exemplar. I never bring conviction on a Sunday morning that I don't sit in with you. So my part in this is how I've perpetuated the mindset about attendance, and I'm sorry for that. But I do believe that I have seen a more consumeristic approach to whether or not we're going to attend church on Sunday morning, if it fits into my schedule, if I'm not doing anything else, if we're not busy, if the kids aren't crazy, believing that that decision only affects you. But what I would impress upon you this morning is that no, it doesn't. The way that I want us to begin to think about church attendance is just with the layer of thinking. This is all I'm asking for. You're not asking me to cancel trips and make any new commitments. I'm just asking you to think about attendance in this way. Understand that your decision about whether or not to come to church on a Sunday morning impacts the whole church. It impacts everyone. It's not just about us and our families. And you know this to be true intuitively, right? When you show up on a Sunday morning and it's full in here, whoa, look at this. People commenting out in the lobby. Well, you really brought them in today. You really packed it out. People are excited. You know that you get excited when people are in the room. You know you get excited when there's energy in this room. You know. If you were here when we went to two services, you know that the hardest part about going to two services is sitting in here with the other 35 people in the 11 o'clock service. That stinks, man. Ain't nobody want to do that. And I know that people are curious about this. I know that people online want to know how many people in the room. How does it feel in there? I got comments that people, when we first started coming back in person, that people would appreciate when the camera person would kind of pan back so they could like see, are my friends there? Like, who's there? Who's in the room? How much energy? What's going on in there? And there was some Sundays when I would go to that camera person, I would say, hey, listen, we don't need to pan back today, okay? We'll just keep this, just we 25, okay? Just stay nice and tight, just zoomed. You know that when we attend, it adds energy to this place. That's important as we seek to rebuild, as we seek to mend nets. You know if you've brought a friend, if you've invited a couple or a family to come with you, and they show up and the energy's a little dead, you die a little bit on the inside. That's hard for you because you invite people here because you're proud of this place. And then when this place doesn't show up, that's a disservice to you and your friend. When we worship together, tell me that worship isn't better when this room isn't full. It is full. Tell me it's not better when we sing and we raise our voices together. Tell me worship in this room isn't better with 200 than it is with 40. There's something to it. There's something to the energy of a church. There's something to looking across the room, and maybe I don't even talk to them this week, but I see them and they're here, and they're committed and we're committed. And as we come back, as we come back out of the woodwork to see those faces again and again and know that they're committed to this place like you're committed to this place. That's heartening. That's good. Your attendance even passively matters to the whole church. It's not just a you decision. And how many conversations do we miss out on? Just a few weeks ago, I had another one of those conversations. A woman walked in. She looked at me. I looked at her. I knew that she knew me. I knew I didn't know her. And she said she'd been watching me online and she was ready to come back. And she was here and she wanted to be involved in Stephen ministry. And I said, that's great. The guy who leads at Bill Reith is right over there. Let me introduce you. And I got them hooked up. What if Bill just decided that day that his attendance was only about him? Maybe she connects via email. Maybe she doesn't. Every week people come in. I was just talking to a couple this morning. They came in, they're wanting to join a small group. Well, what if I had a small group for them to join and I thought, oh, so-and-so would be great for them to talk to and then so-and-so wasn't here. Our decision to come to church impacts the whole church every week. It's a big deal. It adds to the energy in the room. It adds to the sense of camaraderie and commitment from one another. It allows us to these introductions of two people's friends to people that might get plugged in with us. One of the best things in the world, I love it so much, is you cannot, you cannot, I'm looking at you guys right here, you cannot drop your kids off on that hallway without them inviting you to their small group. You just can't do it. What if they just decide this week's not the week and we miss a chance to connect some people? Our attendance doesn't just impact us. I want you to think of it as something that impacts the whole church. Moving forward, it's important. The other way we mend nets is to serve on service teams. The other way we mend nets is to volunteer in the church. Now here's a reality across every church in the country. All their service teams are broken down. None of them have as many people as they used to. I talked to Phil Leverett, our head usher. Sometimes he lets that title go to his head. He's got quite the ego and it's difficult to deal with, but he does a good job nevertheless. And I said, hey, we want to go back to full capacity. We want to start, get your ushers together. We want to start handing out the notes again and things like that. And I said, how's your team, by the way? And he goes, well, I used to have 10 people every week, and now I have four. And two of them are me and Doug Funk. So he's got two, okay? We need people across the board. We need people to serve on service teams. And as we've come back to church, we might not resume into the same role that we had. We might not have had a role previously when last time we were normal. And so we might not feel an impetus to serve again, but I'm telling you as your pastor, all of our teams are broken down. We need more people. We need help. So what I'm asking is, if you're coming to church, serve. If you're attending on a Sunday morning regularly and you're a partner of grace, be a partner. Serve somewhere. And listen, if you're watching online this morning and you're increasingly angry at me because you're like, Nate, I don't feel comfortable coming back. Leave me alone. I get it. And I would never try to convince you to come back before you're comfortable doing it. Ever. But what I would say is, when you do come back, be ready to get to work. Because that's what I'm asking of everyone here too. If you're coming on Sunday, serve. In some capacity. Because our teams are broken down. And people need your help. I talked earlier about the idea of mending a net. Can you imagine how tedious it would be to mend a whole net by yourself? Listen, we have some people who since August of last year have just been slowly but surely washing their net, waiting for other people to come alongside them and help them out. I think of Cindy Hayes back there. I know I'm going to embarrass her, but Cindy runs sound back there. You have this sheet in your seat. It's got urgent needs. There and there. Those are the urgent needs. When Cindy's not there, she's over there with the kids. Every week. Doing her part. Just slowly mending the nets. Waiting for some people to come alongside and help her. We've got other people like Keith. Keith is back there running the feed right now. He helped us set up the live stream. If we didn't have Keith in the summer, you guys would have been watching stuff recorded on YouTube for the duration of the pandemic. We have some faithful people who sit over there and they hold fussy pandemic babies all morning. And they do it week after week. We have the Phil Leveritz of the world who shows up every Sunday to help fill in the gaps. We have Doug Funk who continues to show up and do what he can. I could go on and on and on. We've got some folks in the church who have been mending some nets. But I'm telling you that they need help. So you've got these sheets in your seat. I want us all to take a look at them. Oh, and I'm supposed to say, together let's mend our nets and get ready for all that God is doing and will do at Grace. But really, let's do that. Let's not pastor talk about what I believe is coming. And let's not pastor talk about what our needs are. We need your help. To give you an idea of how badly we need your help, I asked Erin, last time it was normal, how many regular volunteers did you have in children's ministry? And she said, I had 55 people who were regularly a part of children's ministry. Not 55 people on the roster, because there's always people on the roster who are there, they exist on the roster, but they haven't done anything in like six weeks. So in a two-month period leading into the pandemic, 55 different people served. And I said, how many people have served who are not on staff in the last month? 18. And some of those are repeats, and they're doing it every week. Some of those are elders. Some of those are elders that when we went to two services, I looked at the elders and I said, this puts a lot of stress on Aaron and the children's ministry. So I'm asking the elders to all volunteer to do this for a Sunday at least. Some of those are band-aids. We need incredible help in the kids' ministry. And I know what you're thinking. Why don't their parents volunteer? They do. They do. And also, their parents live with three children under five. So let's give them a break. Or go babysit at their house. And then they'll come here and they'll watch the rest of the kids. They do volunteer. No, it's not an option. It's not really going to happen. And we have folks from an older generation that volunteer, but that number is getting smaller and smaller. So we need you to volunteer with the kids. We need people on the tech team. We need people to work back there in the sound booth. Those are very urgent needs. Every week I have conversations with Steve and Aaron about what can we do to find more help. They've done all the shoulder tapping they know how to do, so I'm just telling you corporately, we need help in those places. If those places feel like they just don't make sense for you right now, we need other things too. And those are under the other opportunities. We need you to serve there as well. But I would also tell you, this isn't just a plea to mend the nets of grace, which we need to do. We need to get ready for what God is going to bring us. And I really do think that starts by committing to Sunday morning attendance and changing the way we think about it. And it starts by serving on a team and helping move this thing forward every Sunday morning. But I would also tell you that Jesus is found in service. There's a part of Jesus that is found in his work that you will never find anywhere else. You can read all the Bible passages you want to. You can go to all the small groups you want to. You can have all the good conversations you want to. You can worship him all you want. But there is a part of Jesus that cannot be found outside of his service. And I can tell you story after story of just people on our elder board who their catalyst in faith was taking a small step to serve on Sunday morning. So if you do this, you won't just help mend our nets and get ready for what's next at Grace, but you will also, I believe, find Jesus in that service. So we're going to do this. In a few minutes, I'm going to pray. Steve and the band are going to come up and they're going to play through a song. During that song, we're going to ask you guys to stay seated and just kind of prayerfully go over this and consider being a net mender with us. Fill it out. And at the end of the service, when everyone's dismissed, there's offering boxes as you leave. You can fold these up and put those in there. If space runs out in the offering box for some reason, just hand them to me or anybody else on staff. We'll get it figured out. But I would really love for you to take a minute. If you're a partner, if you're committed to coming, pray through this sheet, fill it out, and let's mend the nets together. Can we do that? Let me pray for us. Father, you are a good father. For those who are on the precipice of knowing what it is to be one of those, God, I just pray for so much joy and happiness and peace for them. For those for whom this day is difficult because they miss their dad, they would give anything just to spend a little bit more time with them. God, I pray that you would just nurture their spirit today in a way that only you can. Father, we are also so grateful for how you've brought us through this difficult time in our country and in our culture. We're grateful that we have a church at all to go to and that you have shepherded us so well and that we do feel so strong right now. But God, I also pray that we as partners, as people of grace, would take ownership of what you are doing here and that we would do our part to get this place ready for what you're doing next. And I pray that in doing that part, we would find you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Hey, Grace. Shocked? I bet you are. I'm sure you were expecting Nate, but instead it's me, Easter Kyle. Why am I here? I'm here to tell you that I am downright bummed. Why are you bummed, you ask? I'm bummed because I'm not going to be able to see my entire church family on Easter next week. Now, sure, I'm upset because I'd love to be able to shake hands and give hugs and just see everyone, but I'm mostly upset because I wanted to see those Easter threads. Personally, I just got this suit for our Easter service. Now, I bought it, and I was like, well, if we're not going to meet together, we've got to make a video because people need to see this. Now, not only do I have my Easter clothes, but I know that you do too. I know you guys prep months in advance for what you're going to wear. And so we don't want that to go to waste. And so what we have decided to do is next week, we would love for you as you wake up, to wake up a little bit earlier for our 10 o'clock service, get dressed in your Sunday and your Easter best. I want to see dads wearing pastels. I want to see daughters wearing their dresses. I want to see everyone looking fresh to death. Now, once you've done that, I want to be able to see it. So we need you to throw it on Instagram, throw it on Facebook, and tag Grace Raleigh. I can't wait to see everyone looking their Sunday best. Good morning, Grace. Thanks, Kyle, for that announcement. I do hope that next week you'll get up, put on your Easter best, and share that with all of us so that we can see it. I think that'll be a fun way to make the best of spending Easter together. I'm