Church Requel Blog - Writings of Mark Pierce

This Sunday at CR: 11 AM Worship!

Church Requel will begin worship at 11am this Sunday morning! Yay! Let's celebrate together at our new location at 2 Marion Avenue, otherwise known as the "Point of Grace" (at the 5-way light where Marion and Park Avenue West intersect.)

Celebration Music. We have planned a very special New Year's worship service for this weekend.  We'll sing some of our favorite songs, including "Day By Day" and "You Are The Way."

Don't Throw Away The Bad Milk! The children will enjoy a special children's message that will help them to make the most of the new year. (We don't want to give anything away - but if anyone has some milk that's about to spoil, Pastor Mark could use it for his illustration. Email him if you have some sour milk!)

A New You For The New Year. We didn't just plan a great message for the kiddos. We even have an inspirational message for the big kids too! As we think about the new year, we'll be facing new problems, new pressures and new possibilities. Sunday morning we'll talk about responding with new attitudes, new adjustments, and new actions. As always, we'll pray together and share communion too. This will be a great way to invite in 2013! Why not invite in some new CR friends to help us celebrate?

Check Out Christmas Eve on Facebook. We enjoyed a wonderful time together on Christmas Eve as about a hundred of us gathered "at the Point!" Diana Devolder has done a wonderful job commemorating the night with pictures and short videos.  If you haven't seen them all yet, make sure you stop by our Facebook page.  Here are some direct links:

• Christmas Eve photo album. (57 GREAT photos!)
• Video: "Singing Silent Night" [2:09]
• Video: Dave Strong (Mark's brother) "Playing The Pipe Organ" [0:31]
• Video: Grayden, Anna and Paityn reading "Glory To God In The Highest" [0:18]
• Video: Brandi, Sarah and Harry "Lead Christmas Carols" [1:00]

January 2nd Pizza Party and Christmas Cleanup. This Wednesday, January 2nd at 7pm, we will gather at the new church and store away all the Christmas decorations. With a good crew, we should be able to stow everything in about an hour. Hot pizza pies will be our reward for everyone who can help!

New Cleaning Team - Jan. 8th at 11am. Sheri Shick has volunteered to lead our new cleaning team. She would love to have other volunteers join her. Email Sheri directly for more information.

Who All Is Welcome at CR? I know our immediate answer is "everyone." But have you given any thought to who exactly that includes?  I'm a regular reader of Jon Acuff's Stuff Christians Like blog. Recently Jon visited a friend's church and read this welcome message in their bulletin:

We extend a special welcome to those who are single, married, divorced, gay, filthy rich, dirt poor, yo no habla Ingles. We extend a special welcome to those who are crying new-borns, skinny as a rail or could afford to lose a few pounds.

We welcome you if you can sing like Andrea Bocelli or like our pastor who can’t carry a note in a bucket. You’re welcome here if you’re “just browsing,” just woke up or just got out of jail. We don’t care if you’re more Catholic than the Pope, or haven’t been in church since little Joey’s Baptism.

The welcome message extends 3 more paragraphs. Read the whole thing here.  The reason I include this to you, my fellow Church Requelers, is that this is exactly how we feel! And now that we have a permanent location near downtown Mansfield, we have a great opportunity to welcome the city and its people - all its people - to church. Make sure you extend an invitation to someone between now and Sunday morning!

See you at the point Sunday at 11am! Pastor Mark

Christmas Awesomeness Coming At Church Requel!

Good afternoon Church Requel!  Pastor Mark here with your weekly "what's happening" blog post. There is so much happening that I couldn't even get a chance to sit down and write it all out until just now! I hope that in the midst of all the busyness - and snowfall - that you will also have a moment to sit down with this message for 5 minutes sometime today and pray along with me that this Christmas will be the most awesome one yet for CR!

The New Sign Will Be Installed! I confirmed with our signage company that our new sign will be installed on Saturday. The new lights haven't come in yet and the old lights aren't working - at the moment. I'm heading over later today to talk to Paul to see if there's any way to get those old sign lights working for Christmas Eve. No matter what, though, the new sign will look great! A special thank you goes out to Jack Nichols and Don Angel, who painted the existing sign posts on Wednesday. They then grabbed a couple rakes and cleaned up the entire lawn out front. Looks great, guys. Thanks!

