August 18.2008
It is easy to think of something to write about today. My wife and I have been married for 18 years. These years have not been long years....which means we still like each other a lot. These years have been filled with transition and sorrow and joy and four wonderful daughters. It is great being married to someone you actually like. Sandra is an amazing woman. I am very proud to be married to her.
As we embark on this new church planting effort with our friends in Salmon Arm and Sicamous there are some thoughts on God and marriage and church planting that go hand in hand.
Ephesians 5:1 tells us this: 1Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children 2and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. And then in keeping with the beginning of this chapter it tells us: 25Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church
Paul is telling me today as a husband that I am to be the one in the family who leads in love. That I am to be the one who will give up my life for my bride to help her be the most like Jesus she can be. That means sacrifice. That means giving up my desires for her's at times. It means seeking her best interest. It means building her up. It means being her friend. It means listening to her and encouraging her with my words, touch and action. One teacher told me that it means bathing her in the Word of God...encouraging her with the Truth of the Bible...the teacher also told me that it does not mean basting her with the Word. Big difference.
And all this totally applies to the Church. As Christ loved the church I am to love my wife and as Christ loved the church I am to love the Church for she is Christ's bride.
That I am to be the one who will give up my life for Christ's bride - to help her be the most like Jesus she can be.
That means sacrifice.
That means giving up my desires for her's at times.
It means seeking her best interest.
It means building her up.
It means being her friend.
It means listening to her and encouraging her with my words, touch and action.
And this not only applies to me but to everyone in the church - pastor or not. We are dealing with the bride of Christ. That means we are dealing with the most precious thing on earth to the Lord Jesus Christ. That means we all need to be step up our commitment a notch.
On this 18th Wedding Anniversary I re-affirm in my mind my pledge of loyalty to Sandra and I reinforce my love for her. That is also what I do for the church...and what we all should do.
'Nuff Said.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
BLOG ENTRY # 2
Something very unexpected happened today. About two minutes after I got to the office for staff meeting my mom called my cell phone. She told me that my dad had a heart attack. At frist the news soaks into my brain with not much reaction. Then I realize that my dad had a heart attack. I told Mom I would call her back and let her know when I was leaving to come and see him.
The past ten days have been very taxing. We have been in Salmon Arm/Sicamous for a month and living in other people’s homes. These folk are gracious, to be sure, but still it is very tiring when as a family we have been not in our own space for over a month. We got possession of our new home on August 1 and immediately ripped up the smoky orange shag carpet and began painting the smoke stained walls and ceilings with Exterminator paint. It is very effective. As well as moving some stuff and doing these renos in the new home I began to speak at Sunnybrae Bible Camp last night. I wanted to tell the kids about my best friend Jesus. I like talking to kids. They listen. I was all set to go and speak again tonight…and then I got that phone call from Mom.
At 11 am I got in the car and made it as quickly as I could to the ferry. It took me five hours and then I found out I had a two hour wait because the ferries are so busy in the summer.
So, God, what are you trying to teach me?
I am supposed to be at Camp tonight speaking, moving stuff into our new home, finishing flooring, meeting people in Sicamous so I can invite them to our new church….and my dad isn’t supposed to be in ICU post-heart attack…so what are you trying to teach me?
I am on the ferry and I thought I would film a little teaching video for the campers I am supposed to be teaching and email it to the camp. Good idea. I finished the filming and went to a computer workstation to edit the video. Only I didn’t have the USB cable to transfer the video to the computer to edit it. So I decided I would watch part of a movie and re-charge my cell phone at the same time. Only there was no power at the workstation. So I went back to my car on the upper deck of the ferry facing the beautiful hills and mountains that are Vancouver island and the setting sun.
I get a thought. Aren’t there some old comics in the trunk of my beater? So I open my trunk. The only comic is a dilapidated old Spider-Man comic I have read a hundred times and am not interested in.
That’s when I saw them. An old pair of Binoculars that my mom gave me. I am on a ferry. So I pulled them out of the worn, black case and I walked to the side of the ferry and peered through them.
There was an old fishing boat, much like one out of the movie the Perfect Storm, serenyl drifting on the calm blue ocean…
I look through these lenses and see the gray moon hanging in the early evening sky…and I realize that it is just hanging there…and so is the earth.
I walk to the other side of the big boat and once again I look through seldom used lenses and I see a sea gull…all by himself..resting on the waves. He is not cold or in a hurry. He is just sitting there watching the ferry go by. If he feels like it he will take off from the briny blue and catch a ride on the big metal fish thing that is floating by if he wants to go to the mainland and see his buds.