so glad to have this time with you on Sunday mornings. If you're watching this on delay, again, I understand schedules get crazy, but my hope is that we're all watching this together on Sundays at 10 o'clock so that we can experience being together. Hopefully you are in the lobby on the YouTube website talking with people, saying hello, and engaging with some of the folks from the church. If you're watching for the first time or for the first couple of times, thanks for being here. We're so glad that you are. We are in the middle of a series called Storyteller, looking at Jesus and the stories that he told called parables. You'll remember that a parable is a short fictional story that's used to make a moral point, and Jesus was the master storyteller. He was the master storyteller and used these to make these incredible points. And this week, we arrive at what I believe is the most famous of all the parables, the parable of the Good Samaritan. And you know, a few years ago, I was reading a book, and I did some research this week to try to figure out what the book was and to get the quote exactly right. But after about 10 minutes of some really intense Googling, I just decided to give up because I remember the main idea that I took away from this book. And one of the things that the author said was, you know, in life, to go from competency to mastery, you have to learn to find joy in the nuances of a particular subject or a particular topic. And I thought that that was a really interesting point that we can kind of get to this place of competency relatively quickly by learning some of the basics around whatever discipline or topic that we're pursuing. But if we want to master it, we've got to learn to find joy in the nuances and the little things. And I think the same is true of Scripture. I think if we want to be masters of God's Word, if we want to understand it well, if we want to be able to explain it to people and really take hold of it, then we've got to learn to find joy in the nuances of Scripture. So even though this is a well-worn parable, most of you probably know it. Most of you at home, if you pause this right now, you could probably tell it to the other people in the room. Even if you're watching this and you're not necessarily a church person, you didn't grow up in church going to Sunday school where they taught you these stories, you probably still at least have heard of the parable of the Good Samaritan. And we think that we know the point of the story. The point of the story is that everyone is our neighbor, and that's one of the points of the story, and that's a great point. But I think if we sink into the nuances of this parable, what we'll find is that there is a greater point waiting on us. This parable is found in Luke chapter 10. It begins in verse 25. So if you have a Bible there with you, and I hope you do, go ahead and turn, open that Bible to Luke chapter 10, and you can follow along with me as I tell you this story. So Jesus is teaching, and it says that a young lawyer asked him a question. So we need to understand right away that a young lawyer is not necessarily how we would think of a lawyer, someone who's gone to law school. A young lawyer in that context, in that culture, really had been going to seminary because the law was based on God's word, on what we call the Old Testament, what they call the Tanakh. The law was based on the law of God. So a young lawyer was really kind of a young theologian. And he's presumably talking with some friends, having one of those debates that you normally have. I went to Bible college, and there was all these different debates. In your college, whether it was Bible college or a liberal arts school, you engaged in debates about philosophy and about politics and about life in general, and you solved the problems of the world. It's one of the great things about being that age is the different conversations and ideas that you exercise. He's probably doing this with his buddies, and he sees Jesus, this well-known teacher, this rabbi, and he asks him a question. And so he said, teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? That's his question to Jesus. What do I have to do to inherit eternal life? Another way of thinking about that is, what does God want from me? What does our Creator God expect from us? What does He want me to do? When Jesus responds like a rabbi does, He responds in the form of a question. And rabbis often did this. They didn't just come out and say the thing. They didn't just come out and make the point. They asked questions. They wanted to lead people to their own truths. And so rather than just coming out and answering him, he says, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, well, what do you think? What does the law say? How do you read it? Which is a way of saying like, you're a student. You've studied this. You ought to know the answer to this question. What do you think it is? And the lawyer refers back to a well-worn passage in Deuteronomy, Shema Israel, and something that they repeated before every time they had synagogue or temple. And he repeats that and he says that you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. Amen. And Jesus says, that's right. And he says, and you should love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, you have read it correctly. And we know that in other places in scripture, Jesus says these two things, love God and love others, sums up the whole Bible, the whole law and the prophets. And so, so far, this young lawyer is tracking right with Jesus. He's doing really good. But then he says, the Bible says, in order to justify himself, he asked. So the lawyer is having this conversation with his buddies. He's talking to his friends. He's debating over here. He's making a point. He's asserting something about who his neighbor is. And then Jesus is there. And so to kind of show off in front of his buddies, get Jesus to justify his answer in front of his friends, we presume, he says, yes, and who is my neighbor? Apparently that was the discussion or the debate of the time. There's a little bit of uncertainty. Is it just Israelites, the people of Israel? Is it the friends of Israel? Is it the people in my immediate neighborhood? Is it the whole nation? Is it the surrounding nations? Is it even people that I don't like? There was some debate about that question. And so this young lawyer invites Jesus into that debate with his friends to justify himself. And Jesus, rather than just answering his question, begins to tell a story. He says, and who is my neighbor? And Jesus replies in verse 30, he says, a man was going down to Jericho. He starts in on the story. And it's at this point where I can almost feel the countenance of the lawyer shifting. He's bold enough to ask Jesus the question. Jesus asks him a return question. He nails it. He gets it right. Love God, love my neighbor. And Jesus says, that's correct. And he's like, you see, I told you I'm right so far. He's feeling pretty good. And he says, and who is my neighbor? And Jesus says, there was a man on his way down to Jericho. And you can almost see the lawyer going, oh no, what have I gotten myself into? I can see the disciples over to the side. I can see James elbowing Peter. Peter, Peter, shut up, man. Listen, this guy's stepping into it. As Jesus starts into his story, that's when everyone begins to lean in and go, oh gosh, what's the point that he's making? And so Jesus says there was a man on his way down to Jericho. This is a well-worn road. It was very traveled. Jerusalem is in the mountains and Jericho is on the coast of the Dead Sea. And so people would often walk down to Jericho. And so that's where this man was. And he was attacked by robbers. There were some robbers hiding out in the nooks and crannies of the road because it goes through valleys. Incidentally, the road to Jericho goes through the valley of the shadow of death that David refers to in Psalm 23. That's a freebie. I'm just giving these things out. So he's walking down this road, and he's jumped on by the bandits, and he's attacked. He's robbed, they strip him of all of his things and they leave him on the road half dead and dying. And Jesus says, after that happens, a priest comes walking by. And they would expect, like we would expect, a priest to know what to do. A priest is going to do the right thing. A priest is going to care for this man, but he says the priest just walks on by him. Then Jesus says a little while later, a Levite walks by. And we would again expect, or that audience would expect, a Levite to know the right thing to do. And to help us understand what a Levite was and why they would have this expectation, To be a Levite was to be a part of a tribe of the 12 tribes of Israel. The 12th tribe was the tribe of Levites, and they were the priestly tribe. To be a priest, you had to be a Levite, but not all Levites were priests. Some were assigned duties in the temple. So the easiest way to think about it for us, because this is a priest who had leadership in the temple or in the church, and then a Levite who had duties and other leadership in the church, the easy way to think about that for us would be a pastor and an elder walked by. And so in our context, we would expect, like they would expect, that a priest and a Levite or a pastor and an elder would know the right thing to do, would do the loving thing. But in both cases, the priest and the Levite walked by the man and left him to die. And for years and years, I thought that they did this because they were jerks. I thought they did this because they were hypocrites, because they got up on Sunday and they said the stuff they were supposed to say, and they shook the hands they were supposed to shake, and they hugged the people they were supposed to hug, but then during the week they didn't really practice what they were preaching. I thought maybe they thought they were too important or too good, or that his case was hopeless, and so they just walked on by. And my whole life, I've judged the priest and the Levite for being terrible examples of love. But someone pointed out for me a couple of years ago a tension that was going on there that I didn't notice when I was a kid and encountered this story for the first time. You know, the man on the road was dying. He was essentially dead. And the priest and the Levite are not allowed to touch dying things. They're not allowed to touch something that's dead or dying. If they did that, they would become unclean. It's a violation of the law that they uphold to reach down and to help this man. Because they can't do it without touching him and without getting messy. They can't do it without getting unclean. So it's entirely possible, it's entirely possible that they saw this man, they wanted to help him, they felt genuine empathy and sorrow for him, but knew, I can't do this. I will become unclean. I am a priest. I am a Levite. I have duties in the temple and I need to be able to perform those, so I can't help this man, and they walk on by. Then Jesus introduces a Samaritan into the story. And you've probably heard that there was tension between the Hebrew people and between the Samaritan people. And maybe you don't know why that tension existed. Maybe you could perfectly articulate it, but for those who can't, this is why there's tension between Jews and Samaritans. The Jews were God's chosen people. They were descendants. The Hebrew people were descendants from Abraham. And throughout their history, by edict of God, they had taken great pains to maintain the ethnic purity of the line of Abraham. They were forbidden to marry people from other nations. They had to protect and maintain this line. And the Samaritans were a race of people from folks who had intermarried with other countries and other nations and other ethnicities. And so they had lost the purity of the race of the Hebrew people. And because of that, they were ostracized and forced to live in their own cities and their own towns. And so there was racial tension between the Jews and the Samaritans because the Samaritans weren't pure like they were. The other thing that deeply offended the Jews about the Samaritan way of life is the Samaritans claimed to worship the same God. They claimed the same lineage. They claimed that they were just as good with God as the Hebrew people were and that their forefathers went back to Abraham as well, just like the Jewish people did, and that they worshiped the same God and that they executed the same religion. But their religion actually gets traced back to a split in the kingdom between Jeroboam and Rehoboam when Jeroboam instituted his own religion to make money and keep the tax dollars there. It was this political maneuver that he made, and the Samaritans are the descendant of that fabricated religion that is kind of part of the Jewish faith, but not the entire Jewish faith. If we wanted to understand it in our context, it would be this religious division that we see between Christians and maybe Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses. Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses claim to worship the same God that we as believers do, but they believe different things about Jesus than what we do. And so while the claim is that everything is the same, what we as Christians believe is there are nuances there that actually make those very different. And so there is ethnic tension between the Jews and the Samaritans, and there's religious tension between the Jews and the Samaritans. And they didn't live in the 21st century with political correctness where we sweep over all of those things and be nice to everybody anyways. They lived in an era where hate was perfectly fine, and so they hated each other. Jews despised the Samaritans. They wouldn't even walk through their towns. They would inconvenience themselves and walk around them. And the Samaritans likewise were justified in despising Jews. They were justified in disdaining them, in there being tension between those two groups of people. And so when Jesus introduces the Samaritan man into the story, he's doing it on purpose. He's making a radical statement. And this is where everyone can feel the story begin to turn and the lawyer has to be going, oh no, what am I going to do? He's going to make me look like an idiot. And this Samaritan has every reason to leave this man dying on the road because this man is likely a Jew and he has every excuse to not help him. But look at what he does. We pick this up in verse 33. It says, but a Samaritan as he journeyed came to where he was, the man who was injured and dying. And when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and he bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper saying, take care of him and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back. Look at the remarkable love of the Samaritan. He doesn't just kneel down and give him some water. He doesn't just kneel down and bind up his wounds and give him oil and wine. And if he's making a journey, he likely needed that oil and wine for himself. He didn't make provisions to help someone convalesce, to heal someone, and to patch someone up. He didn't make provisions for those things as he went on his journey. He needed that. And it would have been enough if he knelt down and gave up his oil and his wine and bound up this man's wounds, touched him, becoming unclean, and the Samaritan understands the same rules that the priest and the Levite do. He just decides that this is more important than remaining ceremonially clean, spiritually clean. And so he kneels down and he touches him and he binds him up. And that would have been enough. That would have been love, but he doesn't stop there. He picks the man up and he lays the man on his animal. Presumably, he gave up his seat and now he has to walk the rest of the journey while this man rides on his animal. And he takes him to an inn. And it would have been enough to take him to an inn to drop him off and go, hey, this guy's dying. I need a room. And just leave him there and let it be the innkeeper's issue. But he brings the man to his room and cares for him overnight. He has a sleepless night to care for this man. And I don't know about you guys, but I have a four-year-old in the house. So every now and again, we have sleepless nights, and I would not choose them. I like to sleep. This man gave up a night of sleep to care for this man who was dying, and that would have been enough. But then he leaves some money with the innkeeper. He says, I have a thing to do. Here's two denarii. Here's 200 bucks. Take care of him. I'm going to come back through town. When I come back through town, you spend whatever you have to to help him get right. And when I come back through town, I'll pay you back for whatever you have to spend. Remarkable love by the Samaritan. And Jesus finishes his story and he looks at the young lawyer and he says, now you tell me, which of these three love their neighbor? And the young lawyer can't even bring himself to say the word Samaritan. He simply says, the one who showed him mercy. And Jesus' response is remarkable. He says, yeah, now you go and do likewise. You go and love like the Samaritan did. Often we make the point of this parable that our neighbor is everyone, even somebody that we should justifiably dislike or have disdain for, even people who are mean to us, even people who are different than us, even people who are different ethnicities or backgrounds or heritages than us. We should love everyone, and we kind of make that the point of this story. But I don't think that Jesus makes that the point of the story. I think when we sink into the nuances of the story, what we see is that there's a lot more going on there and that the way Jesus ends it, the point that he's making to the lawyer is not trying to define the neighbor, it's trying to define love. And the way that Jesus defines love is very simple. I'm stealing this from a speaker and an author named Bob Goff who has a book by this title, and I think it is the point of this parable. And I think the point that Jesus is trying to make is that love does. Love does. Love acts. Love doesn't make excuses. Love doesn't walk past. Love doesn't explain away. Love is not convenient. Love does. Love helps. Love is my father-in-law. He's driving down the road in the middle of winter. He stops at an intersection and there's someone spinning a sign on the side of the road on a particularly cold day. And this person doesn't have a jacket. And a lot of people might just pray, God, help that person feel better. I hope that shift is done soon or give them genuine empathy on their way by. But my father-in-law pulls over his car, gets out, takes his fleece off and hands it to him and says, here, you need this more than I do. That's what love does. Love acts. I think so often we think loving thoughts. We want to do loving things. We have loving ideas, but we don't put them into action. And Jesus' instruction to the young lawyer is not to say, hey, everyone's your neighbor. It's to say, you go and you love like the Samaritan did. And so what we see in this story is that loving our neighbor is easily excused away, but love doesn't make excuses. Loving our neighbor is easily excused away, but love doesn't make excuses. I have a friend whose wife is a nurse. She's been a nurse their whole marriage. They have three boys, one's in sixth grade, and then they go on down. And she only works at the hospital about once every two weeks, whatever the minimum amount of time is to keep up with her licensing and her employment and all those different things. And in the midst of COVID, it came to be her turn to come in and do a shift. And she could have very easily excused away, I've got boys to think about, I've got a family to think about, my mom and dad live in our neighborhood, we see them sometime, I don't want to expose myself and expose them. She could have excused away what she needed to do, but she felt at the end of the day that loving her neighbor was to go in and care for the community that needs care right now more than any other time in our life, was to go in and give a break to the nurses that have been exposing themselves to this danger and to this threat on a daily basis. She could have excused away what love was and stayed home and no one would have blamed her. But love does. Love acts and it doesn't make excuses. We've all done this. We're driving down the side of the road, we're walking on the sidewalk, someone asks us for money and we think, we feel a tinge that we should give them something, we should care for them in some way, but then we excuse it away and we explain it away and we say, well, they're just going to use it to make poor choices. We're on the way home. Somebody's on the side of the road and it looks like maybe they need some help and we think that we could pull over, but then we remember, well, you know, dinner's on the table. The kids are expecting to see me. The family's ready. I don't want to inconvenience them, so I'm going to go on. And the parable of the Good Samaritan reminds us that, yeah, love is easily excused away. We can explain those things away if we want to, but that love doesn't make excuses. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, we see that love is messy. Loving our neighbor is messy, but love gets messy. Whatever, I don't know what the Samaritan was wearing that day, but they were good. They were probably decent tribal clothes, and what he didn't want on them was dirt and blood and grime. But he knelt down, and he cared for this man that was beaten to within an inch of his life, and he got messy. He lost a night's sleep. He got down into this person's problems with them. And we know that love is messy. When you're sitting in your office and you ask someone who passes by, hey, how you doing? And they come sit down in a chair and they go, well, we kind of internally go, oh, I did not bargain for this. I have a lot of things to do because we know that we're about to get messy. We know that they're about to start telling us some stuff and we're about to get in the middle of this thing. And so often we kind of refrain and we go, I don't want to make their problems my problems. I don't want to get in their business. I don't want to make this messy. I don't want to get involved in that. And so we kind of keep to ourselves. But what loving our neighbor means is acknowledging that loving our neighbor is messy and that love gets messy. This is why I love our Stephen ministers so much. At Grace Raleigh, we have Stephen ministry, and we have different people in the church who are Stephen ministers, and that's what they do. They get messy with people. Stephen ministers are trained to go in during hardships, during difficult diagnoses, or during losses, or in the face of addiction, or in the face of depression, or just times of high anxiety. And they go and they sit with people week after week, hour after hour, and they get in this mess with them, and they trudge through life with them, and they love them back to wholeness. They get messy with them. It may be that you feel that you need a Stephen minister right now. You need someone to talk to. You're anxious, and you need to share that. If you'll go to our website, graceralee.org slash care, you can find everything you need there to raise your hand and go, hey, I need to talk to somebody. Or if you want to love your neighbor by joining the ranks of Stephen ministers, you can sign up there and email our leader, Bill Reith, and get involved in loving your neighbor that way. But this story of the Good Samaritan shows us that loving our neighbor is messy and that love gets messy. Finally, in the story, we see that loving our neighbor is costly, but that love invests. Loving our neighbor takes something from us. It took the Samaritan's oil and wine. He gave him 200 denarii and said, I'm going to come back and pay this man's debt. Sometimes love costs us something. I remember when this lesson smacked me in the face a couple of months ago. We just recently moved, but before that we lived very close to the corner of Falls and Spring Forest. And there's a Harris Teeter Shopping Center in there. And there was somebody opening up a store for pets, I think called Pet Wants or something like that. And there was individuals who had been working in there for several days. It was late at night. It was like nine o'clock at night. And they're still in there trying to get ready. And I always root for locally owned places. I always root for people who have invested all of their savings and their hopes and dreams and opening up this thing. And it really kind of pulled on my heartstrings to see them in there working late and pouring their hopes and dreams into this place and their misguided affection for pets. And so I thought, man, I really want to encourage these people. So on my way into the grocery store, I knocked on the door and they kind of looked at me and I just kind of waved and they opened the door and they said, hey, we're not open yet. And I said, no, no, I know. I just want you guys to know that I'm rooting for you. I hope this goes well. I know that you've poured a lot into this. I've seen you working hard and I'm really rooting for you in this. Just wanted to encourage you. And they said, wow, great, thanks. They said, we're gonna open tomorrow. You can come back. We're giving away free yada, yada, yada. And I said, yeah, okay, great. And I walked away and I thought, I'm not coming back tomorrow. I'm not buying stuff for my dog. That's Jen's department. But I got to feel good because I was a good neighbor and I wished them well. But by the time I got back in my car and drove off, I thought, if you really love them, you'll go in there and you'll buy some dog treats. If you really want to support them, you'll go in there and you'll spend some money. If you really want to show them love, then it's going to cost you something. This is not about your ego boost and feeling good about yourself. This is about actually doing what they need you to do to love on them. And now, in light of the story of the Good Samaritan, I realize that love invests. Love is costly. It takes from us. But Jesus says that if the Samaritan was the one in the story that showed love, that we ought to go and do likewise. So grace, we're called to be good Samaritans. And that doesn't just mean that we're called to love everyone. That means that we're called to a love that acts, to a love that does, to a love that doesn't excuse things away, to a love that gets messy, to a love that invests. And now some of you, you may feel like the person that was left for dead. You may feel like COVID and the economy and the markets have just attacked you and robbed you and left you. You may need some people to love on you right now. And I would say this to you, if you are a part of Grace or you're watching this at all, and you feel like that person who's just been left on the side of the road, you're feeling beat up, if you're facing joblessness, if you are anxious because some of the jobs that you had lined up are getting canceled or are getting deferred and you don't know if you're gonna make up that income, if you're worried about being able to pay your bills, would you please let us know? Would you please tell us? If you're watching this on our website, on the live page, at the bottom, there's a space where you can submit a prayer request. Please tell us. On our website, you can find the email addresses of the staff. Email us. I don't want anybody, listen to me, I don't want anybody in our church hurting, facing job loss, not knowing how they're going to pay their bills, facing this time by themselves. I don't want it to be a secret that you've lost your job and you don't know what you're going to do and you don't know how you're going to care for your family, tell us. Let your church love you. Let us invest in you. Let us wrap our arms around you. I would hate to know that any of you are carrying a private anxiety or a private stress and we aren't able to do anything about it. Please let us love you if you feel like the person who's been beat up and left behind. For the rest of us, what a unique time to love our neighbor. If you have the means and you can, go support, go spend money at local places, go do the curbside pickup things, go get meals that you could just make at your home if you can afford it, if you can support in that way, go and do it. It doesn't seem like this is going away anytime soon, so we've got weeks to think about how we can love our neighbors and what love can do in the midst of this crisis. Let's right now, Grace, in whatever capacity we have, be the good Samaritans that love our neighbors well. And let's remember that love does, it goes, it acts. And let's take action. Let me pray for us. Father, we understand that you have made us conduits of your love, that we are able to love others because you love us, because you invested in us. Your love for us was costly and you paid that cost. Your love for us is messy and you got messy. Your love for us could have been excused away, but you didn't do that. You didn't make excuses. You came down here and you loved us and you continue to love us. And God, give us the power and the faith and the courage and the vision to love people like you love us, to love people like the Samaritan loved that person that day. Give us eyes to see the needs around us. Give us the courage to meet those needs. Let us in this time be defined by being a church that loves well. Be with us throughout our weeks, God. Be with our families. Give us grace and patience with each other. And it's in all these things, in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see all of you. