Starting Sunday, January 3, 2016, the Highlands Campus Team will start meeting in the Cedar Mountain School. We will continue to meet until our “official” public launch on Easter Sunday, March 27th, 2016. We will be singing together, spending time in God’s word together, praying together, and preparing for our official launch. These meetings are not “necessarily” open to the public…only because we want to be as ready as we can be when we do go public.
We fully realize that this can get fully confusing. In an effort to help alleviate some confusion – let’s’ clarify a few things – why a “pre-launch?” and what are the main goals during this phase?
First, why a pre-launch? Well, in the church planting world, pre-launch services are the norm. Some refer to them as “rehearsal” worship services, but frankly I’m uncomfortable with that nomenclature. By God’s grace in Jesus, we do not have to “rehearse” coming to him in worship. (See Romans 5…) Amen? So, the idea of pre-launch meetings is to start the ball rolling in order to be fully ready (or as ready as we possibly can be) when we officially open the doors to the public at the end of March. We serve an excellent God who does all things well (Mark 7:37), and so we want to imitate Him (Ephesians 5:1) and be excellent and diligent with what he has given us. Imagine a Vernon family walking in the door for worship and we didn’t have anything ready for them. No Children’s Ministry, no worship service format, no COFFEE, no one to greet them or make them feel welcome, no one to spend time with them because we were all running around like unprepared headless chickens. That would not honor them, nor God.
Second – what specific goals are we trying to accomplish during pre-launch? I’ll give you three:
- Establish Set-Up. This is very basic, but uber-important stuff. Things like: where will the stage be? Where is the power for audio, video, and lights? How will we set up the chairs? Where is the welcome station? Where do we have kids ministry? What about kids ministry security and check in? Where will people park? Where will we set up the COFFEE??!!
- Continue to Build Core Team Unity. Us Highlanders are starting to get tight. We like hanging around each other. You should have seen us the day after Thanksgiving having our own Thanksgiving with everyone’s leftovers. We can’t wait for the Christmas Party. But there is nothing like working together, setting up chairs together, praying for the people who will sit in them together, figuring out how to best honor God together.
- Fine Tune. We know this isn’t going to be perfect and it’s healthy to remind ourselves of that fact. But, we need to be diligent. Ideally, we’d like to have everything running as smoothly as possible by the beginning of March, then we can gradually widen the circle of those we include. You see, by God’s grace, we literally have a potentially large number of community people waiting desperately for this church to open. Just the other day I received an email from the website and the person said “Can’t wait to see you Sunday!” Whoah! Hold on! We aren’t ready yet! By God’s grace, we shall be ready.
Please pray for us during this time. It will be weird for us not to drive to Green Pond on Sunday mornings. It will be weird for you not to see us there. But knowing you are praying for us, as we will be for you reminds us that we are all one body for the God glorifying goal of making and maturing disciples of Jesus Christ.
Please also spread the word to family and friends in the Vernon area. When doing so, please use the “official” public launch date of Easter Sunday, March 27th, 2016. If you want me to talk with anyone, I’d be more than happy to do so to share the vision and purpose of HBC. Also, if someone is interested in HBC, it is a really good idea to invite them to start attending GPBC to get a feel for who we are.