Tech Crew Meeting Sunday at 1pm. I met with Steve and Jonathan Tuesday evening "at the Point," where we made our final plans for the tech installation. The best time for everyone to get together is this coming Sunday at 1pm. Steve Thoman, Jonathan Pierce, Mike Gilbert, Dave Johnon and myself will start at OCF, grabbing one last load of tech gear. We'll then install the lights, sound, projector and screen for our Christmas Eve service.

While We're There... Dave Strong will come over to the new church to practice his organ prelude. That's right! We're planning on having a pipe organ prelude for our Christmas Eve candle light service. Dave will be the first one to play it for our church in our new location. Also while we're setting up the gear, our special praise team will find another corner of the church to practice for Monday night.

Pavilion Helping! You already know that Pavilion Community Church sent a crew to help us with our cleaning project a couple weeks ago. They are also providing two additional musicians to help us with our Christmas Eve service. Sarah Goff and Harry Crum from Pavilion will join our own Brandi Walker in leading our singing of Christmas carols.  

Mosaic Helping! Also lending their support to us that evening is Mosaic Church from across the street. We needed a couple additional microphones for our Christmas Eve skit. When I called Pastor Tony Pingitore to see if he could lend us the microphones, he told me that they also were holding a Christmas Eve service. I was quick to say thanks anyway, when he asked me when our service was scheduled. I told him 7pm. He said his wasn't until 9pm and that we were welcome to the mics! He asked us to "walk them back across the street" when we were finished. Is that a great willingness to help or what?

Sunday Night Our Last Night at OCF. We will have one more simple worship service at Ontario Christian Fellowship this coming Sunday evening. Since all of our gear will be over at St. Luke's, we'll keep it "simple, but meaningful" at OCF. We'll meet Sunday at our regular time at 6pm.  We'll sing some Christmas carols together, listen to one last talk that will remind us of all the great things God has accomplished during these last two years, then take one last communion together in the OCF sanctuary. Our plan is to pray one last time together at OCF, hop in our cars and drive to St. Luke's, where we will surround the sanctuary, hold hands, and pray a blessing on our new place.

Monday Night at 7pm - Christmas Eve - AT THE POINT! Monday night should be an awesome start in our new place. We'll enjoy the pipe organ by Dave Strong. We'll sing together with Brandi, Sarah and Harry. We'll watch a funny skit by Jessica and Jillian. We'll listen to Grayden, Anna and Paityn read the Christmas story from Luke 2. We will watch an incredible painting of the Christmas story. We'll hear a french horn playing "Silent Night" while we light our candles. We'll pray, share communion and celebrate a candle lighting ceremony - all in about an hour! Will this be an AWESOME birthday party or what?

I'm hearing from many guests who are planning on joining us at Church Requel Monday night. We'll need all hands on deck from our regulars to help with parking and greeting. Let's be gracious hosts, shall we? I can't wait to see all the great things that will happen this year because of our Savior's birthday!

Enjoy this weekend everyone! God is with us! Good news indeed!  Pastor Mark

#038: Countdown! [Podcast]

Click to Listen!

Podcast: Subscribe in iTunes | Play or Download in new window.

In this week's podcast we are counting day the final days toward our move to our new location... oh and the last weekend before Christmas!!!  I talk about all the things going on at Church Requel, the cleaning party last Wednesday, the kids singing last Sunday, the new sign being installed this week, plans for our last Sunday at Ontario Christian Fellowship this coming Sunday, and our very first service on Christmas Eve in our new location at St. Luke's Point of Grace.  If you want to be a Church Requel insider, then you will want to hear this week's podcast!

The last 25 minutes is the talk from this past Sunday night.  Want to see more pictures of the kids singing? Check out this Facebook album.  Here's a link to the video we played right before the talk. It's called "The Christmas Scale." It provided me the inspiration for the talk, "Don't Miss The Joy." You can read the sermon notes here.

Music for this week's podcast is "The Final Countdown" by Europe.

Don't Miss The Joy [Sermon Notes]

Every week I publish my sermon notes so that you may read them for yourselves.  For my parishioners, this could be a good review from the weekend before.  And it gives you a chance to see what I intended to say!  For other pastors and ministers, feel free to borrow and use any of this material.  I'd love for God to be glorified by you incorporating these notes into your own worship.

Christmas 2012 p.1: Don’t Miss The Joy - 12.16.12

Psalm 98:4-9 NIV / Video: “The Christmas Scale”

Introduction: I love that video. Were you completely surprised by the ending like I was? The young pianist could only discover the good news by playing the notes in the right direction and with the right pauses. I think that could be a helpful reminder to all of us this Christmas season.

We are always in danger of missing the joy of Christmas. Some recent polling data show that this is a financially stressful time of the year!