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that after the service. This is, as Kyle said, the second part of our series called Grace is Going Home. This is going to culminate in Pledge Sunday on March the 1st. And so the idea is that we're going to kind of spend five weeks thinking, dreaming, praying, talking about this. We're going to have the rhythm of the business meetings or the informational meetings over the course of the next five weeks. And then on March the 1st, what we're asking everyone to do is to bring a sealed pledge card with you. So those are in your seats today. Those are very likely going to get emailed or mailed out to you maybe in the middle of this week or next week if you'd like them to come to your home if you can't be encumbered with carrying that to your car. I understand. If it were me, I would be nervous that I would bend the corners and that it wouldn't be perfectly flat when I had it at my house, and I would prefer it show up in an envelope. So I totally understand that. I'm like that. But what we're asking is that even if you can't be here on March the 1st, that you, if you want to participate, would mail yours in and we'll keep those. And then we are on March the 1st, Tom Ledoux, our finance guy, is flying in from Florida. I've asked him specifically to bring a briefcase so it looks very official. And he will be totaling those up and we'll just see what God is going to do here. We'll find out how he's moved in our hearts. So that's how that's going to work. And if you want to take one of those home and begin to pray about that, that's fine. I also want to be very clear that if you're new here, you're just coming into Grace, and you're not yet sure if this is your home, or if you've been here for forever, we don't want anybody to feel any pressure. I don't want it to feel awkward for anyone as we go through this, but hopefully this is something that if we call grace home, this is something that we're excited about. So that's what we're going to be looking at for the next five weeks. You may be wondering, what in the world am I going to preach about for five weeks? Am I just going to do like giving and campaign and vision for the next four weeks? That would be a real bummer. I don't want to prepare for that any more than you want to hear it. So that's not what we're going to be doing. For the next two weeks, actually, we're going to be answering what I believe is the greatest question facing grace. I believe that we're in a new season as a church, that we have new things to think about, new dreams to form, a new direction to go in. And so that as a church, collectively, we have a question facing us that, as I think about the church, I believe that we are posing this to God, whether we realize this or not. I think that this is the best thing to be asking God right now as grace, which is simply this, Father, what would you have us do in hell? I think that's the greatest question facing us right now. I think that pursuing a permanent home is the first step to walk in obedience to answer this question, but that really isn't the point of the campaign. That really isn't the point of the next five weeks. The point of the next five weeks, honestly, is to answer this question and have us move as a culture and as a church into what God would have for us in health. The reason I think that this is the question facing grace is that for many years, I don't know exactly how many, I wouldn't try to make a guess about that, but for many years, by necessity, the mission of grace has been grace. The mission of our church has been our church. The leaders of the church, the core of the church, those who have loved grace over the years, really our goal has been to get grace to a place where it was simply healthy, was to survive. By necessity for many years, the focus of grace has been turned inward on grace, going, how do we get healthy? How do we put the right structures and the right leadership in place so that we can be in a position where we are thriving? So for many years, the mission of grace has been grace. And now, in God's goodness, He's brought us to this place of health. He's brought us to a place where as a church, we are thriving. And I don't want to be gross about it, but by almost any statistical measure that you would look at a church and measure it, we're doing well. God is blessing us. And so we sit now in a place of health for the first time in a while. And instead of scrambling to get healthy and try to thrive one day, I think that we need to acknowledge as a body of believers that call this place home, that we are healthy, that we are thriving. And because of that, the question becomes, Father, what would you have us do in this health? On this foundation of health that he's built here, what would he have us do? And I believe his answer to that question is actually biblical. I believe it's the same for every church. And I believe that Jesus really gives us the outline of this answer in what's become known as the Great Commission. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 28. This is the last chapter of the gospel of Matthew. The gospels tell the story of the life of Jesus. And at this portion of the Gospel, Jesus has been crucified for our sins. He has come back to life, risen from the grave. He has ministered to people for an amount of days. He's ministered to the disciples, set them about their task, and now he's going back up into heaven. And these are the final instructions that Jesus leaves for the disciples. These are the marching orders from God himself to his church. Jesus came, he stayed for three years, not only to die for our sins, but to establish his kingdom on earth, which is the church. And these are the marching orders that he gives to the church. He says, beginning in verse 18, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And it continues teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And then he says, I will be with you always. So if you were to ask Jesus, what would you have churches do in health? What do you want for your healthy churches? What should they set about doing? I think what he would tell us, I think his answer based on this passage, and not just this passage, but what he says over and over again about his kingdom, and what Paul and the rest of the New Testament, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, what he teaches us about God's kingdom and what we see in what's called the general epistles or the general letters after those from the other New Testament writers, I think what they would all say is that what God wants for his church is to grow in depth and in breadth. I think what Jesus wants for us, if we say, God, what would you have us do in health? I think Jesus would say, I want you to grow deep and I want you to grow wide. I want you to grow in your spiritual depth, in your walks with the Lord, in your intimacy with God. I want a church that is full of mature, seasoned, loving, obedient, compassionate, gracious believers. And I want a church that reaches out into the community and grows wide. I think a healthy church is growing in both of those directions. So often churches do one well and not the other. They go deep. They teach the scripture. Everyone there is mature. The problem is they don't reach out into their communities and share the love of Christ with those in their different circles of influences. Other churches are great at reaching out, but not so great at growing deep. And I think that Jesus's answer to what would you have a healthy church do is to grow both in depth and in breadth. That's why in that verse, I highlighted, make disciples, grow deep, of all nations. Why? Everybody. And really, this is the goal of every church, and this is what we're going to talk about for the next two weeks. This week, we're going to talk about growing deep, and next week, we're going to talk about growing wide, and how we want to do that at at Grace and what the biblical model is for those things. So today, what we're really asking is, as we focus on growing deep, is God, how would you have us make disciples at Grace? What does it mean to be a disciple? How would you have us make disciples? And really, this is the goal of every church. Every Bible-believing church ever says that their goal is to make disciples. They say it in different ways. If you've been in church world at all, you've heard mission statements of different churches. You've heard it preached about a bunch of different times. Some churches just come out right and say it. They're very direct. Our goal is to make disciple-making disciples. Other churches will say, know God and make God known, or dominate the community with the love of Jesus Christ. Love your neighbor, love Jesus, and live faithfully, or connecting people to Jesus and connecting people to people. Churches say it in different ways, but the goal is to make disciples. That's what we all want to do. Every church shares that in common. It is like the white whale of all ministry. It's what everybody is going for, but here's the secret of church world that you may or may not have figured out already in your adult life. Churches tend to be not very good at it. It is really hard to make disciples. And the more conversations I've had with other pastors, not me because I'm excellent at it and my church never fails at anything, but with other pastors, what I learn is that this is a hard process. It's a difficult task. In my last church, I was there for seven years. When I started there, it was a church of about 11 or 1200. By the time I moved on to here, it was a church of about 2000. They kept me in the corner. I did nothing. And none of that growth has anything to do with me. So I'm not bragging. I'm just telling you, that's the season of the church that I walked through. And during that season, we would go to conferences with other churches that were similar in size and oftentimes larger. And I can't tell you how many times at these conferences, we had our little breakout sessions and you discuss all the things that are happening. And I would sit around a table with other people who were small groups pastors, or if you have a conservative church that's adult education pastor, some churches call it a discipleship pastor, whatever you want to call it. My job was to think about the discipleship process at my church. My job was to answer the question, when someone walks in that door for the very first time and they are far from God, but they're spiritually curious, what systems and programs do we have in place to move that person from spiritually curious to spiritually mature disciple, walking with the Lord, reproducing themselves and making disciples? That was my job. What's the process? Someone comes in, they don't even know if they're a believer yet, but they're curious. What do we do as a church to take them from spiritually curious to elder of the church? That's what we do. It was my job to think about that process. And I would sit around the table with other people who their entire job was to think about that process too. And we would talk about the different things that we're doing, the different structures in our church, how we do small groups, and what discipleship means, and all of those things. And inevitably, somebody would ask, what are you guys doing to make disciples? I never really heard that great of an answer. Very few churches had a good answer for that. I thought I had a good answer. It will surprise you none to know that I just bowled right in there with what we were doing, thinking this was the greatest thing in the world. But after seven years of doing it, what I realized is it seemed good on paper, but we're not really producing disciples. And it's kind of a discouraging thing to think about. It's not that the church isn't making disciples, it's just that it's inefficient and ineffective, and there's no systematic way to do it, and it gets messy, and it gets difficult. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about when we commit to something at Grace, how do we want to make disciples here? What should that process look like? And because I've thought about that a lot, and frankly a lot and listened to whatever I can consume, I've tried my best to think through, well, what are the reasons that it struggles? What are the reasons that I see that churches so often struggle to produce disciples in a meaningful and in an effective and efficient way? And I think that so many churches struggle because our definition of discipleship is unclear and our expectations around discipleship are unrealistic. I think so many churches struggle because our definition is unclear and our expectations are unrealistic. Now, what I mean is, when I say our definition is unclear, I mean our definition of both the process, what does discipleship look like, and of the actual term. What does it mean to be a disciple? I think we're unclear about the process. Y'all, I have seen so many different discipleship programs, right? I remember one, and it's a good program out of a church called Twelve Stone near where I'm from, and it's called Joshua's Men. And it's this beefed up three-year study. You sign up for it, and you go like every week at the same time, and you go through this curriculum, and there's a guy that leads you, and there's like groups of six to eight men, and you go through this curriculum, and at the end of it, you're a disciple. And I just thought, what a corporate America way to approach discipleship. What a bunch of dudes getting in a room. We want to make disciples. What do we need to do? What do we need to know? How do we need to learn? What are the blanks we need to fill in? How do we systematize this nebulous relational thing? Joshua's men. And it works sometimes, but not all the time. Most of the time, people crap out. Very few people make it through all three years, right? Or I want to be discipled, and so we'll look for that one person that we're going to have coffee with every week. And we sit down and we say, will you disciple me? And they say yes, and then we don't know what to do from there. So you just get into a small group, and we get into a small group, and we're not sure if discipleship is happening. I've seen so many programs and so many efforts that I think we're unclear on the process. What does it take to produce a disciple? And I know that we're unclear at Grace, because over the past, I would say, year and a half, two years, I've had multiple conversations with people here who have wanted to meet with me. And when they meet with me, they say, hey, I'm looking for someone to disciple me. I'm looking for someone to mentor me. I'm ready to take the next steps in my faith. I'm ready to grow in my walk. What do I need to do? Who do you think I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have, like, just a bank of disciple makers that you can just, like, plug me into? Do you have, like, a catalog I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have like just a bank of disciple