And then I see them. Two dark gray finned backs surfacing and then boing backs under the mild waves. Two porpoises. I have never, in my life, for all my ferry rides seen dolphins. It took my breath away. Their glistening, ebony backs went up and down and I had to adjust the trajectory of my gaze swiftly to keep up with them—they were so fast. I was blown away.
God, the very God who has allowed my Dad to have a heart attack, who has taken me away from my very important work of planting a church, speaking at camp and doing renos on our new place—made it so I would walk in the cool of His garden which surrounds this big pond. It has reminded me of what my friend Leanne quoted to me as we left Prince George. Just walk in the cool of the evening in the garden with your God as you do and plant this church. Just walk with Jesus the way Adam did before sin distracted him from the beauty of what was all around him.
Friday, August 8, 2008
July Report for Sicamous!
Hello from Sicamous! Bob here reporting. July began with packing up our house in Prince George and moving down to Salmon Arm/Sicamous. The first two weeks we stayed with Mel and Sherry Reimer in Salmon Arm as we get our house in Sicamous August 1. From Reimers we began house-sitting for some folk who were on holidays. Also staying there were Rick and Sarah Bugslag who have moved recently from White Horse where Rick served as Youth Pastor. He is going to help get our youth ministry off the ground in Sicamous starting in September.
Our ministry in Sicamous began with HIGH POWER SOCCER CAMP July 7-11 where we had great opportunity to get to know parents and their kids from Sicamous. We started out with a pre-registration of 25 kids and 44 kids showed up. I coached a soccer team of kids and got to know the kids and their parents. The staff from First Baptist in Salmon Arm were outstanding in their field and ran the whole show. Mel Reimer, Ben Hall, Les Harder, Darren Crown and all the volunteers had the whole soccer camp organized and all I had to do was play music, do some of the coaching and hang out with parents and their kids and get to know these folk from the community. Ben Hall gave some great Gospel messages and the interesting thing was that most of the parents stayed for the sermons and sat under the preaching of the Gospel all week! And not a complaint from the bunch. The parents all seemed very grateful that we would put on something like this for their kids. Sicamous is a wasteland of inactivity for families in a lot of ways. We held the camp at the local high school and the staff who hosted us were very gracious. It was great to get to meet Terry the janitor. We executed Soccer Camp with a team of support volunteers mostly made up of the core Christians from Sicamous. At the end of the week we had a Wrap Up BBQ which included free food and the inflatable play equipment which the kids just loved! We had huge opportunities to talk to Dads and Moms like Kevin and Heather whose kids Tyler and Ashton came to Soccer Camp. Sitting with Kevin and Heather were their friends from Revelstoke and—wait for it—their friends attend Revelstoke Fellowship Baptist Church! Kevin and Heather are so open and seem ready to take their kids to church. I took Kevin and his kids out for coffee and donuts at the local Tim Hortons (sigh, I miss Starbucks) the next week and had a great talk with him about life and what I am doing in Sicamous. He even gave some helpful suggestions as to where we could hold services starting at the end of September. I have been spending time writing follow up cards for the families who attended the camp and the kids have been excited to get something in the mail from Coach Bob. We also told the kids of our plans to have a High Power Kids Club on Wednesday evenings this fall. At the Soccer Camp I met Michelle, whose daughter Aila came to Soccer Camp and discovered that Michelle had blanket booked the elementary school gym so she could get some activities for kids going and she agreed to give us Wednesday nights for the weekly kids club. The kids were excited to know that the kids club was coming and we are excited to be able to run this Weekly program for families starting Sept.3rd. My wife Sandra (left) has been hanging out with the kids at the beach and getting to know moms like Christina and her son Ty(right). Sandra discovered that at one point Christina went to church and was even accepted at Columbia Bible College and once in a while she goes to the Sicamous Bible Church. But she doesn’t attend regularly so we think there is a great chance of Christina coming to our new church. We have found people here to be so hungry for friendship and open.
We’re excited about the idea of finding a place to hold services starting Sept. 28th. For now we have settled on the Seniors Centre which will easily seat 150 people. The Seniors Centre is one block off Main St. and has great visibility and a big parking lot. The centre has a nice piano, a big kitchen and a good area for coffee and visiting. There is a room in the back for a Kids Program during the service and it has a great yard with a covered Gazebo for crafts and games and BBQs.
