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
No comments:
Post a Comment