When Bev and I moved to town, we did not know a single soul.  So a large part of the first several months were spent getting to know people and telling our story every opportunity we got.  This is the way we did it.

1.We had a rudimentary website that we made while we were still in Lodi.  So that gave people who went to the site information and contact info.

2.The Chamber had a sub-committee that was dedicated to integrating new members and recruiting new members.  When we had our once-a-month meetings one member of the committee got to tell the story of their company, in my case a church.  The vision of LifeSpring caught peoples’ attention.

3.A fellow cohort member of Leadership Merced once told me, “I belong to a networking organization that you should check out.”  I did and thus became a member of Business Networking International.  And everyone wondered, “What is a pastor doing in here?”  Every single week, I got to tell the LifeSpring story.  Amanda Foster is a LifeSpringer because of this group.

Relatively soon we had a few people who wanted to help us out.  Adam and Erica Moore as well as Tom and Emily Bustos were the first to surface.  Erica taught our children’s class.  Adam designed our first website and maintained it.  Tom and Emily were our first praise team.

I call these people, Scaffolding People, because they were starters.  They helped LifeSpring become a living thing and not just an idea.

Nancy, at the time, O’Bryan helped us immensely by securing us a home at Playhouse.  And she helped us wean away from the planting organization’s taking care of our beginning support money.

Others have helped by remaining past the start up period.  LifeSpring wouldn’t be here without their cumulative help, prayers, and support.

....that Stanley Hauerwas could be funny?  

This week's VoW is a sketch from the Tokens Show (before it became No Small Endeavor).  I thought you might enjoy some theological humor with Stanley.  There will be some terms you may not know, but you'll still get the humor of the sketch.

The sketch is not long, but its fun to see generally serious people throw off the theological restraints to have some fun.

I hope yiou enjoy it.

The text for this Sunday is Genesis 12:1-9, the great text in which God makes a great promise to Abraham about what God had in store for faithful Abraham.  This sermon is a reverie on all the mentions that the Bible makes of this one great promise.

When you become aware of God's intentions, you cannot avoid seeing it stamped all over the Bible.  Which is a North Star of sorts that points us toward God's ultimate intention.