makers that you can just like plug me into? Do you have like a catalog I can choose from? And I'll have other people who will come to me and they'll go, hey, I'd love to disciple somebody. Do you have any young people who are just clamoring for it? And what those conversations tell me is that I have not been clear about our process at Grace. And so I wanted to try to bring some clarity this morning to both what the process is and what the definition of it is. Because on Tuesday, we had an elder meeting. And at the elder meeting, I just brought up the point, I think that there were six elders in the room. And I'm not being overly flattering. I mean this with all sincerity. I love our elders. I have a great amount of respect for our elders. I would put our elders up against any other, not that it's a competition, but I just think we have some really capable, smart people in that room, and I'm grateful for them. And to those people, I said, if I asked you guys to define discipleship, what are the chances I would get if I set each of them down, all six of them that happened to be there that night, and I got to talk with them individually and ask them, how would you define discipleship and what a disciple is? They all agreed that I would get six very different, likely meandering, probably unclear, lacking precision, lacking concision answers about what discipleship is. They would all be different versions of right. They would all wander there eventually. And these are people who love the church and who are committed to the idea of making disciples, but collectively as a group, we didn't have a concise way to explain it. And I think in so many places, the definition of what a disciple is and what discipleship, the process is, is unclear. So I wanted to try to bring some clarity to it for grace and come up with a new way for us to think about as we seek to become disciples and make disciples, which are God's instructions to us. About a year and a half ago, I went to a conference. It was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. It was a guy named Larry Osborne that was putting on the conference. He's got a big, huge church out there. He's in his mid-60s. I love the way this guy thinks about ministry. And he gave me a definition of discipleship that I had never heard before. I had spent most of my vocational life thinking about it, studying it, learning about it, trying to frame it up. And he gave me a definition that was so simple that it totally changed the way I thought about discipleship. And I've been waiting to kind of spring it on you and make this how we think about it at Grace. So this isn't from me, this is from him, but this is what he said. And this is how I want to define the process of discipleship at Grace. Discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what discipleship is. Now, you're adults, you love Jesus, you can poke that and prod that, and you can think through that, and you can take it home and work it out and see if it makes sense to you, but to me it makes perfect sense that discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what it is. We are on that course. It's a process of simply taking our next step of obedience. And with every step, we get closer to God. With every step, we sacrifice more of who we are and accept more of what God wants. With every step, we admit more and more that I am not the Lord of my life, that God is the authority in my life. So with every step, we are getting closer to God. So being on the course of discipleship simply means taking our next step of obedience. And if you think about it, this is what Jesus taught the whole time. In the scriptures, our love of God is irrevocably coupled with our obedience to him. Look at what Jesus says in the Gospel of John in two different places, a chapter apart. I love the happenstance of the references of these verses, 14, 15, and 15, 14. He says, if you love me, this is Jesus speaking, if you love me, keep my commandments. And the very next chapter, if you are my friends, do what I command. It's not complicated. Jesus wasn't trying to shroud discipleship in mystery. He wasn't trying to make spiritual growth difficult or hard to grasp or understand. He wasn't even trying to make it for the spiritually elite. He just said, if you love me, you know how I know? You obey me. You know who my friends are? The people that are close to me? The people who obey my father. In Mark that I'm going through with my men's group, his mom and his siblings show up to try to stop him from teaching because they thought he was crazy. This was early on in his ministry. And he's in the middle of teaching and they say, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here. And he said, my mother and my brothers are those who obey the will of my Father. Jesus himself couples our love of God with our obedience to him. So discipleship is simply walking, taking steps of that obedience. John, the disciple, was, I would argue, the closest disciple to Jesus. I don't know that he was like the best believer. I have no idea to measure that. But relationally, he seems closer to Jesus than anybody else who is living. And at the end of his life, he wrote letters to the churches. And in the second letter that he wrote to the church, in 2 John 6, verse 1, he says, and this is love. He's talking about if we say that we know Jesus, but we don't have love, then we are liars. And then he defines love. This is love, that we walk in obedience to his commands. It is one thing to say that we love God. It is one thing to say that we believe. It is one thing to say that we love God above all else, heart, soul, and mind, amen. That's another thing to walk in obedience. That's why I'm increasingly convinced that what it means to be discipled is to simply take our next step of obedience. And here's what this means, and I love this. This means that discipleship is for everyone. Discipleship is for all of us. I think if you're in the church, sometimes you've heard the word discipleship. You may have been here long enough to have heard that word or been in Christian culture long enough to have heard that word but not really know what it means. I think some of us see that something like far off, that it's like the spiritual equivalent to buds training for the seals in the Navy, that it's like for the military elite, that it's for Christian black belts, and that's not the deal. Disciples are not people on mountainsides who don't talk to anybody but Jesus and just like eat grass. That's not what disciples are. Disciples are not unattainable figures like Elijah or Abraham. Those are pictures of disciples, but those are pictures of people who have been walking and taking steps of obedience for their entire life. But discipleship is for everyone. Has it ever occurred to you that the disciples were disciples before they were Christians? You ever thought about that? When Jesus goes to Matthew, the tax collector, and he says, hey, I want you to follow me. And Matthew puts down his instruments and he leaves his table and he follows Jesus. I don't think he yet fully understood that this is the Messiah, the Savior of the world. And one day he's going to die and I'm going to place my faith in that death so that it covers over my guilt and God accepts me and my relationship is restored. Matthew didn't know all that, but you know what he did do? He took a step of obedience. He said, okay, I'm going to follow you. Peter and James and John, when they put down their fishing nets, they didn't yet know the full magnitude of who this man was that they were following. I would argue that they weren't even yet believers. They simply took a step of obedience. And so what that means for you today is, even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, discipleship is still an option for you because it's simply an invitation to take your next step of obedience. And everybody has one of those. Your next step might be, okay, I've had some nagging questions about spiritual things for a long time. I'm going to take the step to begin to learn about answers to those questions. Maybe you've been gathering and learned some information about those questions. And maybe your next step is to get more serious about what it might look like to take on a faith. Maybe your next step is to accept Christ. Maybe it's to get baptized. Maybe your next step is to have that hard conversation that you've been needing to have. Maybe your next step is to confess something to your spouse or to someone you care about. Maybe your next step is to finally get locked into the discipline of waking up early and spending time in God's Word and spending time in prayer. Everybody's next step is different, but here's the thing about the Holy Spirit. I don't have to stand up here and guess at what they might be until I hit yours because he's already telling you. If you're a believer, we all have a next step of obedience at all times. So discipleship is for everyone, and it always beckons, and it always invites. It is not for the spiritually elite. It's for everybody. And if that's the process of discipleship, if that's what it means to be being discipled, then this is how we define a disciple at grace. This is actually something that I talked over with the elders. This is not my definition. This is our definition. The one that I presented to them at first, they said was too absolute and exclusive, and I came around to agreeing with them. So this is a result of a group think of not just me, but the leadership of the church. And what we believe that a disciple is, and how we want to define it as grace, is a disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. A disciple is someone who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. Have you taken more steps this year than last year? As you progressed last year, did you continue to progress or did you stop? A disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. At some points, we get off the train. At some points, we stop walking in obedience. At some points, we get into a bit of a spiritual rut, but when we get back onto it and we begin to take those steps again, then we are walking in discipleship again, which means that at grace, what we want to do, if we want to make disciples like Jesus told us to do, then what we want to do is constantly be showing ourselves and one another what our next step of obedience is, constantly encouraging one another to take those next steps of obedience and define a disciple as someone who is simply walking and increasing obedience to the Father. That's how we want to define those things. So that's how I want to bring clarity. If we say that one of the reasons that churches struggle is because we're unclear, I want to do what I can to bring some clarity to how we think about the process and the definition of the term at grace. But I also said that our expectations are unrealistic. I think what we expect around discipleship is something that doesn't always work in adult life. I think often we get locked into the single mentor paradigm is what I'm calling it. Often in church we get locked into the single mentor paradigm. We look at the way that Jesus discipled the disciples. And because the disciples had one person that was pouring into them for three years, then our expectation of discipleship is that we'll find this one spiritual mentor that we look up to in every way in life and that will sit under them and they'll teach us. It's this life-on-life model where they followed Jesus around and lived with him. It says, foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head. So the disciples just followed him around couch surfing for three years. I know it's crude, but it's true. That's life-on-life discipleship. We can't in our culture really mimic that. But we still exist in this single mentor paradigm that as adults, we're supposed to find the one person to follow and pour into us. And I've even said things. You've heard pastors say things like this before. I've said it. We see the model of it with Paul and Timothy. I've said before, everyone needs to have their Paul and everyone needs to have their Timothy. Everybody needs to have someone who's pouring into them and everybody needs to have someone that they're pouring into. This kind of single mentor paradigm. The problem is, in 2020, that's not very effective. With the staff this week, the full-time staff, Kyle and Steve and Aaron, in our staff meeting, I said, which of you have ever gone to someone and asked them to disciple you? And because there are people who care about their walk with the Lord, because it matters to them, all of them said, yeah, multiple times. And I said, how'd that go for you? And they said, eh, it was all right. I said, how many of you have had somebody come to you and ask you to disciple them? And they all said, yeah, we've had that before. How'd that go? They said, I don't really know what to do. I had somebody this week that I had coffee with, and he shared with me that years ago, there was a group of guys who were in their 20s, and he was in his 30s or maybe early 40s, and they went to him and they said, hey, will you disciple us? And he said, sure, and he started meeting with them, and then they didn't know what to do. We have a lack of clarity around the process. Our hope and our desire is to find the single mentor that can lead us for the next however many years and guide us through all things in life. And the truth of it is, that's a really rare find, particularly in adulthood. It's not impossible. It's not bad. It's great. And it happens. But if any of you have ever had someone that you said, yeah, I feel like that person discipled me, I would be willing to bet that nine out of 10 of us in the room, it was in high school or in college. I feel like I've discipled people, but they were always in high school or in college. It's a unique season of life that allows for that. But as adults, finding a single mentor to lead us in perpetuity becomes an ineffective thing. And I think hoping for that and expecting that is one of the reasons that we fail to make disciples. So instead of that, I want to propose to you guys the idea of seasons, topics, and communities of discipleship. Seasons of discipleship, topics of discipleship, and communities of discipleship. And here's what I mean. If you think about the disciples, if we understand discipleship as simply taking our next step of obedience towards God, yes, Jesus was the mentor. He was the guy pouring into those. He was the chief minister to the disciples in those three years. But do you mean to tell me that during those three years, the community that they had together of accountability and of encouragement and of challenge didn't help some of them take their next steps of obedience? Do you mean to tell me that as Jesus put different things in front of them, as he put different steps of obedience in front of them, go two by two and go into the