•  20% will have trouble making rent or mortgage
•  39% will cover Christmas expenses with a credit card
•  33% will take more than 6 months to pay off Christmas debt

 Also relationally stressful:

•  Not surprisingly 25% said they were depressed because above.
•  Family stress - meeting all the expectations of fractured families.
•  Divorce pressure - Jan. 8th busiest day for divorce lawyers when one in five couples will enquire after pressures of Christmas

It’s easy to see how Christmas - a holiday meant to celebrate the greatest good news in the history of man - can become the most busy, stressful, and unenjoyable time of the year. What can we do to remember the reason for the season and to experience the joy that should come as a result of Emmanuel: God with us? Today I want to give you 2 easy-to-remember recommendations. They were in the video. We need to live in the right direction and with the right pauses.

To Fill This Christmas With Joy:

#1. I must live ___IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION___.

This advice is so obvious that we risk missing it altogether for its simplicity. If Christmas is not all about Christ, then we really don’t have any reason for the deep joy that we should experience. The best we can hope for is happiness - that good feeling that comes when things work out for us. When the family gets together successfully. When someone receives the perfect gift from us. When someone meaningfully communicates their affection and love for us. That’s all happiness, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting and seeking happiness.

But it’s not joy. Joy comes from the deep love of God for us. Knowing that He loves us so much and wants to be with us so much that He sent His only son as our Savior. God with us. Emmanuel. It gives us joy regardless of our circumstances - in good times and also in bad. It’s a kind of joy that is not dependent on things working out, not dependent on “happiness.” 

We can only experience this joy when our lives are moving toward God - in the right direction!

This Weekend at CR: The Children Sing!

Good morning Church Requel! I hope you are having a good week! Pastor Mark here with my weekly letter to you about what's happening at Church Requel. There are so many things going at the church this week. Let's get right to it!

Cleaning Party Cleaned Up! First off, thanks to all those who showed up at the new church building this past Wednesday evening to help clean. As best as I could count, three dozen of us gathered to clean, sweep, mop, polish and scrub. You are such a wonderful congregation. I love how you came and just started working. You make my job as "leader" an easy one. You shined as you made our new home shine!

I loved watching Sheri Shick step forward, volunteering to lead a new cleaning team. This team would meet regularly to keep the new church clean as we move into next year. One of the men who joined us Wednesday night, Don Angel - a friend of Jack and Sheri's, proved himself an angel as he was the first one to volunteer to serve with Sheri on the new team! Don hasn't even been to a CR worship yet and is already pitching in to help. What an awesome attitude!

Also a BIG thank you goes out to Pavilion Community Church, who sent a crew out to help us with our cleaning work. Pastor Aaron Rose brought willing hands (and pizza!) and caught some of our excitement over God's provision of St. Luke's for us. Personally, I plan on attending Pavilion's worship service Sunday morning as a small gesture of thanks to them. Anyone who would like to join me is welcome. Their worship begins at 10am. Their church is located on Mill Street in Lexington.

This Coming Sunday Kid Friendly and Kid Led! Our own Sunday night service at OCF this weekend promises to be a special one. We have many participants. Our children will lead our worship singing Sunday night with five different songs! (I get to sing with them on the last song!) I'm sure all you moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas are going to want to arrive early to get good up-front seats. (Don't forget your cameras!)

I'm also looking forward to my Children's sermon this weekend as I plan to tell the story of the Christmas candy cane. This kid's talk promises to be... sweet! Every child will receive 2 candy canes - one to keep and one to share with a friend.

Thanks to Brandi Walker, who has been rehearsing with our children over the last three weeks to prepare them for Sunday's special worship. Brandi has really been stepping up her leadership lately. She has also been integral in preparing for our very special Christmas Eve service at St. Luke's.

Also thanks go out to Jessica Pierce, who will read our Scripture reading Sunday evening. Jessica and my youngest daughter, Jillian, are also working on a very special Christmas Eve drama. What a great way to celebrate our first-ever worship service at St. Luke's at 7pm on the night before Christmas!

Wednesday Invitation Night And Potluck. We have invested our last two Wednesday nights together at St. Luke's. Two weeks ago we gathered to decorate. This past week we cleaned. Next week we plan to get together for one more very special night. Next Wednesday, at 5 pm, we will meet in the new St. Luke's sanctuary. First we will pray together, asking God to fill the sanctuary on Christmas Eve. After receiving instructions, we will go out into the surrounding neighborhoods to invite all of our new neighbors to the Christmas Eve service. After an hour of inviting, we'll come back to the church to enjoy another potluck. We'll swap stories of how God worked through us.