The rent is $35 an hour which will total $405 a month for church services (that is 3 hours a Sunday from 4-7pm). We met Darryl, a senior who recently had a stroke and manages the centre and he was eager to rent it to us. I may run a Family Movie Night once every six weeks on a Saturday night during the winter. We also met Dianna the treasurer of the centre and discovered that she used to go to church as a young girl and even attended Prairie Bible Christian School in Three Hills, Alberta and walked away from church because the “fundamentalist Baptist church” she went to were killing her with their rules. She asked Mel and I what kind of Baptist church we belonged to and you could tell that she was in serious assessment mode as we talked. 15 minutes into the conversation she relaxed a bit as we told her about our church and what it was like. Very different than what she was used to. So we are praying that she will check the church out.
I will be starting my day in one of my offices (Askews Grocery Store Coffee Shop or Tim Hortons) hanging out, getting to know the staff and customers, meeting people and doing some sermon prep here and there with my laptop and cell phone. I have secured the name www.sicamouschurch.com for a website. This way I can put it on the business card I have designed to give to people. I have seen the church website as the front door for the church in Prince George where families came just by checking out the website. I have spent many hours totally re-designing the site for First Baptist Church which will be one website with with a Locations and Services on the main page that will link people to where the Sicamous location. The website will be up and running by the last week of August. We are also designing some big sandwich signs that we can place all around town for advertising. I will also put some TV ads on the Listing Channel and in the Local Newspaper.
I am planning to ask the Mayor of Sicamous, Lorraine March,
for lunch and to ask her to come to our first service on Sept.28th which will be more of a dessert night to welcome people, play some good music and show a video of what we are all about. There we will invite the folk to check out our first sermon series Extreme Home Makeover Helping Today’s Family. This will be our first big outreach push for the year.
I will get some guys from the community to come to the annual men’s trip to see the BC Lions in Vancouver and use that as a springboard for some friendships. The guys from the church take a bus down on Saturday morning and get back late, late that night after the 5 hour drive home after the game. So it should be tons of fun! Please pray for my daughters transition into school this fall, especially my teenage daughters Emily and Rebecca as they enter a close knit high school. I am working on fundraising as well. I need $5000 raised this first year and am counting on my friends from other churches to support us in this new ministry. Thanks for reading this report.
Thanks for Reading
—BOB EVANS
Our ministry in Sicamous began with HIGH POWER SOCCER CAMP July 7-11 where we had great opportunity to get to know parents and their kids from Sicamous. We started out with a pre-registration of 25 kids and 44 kids showed up. I coached a soccer team of kids and got to know the kids and their parents. The staff from First Baptist in Salmon Arm were outstanding in their field and ran the whole show. Mel Reimer, Ben Hall, Les Harder, Darren Crown and all the volunteers had the whole soccer camp organized and all I had to do was play music, do some of the coaching and hang out with parents and their kids and get to know these folk from the community. Ben Hall gave some great Gospel messages and the interesting thing was that most of the parents stayed for the sermons and sat under the preaching of the Gospel all week! And not a complaint from the bunch. The parents all seemed very grateful that we would put on something like this for their kids. Sicamous is a wasteland of inactivity for families in a lot of ways. We held the camp at the local high school and the staff who hosted us were very gracious. It was great to get to meet Terry the janitor. We executed Soccer Camp with a team of support volunteers mostly made up of the core Christians from Sicamous. At the end of the week we had a Wrap Up BBQ which included free food and the inflatable play equipment which the kids just loved! We had huge opportunities to talk to Dads and Moms like Kevin and Heather whose kids Tyler and Ashton came to Soccer Camp. Sitting with Kevin and Heather were their friends from Revelstoke and—wait for it—their friends attend Revelstoke Fellowship Baptist Church! Kevin and Heather are so open and seem ready to take their kids to church. I took Kevin and his kids out for coffee and donuts at the local Tim Hortons (sigh, I miss Starbucks) the next week and had a great talk with him about life and what I am doing in Sicamous. He even gave some helpful suggestions as to where we could hold services starting at the end of September. I have been spending time writing follow up cards for the families who attended the camp and the kids have been excited to get something in the mail from Coach Bob. We also told the kids of our plans to have a High Power Kids Club on Wednesday evenings this fall. At the Soccer Camp I met Michelle, whose daughter Aila came to Soccer Camp and discovered that Michelle had blanket booked the elementary school gym so she could get some activities for kids going and she agreed to give us Wednesday nights for the weekly kids club. The kids were excited to know that the kids club was coming and we are excited to be able to run this Weekly program for families starting Sept.3rd. My wife Sandra (left) has been hanging out with the kids at the beach and getting to know moms like Christina and her son Ty(right). Sandra discovered that at one point Christina went to church and was even accepted at Columbia Bible College and once in a while she goes to the Sicamous Bible Church. But she doesn’t attend regularly so we think there is a great chance of Christina coming to our new church. We have found people here to be so hungry for friendship and open.