surrounding towns and teach what I've taught you and perform the miracles that I've performed, do you mean to tell me that they didn't lean on each other to be encouraged towards that obedience? Do you mean to tell me that that wasn't a community of discipleship? I would argue that the disciples discipled the disciples. I think that's what they did. Furthermore, Jesus only spent three years with them. They had the rest of their lives to live. If you believe some research, they were at the latest in their early 20s when Jesus ascended into heaven. They had a long way to go. Who discipled Peter for those remaining years? Who discipled James and John? They did. They continued to encourage one another to take their next step of obedience towards God. So we want to have communities of discipleship here. We want to have topics and seasons of discipleship. I believe in seasons of discipleship because I believe that God puts people in our path for a season that we learn from during that time, and then at some point or another, that season's in, and each of you move into your next phase. We see that in Jesus's ministry and the disciples' ministry. We see Paul enter into John Mark's life and disciple him for a season. We see Paul disciple Timothy for a season. We see Paul and Barnabas work together for a season. I think that there are seasons of people in our life and things that God wants us to work on, and I believe that there are topics of discipleship. A great example of this is the small group that meets this afternoon. This afternoon, Steve, our worship leader, and his wife, Lisa, start their marriage small group. It's going to last for about six weeks, and then after that, they may continue to meet and discuss other things. But for those six weeks, absolutely what they are doing is discipling those couples in marriage. It's a topic of discipleship. What they're going to do is show them how to take their next steps of obedience in their marriage. It's a community of discipleship because it's 16 to 20 people who are getting together every week, and they're going to encourage one another in that direction. It's a season of discipleship. It's not going to go on forever. It's going to happen now, and then move on to another thing. I want us to reshape the way we think about discipleship, to move away from the single mentor paradigm. We might find that, but discipleship can happen outside of that. And start looking for people and communities and opportunities that can encourage us to take our next step in obedience to God. This is why we have small groups shaped up the way that we do. We sign up for our small groups every January and every August. And part of the design of that is to give you easy in-ramps and easy off-ramps. You try a small group for a semester. It works for you as a community of discipleship and a season of discipleship, maybe even a topic of discipleship then. And then the next semester, you do what seems most helpful to you. So maybe we stay in our small groups in perpetuity, and that becomes a community of discipleship for years to come. And maybe we shift into a different group. But our small groups are structured in such a way that we can move into and out of whichever groups are going to help us along our path the best. Which is again why I want us to start thinking about discipleship in terms of seasons and community and topics. And as we think about, man, I wish somebody would disciple me. If you're thinking about meeting with someone, if you're thinking about approaching someone, if you see someone and you respect some of the things that they do, I would encourage you to think in terms of a question, to think in terms of a topic. Don't go to someone and say, hey, would you disciple me? That's weird for everybody because we don't know what to do after that. But you may notice that this lady loves her husband in a way that I have not seen. So you might go to her and you might say, hey, I see the way that you love your husband. Will you teach me to be a wife the way that you are? It's a topic. It's an easy expectation. She can disciple you in that for a season. You may look at somebody and you may see the way that they run their business or the way that they orchestrate their career. And you may go, hey, listen, I see the way that you honor God, but you still achieve success. Will you disciple me in what it means to be a godly professional or a godly entrepreneur? That's a question. That's a topic. That's a season. You might, as a couple, go to another couple and say, hey, we see your kids. They're in college or they're adults and they seem to have their act together. We'd love to have kids that look like yours. Will you tell us your secrets? Can we have dinner at our house and you'll just tell us, we'll ask you questions about being parents. That's discipleship. It's a topic. It's a season. And if you do that, those things might morph into ongoing relationships of long-term discipleship, and that's great. But for those of us who are seeking to grow, I want us to start to think in terms of topics and seasons. For those of you who would seek to make disciples, your goal and your job is to simply help them see their next step of obedience and give them the courage and the ability to take it. And if someone does come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? I would encourage you to try to get them to reframe the question in, what do you want to know? How can I help you best? What specifically do you want to get out of this to make sure it's fruitful for everyone? So at Grace, let's make disciples. Let's be disciples. Understanding that means we are a people who are committed to increasingly walk in obedience to the Father, that we are constantly thinking about our next step. I'm going to begin incorporating next step language in my sermons and pose to us what's the next step of obedience for us. What's your next step of obedience here? We want to see that language show up in our small groups. Small group leaders, as you shepherd the people who are in your groups, disciple them. Your job is to think for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? People who volunteer in the children's ministry every week, those kids that you love so much that you see once a month or every other week or however often it is, you're thinking actively for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? If you volunteer in the student ministry, if you pour into anybody in this church or anybody in your life, if you have kids, you are the chief discipler of them. Let me encourage you to shape up your parenting in such a way where you're thinking, what is their next step of obedience, Father, and how can I encourage them to take it? And in doing those things with clarity, let's be a church that grows deep. Let's be a church that is full of disciples, that is full of kind, generous, loving, knowledgeable, gracious believers who can all say that we are increasingly walking in obedience to our God together. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for loving us. God, I pray that Grace would be a church that makes disciples. Help us, God, from the leadership, to the partners, the volunteers, small group leaders, small group members, from people who would consider themselves on the periphery and even considering, help us all to take steps of obedience towards you. God, make us good at making disciples. If nothing else, God, if we stink at everything else as a church, I pray that this would be a place where if you come here, you will grow in a deeper knowledge of you. Father, for those of us who are facing steps of obedience that are difficult, please give us courage. Give us a faith to believe that even though we can't see what's on the other side of that step, even though we might fear bad consequences on the other side of that step, that ultimately, God, what you have for us when we take that step is better. Help us trust that you came to give us life to the full. God, build at grace a church of disciples that love you and help other people towards you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

20 years ago, Grace was launched by a courageous group of faithful believers with a dream to expand God's kingdom in North Raleigh. Part of this dream was establishing a permanent home to serve as a launching point for this ministry. Through the years, God has used Grace to strengthen families, build faiths, and knit together a wonderful community of His people. But because there has always been a more urgent struggle or need, the dream of having our own home has not yet been realized. Now, however, we see that we are entering into a time of health. We believe that it is time for us as a church to look outward once again and dream big dreams about how God might use us to build His kingdom here. We continue to believe that having our own permanent home is a part of God's plan for us and is critical to our ministry and our community. We believe that after 20 years of hoping and dreaming, now is the time for Grace to go home. Good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor. This is a big, special morning. I'm so excited to get to share with you. I am in the habit of praying before I get up to preach, and in both services, I've just prayed that God would give me the strength to kind of keep it together without just blubbering like an idiot, because it's just, I feel so excited about what Grace is stepping into and getting to share this with you. On most Sunday mornings, on all Sunday mornings, I feel like my job as the pastor is to get up and open the Bible and share with you what I believe is teaching us together. My job is to teach scripture. I try to anchor everything I say in scripture and simply open it up and explain it to us in a way that is hopefully compelling or convicting or inspiring, whatever God has for us that morning. I feel like that's my job. But this morning, I'm going to take a little bit of a departure from that and just share with you what's been going on for the last 18 months. If this is your first time with us or your first couple times with us, this is not a typical Sunday morning, but it's the right one for the life of the church now. So if you allow me that license, I'm just going to share with you this morning and not preach at you this morning. Hopefully, I never preach at you, but you understand what I'm saying. In September of 2018, we went on an elder retreat to a farm in Youngsville. We had our sitting elders, and then we had three of our elders that had been recently nominated and appointed but weren't yet voting. They were junior elders. I still consider them junior elders. And we all sat around talking and dreaming about grace. And two of our elders, Bill Reith and Burt Banks, said that it was time that we start discussing the 10-year plan for grace. What's our 10-year plan for Grace Raleigh? Their very corporate 10-year plans seem important in that world, and so they thought we should have one too. And one of the items that they had on the agenda to discuss was the question of, do we want to own our own permanent home in North Raleigh? Do we want to be owners or renters? Historically, we've been renters, and so this was the question of, do we want to own one day? And very quickly and overwhelmingly, the response of the room was, yes, this is what we want to do. And uncharacteristically, during this discussion, I remained quiet. You may find it hard to believe I'm vocal in meetings. I don't have a problem saying what I think, and sometimes I feel like that's the role, so I should share my two cents. But in this particular elder meeting, as these decisions were being made, I stayed very quiet. And I stayed quiet because I carry with me an acute awareness that this is not my church. This is not my building. These are not my dreams. The church's goals are not my goals. This is our church. This church existed long before I got here. This church existed and did things and people poured into it and developed a life here long before Nate arrived. And so I'm acutely aware of the shoulders that I stand on and that my job is to steward the dreams and the hopes of us, not me. And because that's such a huge decision, I didn't really want to be the driver of that. So I stayed quiet. They quickly decided, yes, we want to be owners. And so then the natural question is, okay, what's the timeline for that? When do we want to begin to make decisions to take us down that path? And very quickly and overwhelmingly, again, the answer in the room was right away. We need to start making decisions right away. We need to start moving towards that now. And I remember thinking, I can still remember where I was sitting. I was sitting on the fireplace looking at those couches and chairs and couch, and I can see the dim room around me. And I remember thinking as everyone discussed this, why don't we pump the brakes a little bit? Let's just, let's chill out. Like I'm, it's a big enough challenge to fill a 200 person auditorium. Let's not build a 400 person auditorium. Let's just wait. I'm not really sure I need that pressure in my life, you know? And then in my head, I'm also thinking, and I'll tell her story in a second, but we had just then that month moved out of a season of tremendous debt. We haven't even announced to the congregation yet that we were out of debt. And now here we are signing up to go into more debt. And I'm going, gosh, maybe we should just like chill out. Can we just be healthy for a little while? But these were the decisions that were made. And I began to understand why we were making those decisions. And so that had set in motion a series of events. Shortly after that, we formed a building committee. And it was their job to go out and figure out how much are we going to need to spend to accomplish what we need to accomplish. So they went out and they looked around and they came back to us and they said, this is kind of what we think. This is what it's going to cost. This is what we think monthly debt service on it would be. And so this is kind of our goal. And so then once we had that goal, we realized we needed to get capitalized. So we formed a capital campaign committee last spring and asked them the question, this is what we want to do. Let's come up with the best way to do it. And so we've been working behind the scenes for 18 months now and are ready to present to us, the church, everything that we've been hoping and dreaming and praying and thinking about. But to understand the decisions that have been made and why we feel like now is the right time, I think we also need to understand the story of grace. Because we have some here who have been here since the very beginning. We have others who have come recently, and I'm not sure we all remember exactly how we got here. So like the video said, in 2000, there was a core group of faithful believers, a group of people from St. Andrew's Presbyterian