I'm convinced that we will be amazed at what God accomplishes on Christmas Eve through our little church. I'm hearing stories all over town about Church Requel, St. Luke's and Christmas Eve. It's just like God to start something really big with something incredibly small. After all, that first Christmas started out with "just" a little baby boy!

Results of last weekend's special offering. One more thing... ( I hope you don't think I've buried the lead!) Thanks so much to all of you who faithfully committed to financially supporting our transition to the new church. We received over $4,100 last weekend and another $1,000 in pledges to be given before year-end. Plus one of our members committed to cover the entire costs of the outside signage. (Let's stop and applaud God for His goodness in providing for us.) We don't quite have everything covered yet, so if you haven't yet been able to join this offering, there is still time.

We hope to have the new main sign out front installed before our Christmas Eve service. We plan for the rest of the inside wiring work, platform, screen, new projector, baptismal pool and paint work will be accomplished in early 2013. We also plan to install other outdoor signage on both sides of the church and in front of the church parking lot.

I'd better sign off of this way-too-long-already weekly message. I can't help myself in being excited. God is doing so many wonderful things through your faithful work. I can't wait to see you on Sunday!

With great affection, Pastor Mark

 

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#037: Preparing To Move [Podcast]

This week I talk about all the news about our move to St. Luke's.  I mention all the pictures posted on our Facebook page last week at the decorating party. Finally you can listen to the sermon from this past Sunday evening, "What If We Knew We Couldn't Fail?"

Click to Listen!

Podcast: Subscribe in iTunes | Play or Download in new window.

Music for this week's podcast is "You Move Me" by Denver and the Mile High Orchestra.

What If We Weren't Afraid To Fail? [Sermon Notes]

Every week I publish my sermon notes so that you may read them for yourselves.  For my parishioners, this could be a good review from the weekend before.  And it gives you a chance to see what I intended to say!  For other pastors and ministers, feel free to borrow and use any of this material.  I'd love for God to be glorified by you incorporating these notes into your own worship.

Failing Forward p.3: What If We Weren’t Afraid To Fail? - 12.09.12

2 Corinthians 9:6-8 / Deuteronomy 15:10

Introduction: I want to talk to you today about our special one-time offering that we are about to give. Like last week this is going to be a personal talk given out of the depth of my own struggles with fear.  I know I’m afraid to be generous, because I wonder to myself “What if this doesn’t work out?” I find that the last, hardest thing for me to release is my trust in my own financial resources to provide for my needs. I want to be able to trust God - but it seems like money is the last place where fear lets go. Leads to our first point:

1. My ___GENEROSITY___ causes natural fear in me.

 We are tempted to say that we can’t be generous and be fearful at the same time. But that’s not true. In fact, every time I’m especially generous with someone else - especially when the gift is a generous one that causes me sacrifice - I’m going to experience fear. Will I have enough to get by? What if I need that money?

 Remember last week I told you that your gift today should be:

A. a sacrifice

B. God-directed

C. Over and above your normal support.

 If you are giving a gift today that meets these A,B,Cs of this one-time gift, then it’s going to be scary!

 But what if you KNEW you couldn’t fail? What if success were guaranteed?

This Weekend at CR: Special Offering Sunday

Good morning Church Requel!  Pastor Mark here with your "What's Happening" blog post. These days there are so many things happening I feel like we should change this to more of a highlights from the past week. 

Check out the Decoration Photos. When I woke up this morning I saw that Diana had been hard at work most of the night posting photos from our decorating party Wednesday night. She posted 78 different photos on our Facebook page! Check out this link to see these beautiful pictures.

Lots of Thank You's! Next time you see Diana, make sure you thank her for all of her late night activities on our behalf.  And while you're in a thanking mood, let's also make sure to show our appreciate to Marci, who also stayed up into the wee hours publishing this weekend's program.  And while we are talking about thank-you's and the weekly program, let's also thank Nancy Roop. Starting next week, Nancy will print our weekly programs using the equipment at Quest Wealth Solutions. They have agreed to pay for all the expenses of printing our weekly programs. God continues to provide for us!

Cleaning Party / Potluck! We had so much fun decorating our new church home for Christmas, that we've decided to meet there again next Wednesday for a cleaning party. Let's all bring our cleaning supplies in one hand and a supper dish to share in the other hand. We will meet at St. Luke's at 5pm. We'll give the place a good cleaning and sweeping, then gather downstairs in the kitchen and share a meal together.  If we have the same size crew as last week, we'll finish the cleaning in an hour!