We’re excited about the idea of finding a place to hold services starting Sept. 28th. For now we have settled on the Seniors Centre which will easily seat 150 people. The Seniors Centre is one block off Main St. and has great visibility and a big parking lot. The centre has a nice piano, a big kitchen and a good area for coffee and visiting. There is a room in the back for a Kids Program during the service and it has a great yard with a covered Gazebo for crafts and games and BBQs.
The rent is $35 an hour which will total $405 a month for church services (that is 3 hours a Sunday from 4-7pm). We met Darryl, a senior who recently had a stroke and manages the centre and he was eager to rent it to us. I may run a Family Movie Night once every six weeks on a Saturday night during the winter. We also met Dianna the treasurer of the centre and discovered that she used to go to church as a young girl and even attended Prairie Bible Christian School in Three Hills, Alberta and walked away from church because the “fundamentalist Baptist church” she went to were killing her with their rules. She asked Mel and I what kind of Baptist church we belonged to and you could tell that she was in serious assessment mode as we talked. 15 minutes into the conversation she relaxed a bit as we told her about our church and what it was like. Very different than what she was used to. So we are praying that she will check the church out.
I will be starting my day in one of my offices (Askews Grocery Store Coffee Shop or Tim Hortons) hanging out, getting to know the staff and customers, meeting people and doing some sermon prep here and there with my laptop and cell phone. I have secured the name www.sicamouschurch.com for a website. This way I can put it on the business card I have designed to give to people. I have seen the church website as the front door for the church in Prince George where families came just by checking out the website. I have spent many hours totally re-designing the site for First Baptist Church which will be one website with with a Locations and Services on the main page that will link people to where the Sicamous location. The website will be up and running by the last week of August. We are also designing some big sandwich signs that we can place all around town for advertising. I will also put some TV ads on the Listing Channel and in the Local Newspaper.
I am planning to ask the Mayor of Sicamous, Lorraine March,
for lunch and to ask her to come to our first service on Sept.28th which will be more of a dessert night to welcome people, play some good music and show a video of what we are all about. There we will invite the folk to check out our first sermon series Extreme Home Makeover Helping Today’s Family. This will be our first big outreach push for the year.
I will get some guys from the community to come to the annual men’s trip to see the BC Lions in Vancouver and use that as a springboard for some friendships. The guys from the church take a bus down on Saturday morning and get back late, late that night after the 5 hour drive home after the game. So it should be tons of fun! Please pray for my daughters transition into school this fall, especially my teenage daughters Emily and Rebecca as they enter a close knit high school. I am working on fundraising as well. I need $5000 raised this first year and am counting on my friends from other churches to support us in this new ministry. Thanks for reading this report.
Thanks for Reading
—BOB EVANS
Sicamous Church Plant Report 1
Hello from Sicamous! Bob here reporting. July began with packing up our house in Prince George and moving down to Salmon Arm/Sicamous. The first two weeks we stayed with Mel and Sherry Reimer in Salmon Arm as we get our house in Sicamous August 1. From Reimers we began house-sitting for some folk who were on holidays. Also staying there were Rick and Sarah Bugslag who have moved recently from White Horse where Rick served as Youth Pastor. He is going to help get our youth ministry off the ground in Sicamous starting in September.