over on Falls, that said they had a vision and a dream for starting their own church. A church that would be a light in the community that they love so much. A church that would strengthen faiths and strengthen families and watch people come to know Jesus and watch faith get deepened. Watch people walk with Jesus with more depth. They wanted to impact the community of North Raleigh, and so they banded together and they launched, at the time, the church called Grace Community Church. The very first Sunday, this church met on the lawn at the YMCA, and they had no idea what to expect. And that first Sunday, over 1,200 people showed up and sat on the grass and listened to that preacher preach and sang songs together. Everybody was blown away by what happened. And it was that Sunday that God, for the first time, whispered into the ears of those who cared so much about grace and believed in this place, hey, this church is special to me. My hand is on this place. I'm gonna use this church. I'm gonna use this place. Grace matters to me. And so that core of people believed that and believed that God's hand was on this place and believed that God had big plans for grace and believed that God was moving to make this an effective church in his kingdom. And so very quickly they needed space. So they started to meet at a storefront that used to be a Michael's. It affectionately became known as St. Michael's. And the idea was never that that would be a permanent location, but that that would be a temporary space until they had the health and the finances to build a permanent home. That's been the goal from the very beginning. It was just deferred because they needed space so quickly. But then having outgrown Michael's and not yet being totally prepared to go out in health and build a building, they made the decision to rent a space over on Meridian Drive. It was a larger space, 600-person auditorium. They were filling it up and going and blowing, and it was a really, really special time where it was easy to be enthusiastic about grace. Understanding that they weren't yet home, but that soon, when they were ready, they would have a home. And during that season, it was incredibly evident that God's hand was on grace. It was evident that God cared about that place. There was a thriving student ministry, a thriving children's ministry, wonderful people and wonderful families being strengthened and coming to know the Lord, and God worked in that place. But it was also during that season where there was some turmoil and some tumult in grace. There were struggles and trials and dreams got deferred and difficulty to walk through as a church. And it was during this season that some of that hopeful core that helped to start grace with all those dreams began to wonder if God's hand was still on grace, began to wonder if God still had plans for this place, began to wonder if the brightest days of grace were still ahead or if they were already behind. And so grace began to dwindle, and grace began to struggle, and those dreams got deferred. And it was in this season, in December of 2016, that my story intersected with grace. I still remember it was December 8, 2016. I had my first interview with the Pastoral Search Committee. They had asked me to block off enough time for a two-hour Skype interview, which I thought was excessive, but what do I know? I'm not making the rules. So that day, I started to prep and plan for the interview. So if you know me, you know that I don't like to be unprepared. I don't like to be caught off guard. I like to know what to expect. If you ask for a meeting with me, I'm probably going to say, yeah, that's great. What do you want to talk about? Because I got to know it's going to eat me up inside if I don't, if I can't prepare and think through everything that needs to be said. And so going into an interview, you better believe I'm going to be ready. So I started to dig into grace. And at the time on the website, they had a history of grace, just the events that happened year by year. And so I read through that history and I saw the ebbs and flows and the triumph and the trials. And then they had their elder minutes online. So I started to read through the elder minutes for the past couple of years. And I got done with all of that and I thought, yeah, I'm going to cancel this interview. I don't really want to be a part of this church. I got done with that research, and honestly, my conclusion was, I just don't see God's hand on this place. I don't have a lot of hope for that church. So I don't think I'm going to go there. I don't want to waste anybody's time. I need to cancel the interview. And as I opened up my computer to email Holly, who was then chair of the committee, it occurred to me like, come on, big time. You're 36. You don't have big enough britches yet to start turning down interviews. Just take it. Use it as practice. Let's see what happens. So I did. And I did the interview. And it was funny because in the interview, I gave the most honest answers ever because I didn't care if these people liked me. I wasn't trying to get anybody to like me. I was just telling the truth. And then at the end of the interview, they said, do you have any questions for us? I said, yeah. I mean, I've looked at your history. I've read through it all. Grace has been a hard place to be a part of for several years. And they all kind of started smiling, nodding their heads. I said, so there's a lot of churches in Raleigh. What are you doing there? Why do you go to that place? What's so special about it that you're clinging on? And Holly got a big smile on her face. And she said, because we love this place. These people are special to us. Our kids grew up here. Grace means a lot to us. It's our community. And we believe that the best days are still ahead for grace. And everybody nodded and smiled and agreed. And I believed it too. And I realized that God's hand was here and that there was reason to hope for grace and that I too believe that the brightest days were still ahead. It was hard to believe that when I visited in February for my like official visit interview weekend and I came to a service and there's less people in the service that Sunday than there are in this room right now. But I still believe that God wanted us to be at this place, and that God wasn't done with grace. And so in April of 2017, my wife and I, Jen, and our then one-year-old daughter, Lily, moved up to Raleigh, and we assumed we became a part of grace. And when I got here, it was not going well. We were very far in debt. Our line of credit had been maxed out. The bank had frozen our credit cards. There were some people who told me like, thanks for coming, but you'll probably be moving home in about six weeks. We just weren't sure about this place. But there was all kinds of things that happened in that first year that I felt like was just God whispering in my ear, Nate, I still care about Grace. My hand is still in this place. I still have plans for it. I'll never forget the Memorial Day offering in 2017, that first year that I got here. My whole goal was to get through the summer without incurring more debt, without begging and borrowing and stealing more money, right? I just wanted to try to get through the summer without going into greater debt. And in the month of May, we were running a deficit. And going into the last week of the year, we needed an offering of $15,000. That year, we were averaging about $10,500 a week. So we needed 50% more, almost 50% more in the offering to come in that week for us to remain solvent and not have to go into greater debt. And I don't know if you know this about church world, but Memorial Day weekend is the worst, okay? It's the worst. Nobody comes and nobody gives. And I don't blame you because if they didn't pay me, I would go to the beach too. Nobody's harboring ill will about that. But the reality of it is, that's the lowest giving Sunday of the year, every year in every church in the history of churches. So to be praying for 15,000, 5,000 more than what we normally get is an absurd prayer. And I prayed it all week and I asked the elders to pray. We didn't send out an email. We didn't ask for money. We just prayed. If I'm honest with you, I didn't really believe that it would happen. That Sunday, $28,000 came in. Not a single huge gift, just faithful giving from people who cared about grace. Without being asked, I was blown away. That will always stand out to me as the first time I felt God's hand on my shoulders saying, hey, listen, pal, you just worry about preaching. I'll figure out the rest. Let's go. And I knew that God's hand was on his place. Later that year, a couple months later, we owed $17,000 to World Overcomers that took over our space on Meridian Drive. And the deal that we got to get out of there, we still owed them money. And I emailed a lady that I didn't know on a committee that I had never talked to and said, hey, listen, I'm new here. This debt is gonna crush us. Can we please defer to the end of the year because we can't afford to pay it over the summer. And she emailed me back and she said, we love God and we love his kingdom and we love his church and you are forgiven of that debt. Don't worry about it. Again, God tells us his hand is on this place. He's not done with grace. And over these three years, I will have been here three years in April, over these three years, we've seen some of the people who thought that maybe God was done with grace begin to come back and breathe new life into it as well. We've seen people come back and believe that, yes, God's not done with this place. We've seen families added. We've seen our young family small group, Virgin, our three-year-old class is stinking full every week. We've seen more kids on the roster than Erin's had in the history of her tenure at Grace, which is now seven years. We're seeing small groups filled up. We have two established services. We're totally out of debt and saving money for the building already. We are in now a healthy place where we are watching faiths being strengthened. We are watching people being connected with Jesus. We are watching a community being built. And for the first time in the history of grace, we really are walking in health. And that's why we believe that after 20 years of wondering and wandering, that it's finally time for grace to go home and realize the dreams that we've dreamt for 20 years. Now, when we say that, that it's time for grace to go home, that we believe now is the time to pursue a permanent home, a permanent building, there's a couple things to understand. The first is when I say permanent home, I'm careful to say that because we could buy land and build or we could buy a building and upfit. We're open to all options. And I think the question becomes, why now? Why build? Why is it that we want to own our own building? Why is it that we want to own our own permanent home in this community that we love? And there's a lot of reasons for this. And in some business meetings that I'm going to tell you about, we're going to cover those reasons. But I think there's two really compelling ones that I would share with you this morning. The first most compelling reason that this is the time for us to go home and have a permanent home to call our own is to simply look around at this space. Now, we're grateful for this space. If this little room didn't exist, we would not exist as a church. No question about it. God gave us this space and allowed us to get our feet underneath us here. But look around. Does this feel like home to you? If you're not sure, sit behind the pole one Sunday and then answer that question. Where I have to walk over here to be able to see you. Hey, guys. Look in the corners because we have no storage. So we just put extra chairs on the sides and put tablecloths on top of them. That's less than optimal. We have a lobby. We say we're about connecting people to people. And a big part of that is our lobby and talking and being able to catch up with friends. The lobby time, honestly, is some of my favorite time of the week every week where I get to buzz around and catch up with everybody and see what's going on. It's too small. Try to hang out there right after the first service. It has to spill out into the front, whether it's cold or raining or whatever. Speaking of going outside, even if it's cold and rainy, have a kid in elementary school and have to walk outside every week, whether it's cold or whether it's fair, whether it's rainy or whether it's dry, and walk past the aquarium store and down the hallway of offices and get your kid in the repurposed children's space. We're grateful for that space. It just doesn't feel like home. If you think this feels like home, get here early on a Sunday morning when we have to get the air and the fans going because it smells like an aquarium. That's a thing. Come on Thursday, I'll show you. We'd love to have a restroom available in the lobby so that people don't have to walk down the children's space to get to it. If you've ever tried to, when that door's open and kids are trying to get into the nursery and other families are trying to get out of the nursery and you're just trying to get by to go to the restroom, there's a choke point over there that definitely does not feel like home. We'd love to have a playground for our kids to play on. I would love for our students, our sixth through 12th graders, to have their own space. Right now they meet in this space, and Kyle, our student pastor, is doing a phenomenal job with them, and he's gotten that. We're growing. We're running about 40 kids a week when everybody comes. But this space still swallows them up, and there's a limit on what they can do. Students like to be rowdy and rambunctious, and that's great, but we have to kind of keep a lid on that because we have not put enough money in Kyle's budget for auditorium repairs, so he's got to stay within some certain parameters. They need their own space that feels like home for them too. We need to invest in our student ministry. We want adult spaces during the week that feel more like living rooms where it's comfortable to sit in and meet in and have small group in so that our adults who come don't have to sit in repurposed children's spaces around white plastic tables and metal folding chairs. We're happy to do that, but we want other people to come too. We want you to be able to invite people to small group and have it feel comfortable and like home when they come. I dream of having some of our folks who work from home to take a day every week and come sit and work with us as a staff and as a community and make it kind of a hub during the days where people just are. We can't do that in our current space. And more importantly, all the things that I just mentioned, the pole and the chairs and the small lobby with the very nice hutch. If you go to Grace and you call Grace home, we don't think about