This Weekend - Special Offering. This weekend - for the first time in Church Requel's history, we are collecting a special offering to provide for the transition costs of moving to our new church. With the money given this weekend, we will pay for new signage, a new screen for the new church along with an upgraded projector that will work better in the larger sanctuary.  If we have enough, we'll also purchase a baptistry tub that we can set up on those weekends when we have someone wanting to be baptized.  Finally we hope to do some painting of the bathrooms along with new signage so our guests can find the bathrooms.  

Last weekend we said we wanted everyone to participate.  So come prepared to give. Your gifts should be sacrificial, the result of prayer, and should be over and above your regular financial support. Already I've heard from many of you and how God has blessed you and empowered you to give.  A couple of you have already given your offering! One person took money from their retirement plan. Another had a rainy day jar and decided that it was really a Church Requel jar! One person decided to give $500, but had no idea how. Then, on Wednesday, this person received a completely unexpected check for $500!

The talk this weekend comes from my own heart and thinking and struggles.  What if we knew we couldn't fail? I've been studying two different passages in the Bible about generosity and God's provision for success in being generous. The talk is centered in the Scripture, but God has provided us so many living illustrations this week of his truth! 

We only have three more weekends at Ontario Christian Fellowship. Let's end our OCF days together in strong fashion.  Love you all much! Pastor Mark

How God Provided Our New Church Home [Sermon Notes]

Every week I publish my sermon notes so that you may read them for yourselves.  For my parishioners, this could be a good review from the weekend before.  And it gives you a chance to see what I intended to say!  For other pastors and ministers, feel free to borrow and use any of this material.  I'd love for God to be glorified by you incorporating these notes into your own worship.

How God Provided Us A New Church Home - 12.02.12

Matthew 22:9 / Psalm 40:1-5 / 1 Chronicles 21:24

Click to Listen!

Introduction: God is so good! God is faithful. God answers prayer. God has provided Church Requel a new church home at St. Luke’s! Yay God!  

This sermon is not so much a teaching time as it is a celebration time. No fill-in-the-blanks. Today let’s just sit back and relish in what God has provided. Today I want to tell you the story from a very personal perspective. We all have ways that we have interacted with and responded to the good news that Church Requel will begin Sunday morning worship services at St. Luke’s. Today I want to tell the story from my own perspective. I want to tell you about my own doubts and struggles in faith, and how God answered so powerfully.

Admit my own struggle. I need to start with the hardest step of faith I think I’ve ever taken. I want you to know about it, not to honor me - but to honor God. I want you to know about it because I know that many of us struggle with our faith and with taking tough steps of obedience forward in faith.

November 4th - just 4 weeks ago - was the beginning of this step of obedience and struggle with faith. That Sunday night we had only 24 people here for Church Requel at the beginning of the service. I went home that night and knew that after 3 years of working as hard and creatively as I knew how to work that the Sunday night alternative just wasn’t working. Sunday night just flies too much in the face of our culture. You ask anyone - church person or unchurched - when the best time would be to go to church, and they’ll tell you Sunday morning.  Even our most core group struggled with family conflicts on Sunday evenings.

I’ve told you of my ice cream binge. That was really just a symptom. I felt disappointed. Let down. I thought we were doing what God had called us to do. Why wasn’t He drawing more people? What more should we have done? And even more personal, what was my own future? There was never a plan B. I had never given consideration to the possibility that Church Requel wouldn’t eventually thrive. We’ve used up most of our savings over the past 3 years. In short, for 3 days I carried a heavy burden of failure, of feeling abandoned, and of great uncertainty.

In prayer and in my thought life I knew the Sunday night time frame was no longer a viable option. To continue doing something the same way and hoping for a different result was just crazy. I met with our leadership team 3 days later, November 7th, and told them my conclusions. Our treasurer added fuel to my worries by telling us that based on the current financial trend, we would be out of money by the end of December.

#036: Our New Church Home [Podcast]

Listen to Sunday night's Church Requel talk about how God proved faithful to our small church despite my own lack of faith at times. Then, after the sermon, I'll share the behind-the-scenes, rest of the story of how St. Luke's Point of Grace will become the home of Church Requel.

Click to Listen!

Podcast: Subscribe in iTunes | Play or Download in new window.

Music for this week's podcast is "So Good" by Lincoln Brewster on his Real Life album.