Our ministry in Sicamous began with HIGH POWER SOCCER CAMP July 7-11 where we had great opportunity to get to know parents and their kids from Sicamous. We started out with a pre-registration of 25 kids and 44 kids showed up. I coached a soccer team of kids and got to know the kids and their parents. The staff from First Baptist in Salmon Arm were outstanding in their field and ran the whole show. Mel Reimer, Ben Hall, Les Harder, Darren Crown and all the volunteers had the whole soccer camp organized and all I had to do was play music, do some of the coaching and hang out with parents and their kids and get to know these folk from the community. Ben Hall gave some great Gospel messages and the interesting thing was that most of the parents stayed for the sermons and sat under the preaching of the Gospel all week! And not a complaint from the bunch. The parents all seemed very grateful that we would put on something like this for their kids. Sicamous is a wasteland of inactivity for families in a lot of ways. We held the camp at the local high school and the staff who hosted us were very gracious. It was great to get to meet Terry the janitor. We executed Soccer Camp with a team of support volunteers mostly made up of the core Christians from Sicamous. At the end of the week we had a Wrap Up BBQ which included free food and the inflatable play equipment which the kids just loved! We had huge opportunities to talk to Dads and Moms like Kevin and Heather whose kids Tyler and Ashton came to Soccer Camp. Sitting with Kevin and Heather were their friends from Revelstoke and—wait for it—their friends attend Revelstoke Fellowship Baptist Church! Kevin and Heather are so open and seem ready to take their kids to church. I took Kevin and his kids out for coffee and donuts at the local Tim Hortons (sigh, I miss Starbucks) the next week and had a great talk with him about life and what I am doing in Sicamous. He even gave some helpful suggestions as to where we could hold services starting at the end of September. I have been spending time writing follow up cards for the families who attended the camp and the kids have been excited to get something in the mail from Coach Bob. We also told the kids of our plans to have a High Power Kids Club on Wednesday evenings this fall. At the Soccer Camp I met Michelle, whose daughter Aila came to Soccer Camp and discovered that Michelle had blanket booked the elementary school gym so she could get some activities for kids going and she agreed to give us Wednesday nights for the weekly kids club. The kids were excited to know that the kids club was coming and we are excited to be able to run this Weekly program for families starting Sept.3rd. My wife Sandra (left) has been hanging out with the kids at the beach and getting to know moms like Christina and her son Ty(right). Sandra discovered that at one point Christina went to church and was even accepted at Columbia Bible College and once in a while she goes to the Sicamous Bible Church. But she doesn’t attend regularly so we think there is a great chance of Christina coming to our new church. We have found people here to be so hungry for friendship and open.
We’re excited about the idea of finding a place to hold services starting Sept. 28th. For now we have settled on the Seniors Centre which will easily seat 150 people. The Seniors Centre is one block off Main St. and has great visibility and a big parking lot. The centre has a nice piano, a big kitchen and a good area for coffee and visiting. There is a room in the back for a Kids Program during the service and it has a great yard with a covered Gazebo for crafts and games and BBQs.
The rent is $35 an hour which will total $405 a month for church services (that is 3 hours a Sunday from 4-7pm). We met Darryl, a senior who recently had a stroke and manages the centre and he was eager to rent it to us. I may run a Family Movie Night once every six weeks on a Saturday night during the winter. We also met Dianna the treasurer of the centre and discovered that she used to go to church as a young girl and even attended Prairie Bible Christian School in Three Hills, Alberta and walked away from church because the “fundamentalist Baptist church” she went to were killing her with their rules. She asked Mel and I what kind of Baptist church we belonged to and you could tell that she was in serious assessment mode as we talked. 15 minutes into the conversation she relaxed a bit as we told her about our church and what it was like. Very different than what she was used to. So we are praying that she will check the church out.
I will be starting my day in one of my offices (Askews Grocery Store Coffee Shop or Tim Hortons) hanging out, getting to know the staff and customers, meeting people and doing some sermon prep here and there with my laptop and cell phone. I have secured the name www.sicamouschurch.com for a website. This way I can put it on the business card I have designed to give to people. I have seen the church website as the front door for the church in Prince George where families came just by checking out the website. I have spent many hours totally re-designing the site for First Baptist Church which will be one website with with a Locations and Services on the main page that will link people to where the Sicamous location. The website will be up and running by the last week of August. We are also designing some big sandwich signs that we can place all around town for advertising. I will also put some TV ads on the Listing Channel and in the Local Newspaper.
I am planning to ask the Mayor of Sicamous, Lorraine March,
for lunch and to ask her to come to our first service on Sept.28th which will be more of a dessert night to welcome people, play some good music and show a video of what we are all about. There we will invite the folk to check out our first sermon series Extreme Home Makeover Helping
Today’s Family. This will be our first big outreach push for the year.
I will get some guys from the community to come to the annual men’s trip to see the BC Lions in Vancouver and use that as a springboard for some friendships. The guys from the church take a bus down on Saturday morning and get back late, late that night after the 5 hour drive home after the game. So it should be tons of fun! Please pray for my daughters transition into school this fall, especially my teenage daughters Emily and Rebecca as they enter a close knit high school. I am working on fundraising as well. I need $5000 raised this first year and am counting on my friends from other churches to support us in this new ministry. Thanks for reading this report.
Thanks For Reading
—BOB EVANS
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