those things. We don't care about those things. Those aren't really that big of a deal to us. But when you bring somebody for the first time because you want them to experience all that you've experienced at Grace, everything that I just listed is something that they have to get over in order to come here. The fact that you can't even see us from the road. We have signs on our building, but it's useless. Why do we even have that? You can't see it. You have to find us. We've joked that we're like a secret club. You only find us if you get invited. Everything that I just listed is something that they have to get over, that they have to get past so that they can be fully engaged here. As they assess whether or not they want to be a part of grace, those are all things that they have to be willing to move past too before they can really receive what God has for them here, before they can be encountered with the beauty and the grandeur of the gospel. And I just want as few things between people and Jesus as possible. I want people to notice as few things as possible that are detriments to what we're doing here so that they feel at home too and they feel freed up to encounter Jesus in this space. And so I think it matters. The next compelling reason that I think it's wise to build now is because it's really, this is not exciting, but it's true. It's fiscally responsible to own. It's the more financially wise thing to do with the resources that we have. Most of you in this room, you own your home. A vast majority of us do. Why do you do that? Because you know that financially it's the best decision for your family. The same is true for us as a church. We believe that it's the wisest thing to do with the resources that we have. Another thing you understand as you invest in a home now in whatever season of life you're in is if you'll do it up front, if you'll be financially wise in the early years of your life and you make sound choices, then later in the decades to come, you'll have the financial freedom to do what's really special to you with your money. You'll have the financial freedom to really spend your resources on what matters most to you. And we wanna do that as a church too. Right now we give 10% of our offerings to missions, to ministries going on outside the walls of grace. And I'm so proud that we do that. But I wanna see that number grow. What if we can get into a facility and get that manageable? And as our numbers and as our budget grows, our property cost doesn't have to and we can give 30, 40, 50% of what we have to things going on outside the walls of grace and be a generous church. It's more fiscally responsible to buy now so that we can be generous later. And just to kind of further drive that point home, we were in that facility on Meridian Drive for 16 years. In 16 years, we spent $5.4 million on rent. And that's conservative because for a season, we rented some extra space that cost more money. It's probably much closer to $6 million. And coming out of that space, we had debt to show for it. We want to make good choices so that that never happens again. That's why we believe that now is the time to act and move and go home. Now, with those things being said, there's some details that I do want to share with you this morning. And then I'm going to tell you about the informational meetings that we have and why we've chosen to go that route. The nitty gritty of it is, and this will be covered in those meetings, so you don't have to remember all this right now, but you're probably very curious. Our goal in the campaign is to raise $1.5 million over two years. We're going to ask everyone to make a two-year pledge and try to have that by the end of two years so that we can do what it is we think God wants us to do. The reason it's $1.5 million is because in the estimates that we have, we want to build a building that's between 400 and 600 people. The auditorium is between 400 and 600. In church world, once you have the auditorium size, you have the algorithms for all your other space. So it's really a decision about how big of an auditorium do we want. This one seats 200. The elders want us to have a 600-person auditorium. I want us to have a 350-person auditorium. I don't need that pressure in my life. But that's the decisions that we're making. We're open to buying land and building, but we would rather buy a building and up fit. Buying land and building takes more time and takes more money. The only reason we would do that is if there's a piece of land that's so attractive that we just couldn't pass it up. We want the building to be as close as possible to Capitol and 540. This puts us in range of everyone who calls Grace home. That's an optimistic goal. I was having lunch the other day with somebody who's been buying and selling land in the Raleigh area for probably 30 or 40 years. And when I told him where we wanted to be, he audibly laughed at me. But we think that God is going to look out for us. He'll give us the place that we need to be. If we were to buy and build, that could cost as much as $4.5 million, and $1.5 million allows us to borrow what we need to make that happen. If we want to go a little bit smaller, build and upfit, that is going to cost somewhere around $3 million. So 1.5 over two years positions us to do whatever it is we think we need to do. Now, to raise that money, we formed a campaign committee. And the campaign committee began, got a book written by an expert who's done 100 of these. And we started to read, what's the best way to go about this? And what we quickly learned is all the experts have a set way that you're supposed to go about raising funds for a project like this. What they wanted us to do is tear out all of the givers at grace and take like the top 15 families and I would go meet with them personally. Then you take the top 30 or 40 families and the elders go meet with them individually, share all the information, ask for a pledge. And then you take all the other families and we'll just get to you whenever we get to you. We're busy. We've got a lot of things going on. That's how it goes. You tear them out, you have the meetings, and the experts say by going and sitting down in someone's home and presenting to them and making a personal ask, you're gonna get more juice out of that lemon. That's the best possible way to get the funds that you need. That's the way you need to do it. And so because that's the way we need to do it, that's what we set about doing, is figuring out a way to do that. Now that was a challenge because at Grace, we have a long history, nobody knows what anybody gives at Grace. There's one person who knows how much people give. That's a guy named Tom Ledoux. He is our finance manager. He's living his best life in the villages in Florida right now. So you don't have to worry about running into him at Harris Teeter. And in between games of golf, he does our finances. We get a great deal on it. I love that guy so much. And he's the only one who sees what everybody gives. So to tear out our givers, I would have to start learning some stuff that is none of my business. But this was the way we need to do it. This is the money we need to raise. And so we started talking with the elders about it. One of the elders raised a concern. He's like, I'm really not comfortable with that. I don't think that we should do that. I think that we should just ask everybody all at once and let them respond however they want to and let the Holy Spirit move. And my response to him was, I think you need to go play in the forest and sing with the animals. Like, that's Pollyanna stuff, man. We got to get real. But the more I thought about it, and the more we prayed about it, the more I became convinced that that way to raise funds was just not right for grace. The more I thought about going into homes and presenting and asking, the less comfortable I got with it. The more, honestly, the more I saw it being the plans of man trying to figure out the best way to go about this and not making room for the Spirit. And so I thought rather than going to you individually and making an ask that I would just ask you corporately and trust you. I've tried as I've led Grace to trust you to be adults who love Jesus and love this place and trust you to go home and pray about it and allow the Holy Spirit to direct as if he saw fit that you would be sensitive to that and trust the pledges that come in. Another reason I didn't want to do the individual meetings is I began to think about it. And this is really what drove it home for me is, I don't want anybody in the church who gives to the campaign to think that their gift is valued any different than any other gift. We have some families in our church that because they've made wise choices, because God has blessed them, they really do have great means. We have some families in the church who have the ability, if they wanted to, to give in ways that were really impactful for the campaign. They give a lot of money. And that's wonderful. And then we have other families in the church that are far closer to mine and Jen's end of the spectrum that are in their 20s or in their 30s and kind of trying to figure out how to get life together. And some of us even living paycheck to paycheck and any amount that would be given would be really sacrificial. And if these families are able over the next two years to cobble together five or $10,000, I don't want to value that $10,000 any less than I would value the $100,000, $150,000. Because even though the amounts in those two gifts are different, the faith is the same. The sacrifice is the same. The spirit of generosity and obedience is the same. And I don't want to be a part of a system that makes those two people feel any different for what they gave. Because every bit of it is special. Every bit of it is impactful. I got a text this morning from a good friend of mine who just knew that this morning was when we were launching the campaign at the church. And they're a family like us. And he just said, hey, proud of you, rooting for you. Julie and I are committing $1,000 to the campaign this year. I started to cry in my bedroom. It's the same sacrifice. It's the same generosity. The gifts aren't different. And I don't want to treat them that way. So rather than going to your houses and doing an individual ask, we're having these informational meetings and we're asking corporately. There's three informational meetings. You have them on the cards in your seats. They're all identical. We're just asking that you would come to one of them. If you want to come to all three, because you just love this kind of stuff, knock yourself out. But we're asking that you would come to one. We hope that every partner and everybody who calls Grace home will come to at least one of these meetings. At those meetings, we will roll out for you all the things that we would have if I came to your house and sat down with you and talked to you. The type of ask that we're looking for, all the details of the campaign. There's an FAQ sheet on the huts that will give you a little bit more information if you have questions right away. We will go through all of those details. We'll have people from all the committees here that you can ask questions of. There'll be some give and take. And I think that those are going to be some good times for us at the church. That's where that's going to happen. We're hoping that you will come to those. And for the next five weeks, we're going to talk about the next steps of grace. Because I believe that the building, pursuing a permanent home, is just the first step that we need to take as a church that's now walking in health. The question facing grace now is, God, what would you have us do with this health? And so over the next five weeks, we're going to answer that. It's going to culminate in a pledge Sunday on March 1st, and we'll find out if this is a realistic dream. But as I close today, I would just share this with you. I was reminded in my preparation that in July of 2017, we had a business meeting. It was to talk about how to financially make it through the rest of the summer, how to exist as a church. And I remember there was somebody in the back of the room who stood up over there, and they said, hey, and they kind of talked to the room and said, hey, we just need to all give a little bit more and we'll be okay. And I was able to say to him and to everyone, actually, no, you don't. You don't need to give any more. This church is generous and doing everything that it can right now. You don't need to give us any more money. We need to be more responsible with the money that you're already giving us, and we're going to do that. And then I made a promise. I said, as a matter of fact, if you'll trust me, I'm not going to ask you for more money again until we're ready to build a building. So now here I am, three years later, because of God's grace, we've been able to keep that promise, asking you to consider participating in the campaign as we seek to go home. Asking you to consider participating in this above and beyond what you give to operational budget. So the invitation is to go home and just begin to pray and to think and to plan and earnestly ask God, God, how would you have us participate in this campaign? We'll have those informational meetings. We'll have our services for the next five weeks. And then on March the 1st, we're gonna come and celebrate and submit our pledges together and we're gonna see what God is gonna do. In the meantime, if you have any questions, my door is open. I will meet with you, talk with you, answer whatever questions I have. If you'd like an individual meeting, we can have that. I'm just not going to impose that on you. But that's the invite. Let's go as a church and pray how God would have us be involved with what he's doing here and the next steps of grace. Let's pray. Father, you're so good to us. We know that your hand is here. We know it's on this place. We know that what happens here matters to you. God, we believe as a body that it's time for us to take this step of faith and pursue a permanent home in this community where you've planted us. So God, I earnestly pray that if that's your will, if that's from you, let us marvel at how you make it happen. God, if that's not your will, if this needs to be our home for a while, then make it abundantly clear that that's your will and let us celebrate that too. God, we simply humbly ask that your will be done and that we walk in obedience to what that is. Father, be with these families and these individuals as they go and pray. I pray that they would be sensitive to your spirit. I pray that their hearts would be opened, would be moved by what moves you and that you would guide and direct us to exactly where and how you would have us participate. God, I cannot wait to see all that you do in this season of grace. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.