Paul Leavens Minister Reporting
Here are the facts of the last 25 years according to the church records:
Baptisms - 180
Membership Transfers - 151
Weddings - 74
Funerals - 102
Church members moved away - 105
There is no record of the people who attended but never became members.
Yes Divine Intervention.
A spiritual hospital in the middle of a worldly desert.
I want to thank all the people whose faith and commitment helped make all this possible. God Bless you and I love you. Your an inspiration to me.
Serve Others
At Target, I watched a mother become very exasperated with her five-year-old son. The boy kept whining and complaining until his mother lost patience with him. She seized him by the shoulders, shook him, and snarled, "Look, I brought you here! Now you have a good time! Enjoy it!”
The world tries so hard to be happy. But most of the things it offers drugs, alcohol, sexual adventures, expensive entertainment, financial reward don't work for long. Self-indulgence always produces emptiness, dissatisfaction, restlessness, and what the Bible calls "a continual lust for more" (Ephesians 4:19).
We Have a Friend.
Lord," Martha said to Jesus, "if you had been here, my brother would not have died" (John 11:21). Martha implied that Jesus had betrayed the family by not coming immediately when he heard that Lazarus was sick. Now it was too late.
Martha could not have known that Jesus permitted Lazarus to die in order to dramatically prove God's power to raise the dead. But this account illustrates three truths that can help us when death strikes close to home.
(1) Death is inevitable, even for the friends of Jesus.
Keep pressing on. The example of the apostle Paul should inspire us older Christians to make the most of life’s final chapter. Paul wrote the book of the Philippians when he was prisoner in Rome around A.D. 62. His circumstances could easily have discourage him. He was aging. He was imprisoned. His future was uncertain. Paul had many reasons to put his life in neutral and coast toward the finish line. Yet he wrote, “I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forget what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”