One of the things we’re celebrating this week is three years of being a portable church. For 153 Sundays (but who’s counting) we’ve met in rented facilities and our great crew has transformed them into actionchurch each Sunday Morning. We’ve met in a Bar/Nightclub (Fat Daddys), and underage rock venue (Club 19), and now at a movie theater/entertainment complex(Queensgate).
One thing that all of our venues have had in common is WORK. Not sit around and discuss-something-in-a-committee-“church work” ; but real honest-to-goodness-I-think-I-got-a-hernia-WORK.
At Fat Daddys Nightclub, (our first venue) our job each Sunday was not only to retrieve all our gear from the basement storage via the “elevator of death” (Lots of great stories of crew members stranded in that rickety elevator), but also to clean the nightclub to prepare it for Sunday’s service after the biggest night of the week for clubbing…and vomiting. :-( At club 19, we were thankful (especially the “cleaning crew”!!!) for a sparkling clean venue on Sunday mornings, but there was still LOTS of work to be done on Sunday mornings as a/c crew transformed a bare rock venue into a church complete with chairs, tables, video screens, and two children’s areas. Our move to Frank Theaters has added a whole new level of Sunday morning work, as we load in EVERYTHING it takes to make actionchurch happen in the hours before the service, and then pack it all away and on the truck afterwards. It’s even MORE work!
I’m thankful for what the work of being a portable church has done for us as a church. I feel privileged to have spent hundreds of hours on Sundays over the last three years working with the actionchurch crew. I am thankful for the relationships that have been built. I am thankful for the prayers I have seen answered. I am thankful every week to know so many generous and hardworking people who chose to sacrifice their Sunday morning sleep to work hard so that OTHERS can experience a church like actionchurch.
What will the next three years bring? I’m not sure. Could there be a permanent venue in our future where people could come to church on Sunday morning without work gloves? It could happen. Personally, I believe that the in next three years, God could bless us with a “permanent” base of operations…AND…we could set up another actionchurch campus at a Bar, nightclub..or? somewhere else in York County.
What ever happens, in spite of the scars on my hands and the pains in my back :-), I am thankful this morning for the work that we have done over the last 153 Sundays. I don’t think actionchurch would be the church it is without it…