Prayer Force

As part of the ramp up for the launch of Saturday evening services this Fall in Cedar Park and Round Rock, we're forming prayer teams. You can participate in any of the following ways.

• Daily - Pray for the launch of the satellite services
• Weekly - Pray with a prayer partner
• Monthly - Pray with a group in a home
  

If you'd like to join the Prayer Force, decide which team you'd like to be on (Cedar Park or Round Rock), how you'd like to participate (daily, weekly, and/or monthly), and sign up at the Events Center.

Allen

Baptism Saturday

What a week! For those who don't know, we're ramping up for the launch of Saturday evening services this Fall in Cedar Park and Round Rock. Twice this week we took members of our Project Team to the sites. Excitement is building as we see the potential for reaching these communities.

Saturday we'll be at Emma Long Metropolitan Park for a baptism. Pack an ice-chest and arrive as early as noon. You can't miss the signage and tent as you enter the park. Baptisms start at 3 p.m. and we'll be there till 5. If you're new to Calvary - even if you've never visited before - we'd love for you to join us. I can't imagine a better way for us to connect with you than in the park with our families!

But be sure to bring sunscreen and drink lots of water. We don't want you to miss church Sunday. We'll continue our message-series, Future-Proof, a verse-by-verse study of 1 and 2 Thessalonians. This weekend we'll be talking about prayer and the benefits of maintaining a high-speed connection with God.

Allen

Life Group Props

Props to everyone involved in last week's launch of three new Life Groups. Great job! Nearly 50 people, most of them first-timers, attended the new groups. That's huge! Amazing things happen when we do the Christian life together. If you have yet to visit a Life Group, there are several meeting at various locations tonight and a couple more Sunday. For info, check out the Life Groups web page.

Allen

Baptism

A week from Saturday we will gather at City Park for a church picnic and baptism. If you've received Christ but never been baptized, this is the perfect time for you to take this step of obedience. In baptism, you publicly identify yourself with Christ and celebrate your new life in Him. It's an amazing thing when several hundred people gather on the shore singing worship songs while as many as a hundred are being baptized.

If you'd like to be baptized, be sure to register at the Events Center Sunday so we can prepare a baptismal certificate for you. Invite family and friends to witness your baptism especially if they're not Christians. This is a very impactful event and it's not unusual for people to receive Christ on the beach and make their way into the water to be baptized themselves.

Even if you're not being baptized, please plan to attend. Among other things, the church is like a family and this is a family event. In the same way that many of us have recently attended a relative's graduation, we wouldn't dream of missing the baptism of members of our spiritual family. You will be refreshed in ways you never could have anticipated.

Please call the church office if you have any questions about the event. Our staff would be happy to assist you in any way possible!

Allen

Values, Mission, and Vision

I thought it might be helpful to talk about the difference between values, mission, and vision. Different people mean different things by these words. Here's what we mean at Calvary Austin.

• Values tell us who we are.
• Mission tells us what we do.
• Vision tells us where we're going.

Some have confused our vision with our mission. Our vision is "To bring change by impacting 1% or more of the Austin-area population at weekend services by 2015." That's not our mission. That's not we do. That's our vision. That's where we're going. To put it another way, when we look by faith into the future, that's where we're trusting God to take us.

Our mission is to "To Change Austin by Changing Lives." Jesus gave us a mandate to "make disciples" (Matt. 28:19). That's what we do as we help people to know Christ, grow in Christ, and show Christ to others.

Allen

Coffee Space

We have an opportunity to do something that makes too much sense not to do.

Several years ago we opened a coffee bar in retail space on the corner of our present location. We opened the coffee bar to encourage people to come early and stay late for worship gatherings. Our hope was that friendships would be formed and people would feel like they were part of the Calvary community. We also hoped that by locating the coffee space off-site, on the corner, it might become an entry point for the neighborhood. Unfortunately it was never a big hit with our neighbors and is now only open before and after weekend worship gatherings.

We have an opportunity to sublease the space. This makes sense for at least two reasons. First we believe that we can be more effective in seeing friendships formed if we create coffee space on-site where people attending worship gatherings will be sure to see it and have easier access to it. Second it will save the church a significant amount of money currently being spent sustaining the offsite space.

That just makes too much sense not to do! So we'll be moving out of the off-site space this week and will soon announce plans to create coffee space on-site in the very near future.

Allen

Criticism

I can't wait to jump back into 1 Thessalonians Sunday. In chapter 2, Paul talks about the way he went about caring for the spiritual needs of the people in Thessalonica when he was there. The amazing thing to me is how apparent it is that Paul was on the receiving end of harsh criticism. People often quote these verses when criticizing spiritual leaders not realizing that, in doing so, they may have more in common with Paul's critics than they do with Paul.

For example, in verse four, when Paul says that he was all about pleasing God rather than men, he says it because people were accusing him of being a man-pleaser. It's hard to believe that people would say that about Paul but people say that and things like it about godly leaders all the time. When we are criticized by other Christians for serving the Lord the way we do, we need to remember that we are in good company. And, before we criticize others, we need to remember that we may not be in such good company.

Allen

Why Rethink Church?

So Sunday, as we started our new message-series, we were talking about the need to rethink church. If you had everybody in the Austin metro number off, only three in 20 would have been in church in the last month. I can't help but think that if our churches were more like the one in Thessalonica, more people would want to check it out and would come to know Christ.

First there was their "work of faith" (1 Thess. 1:3). Truth had made it's way from their head to their heart. Not only did they know the truth but they lived it. Their faith worked!

Second there was their "labor of love" (1 Thess. 1:3). Love wasn't just a noun for them, it was a verb. It wasn't just something they felt, it was something they did. Their love labored!

Third there was their "patience of hope" (1 Thess. 1:3). They saw the big picture. They were patient in the midst of problems because they had an eternal perspective. Their hope endured!

Allen

It matters what we believe!

It matters what we believe about God. For example in 1 Thessalonians 1:1, we see that Jesus is God. Paul uses the single preposition "in" to modify both God the Father and Jesus making them equal. What difference does that make? Sunday we said that if Jesus wasn't God, He couldn't die for our sins. Here's something else to consider. In Hebrews, it tells us that because God the Son became a Man, He can "aid those who are tempted" (2:18) and can "sympathize with our weaknesses." Take a few moments to reflect on that today and feel the heat of His love for you.

I'm off to grab breakfast before the conference I'm attending begins again this morning.

Allen

New Life Groups

I'm sitting outside at Starbucks in Murrieta, CA with several Calvary Chapel pastors. We're here for the annual Senior Pastors Conference. It's cooler out than it will be in Austin till October. Sweet.

At home, this is a big week for everyone who attends Calvary Austin. We launch three new Life Groups. That makes seven Life Groups meeting in six Austin-area cities on three different days of the week. If you haven't visited a Life Group yet, I just want to encourage you to do that this week. Part of what it means to be fully plugged in at Calvary Austin is to experience community as part of a Life Group. I can't wait to hear about all the people impacted by these new groups.

Allen

A long time ago, on a continent far, far away…

It is a period of relative peace known as Pax Romana. Missionaries, setting out from a base in Syria, have won their first converts on the European continent.

During the mission, the missionaries managed to plant churches in several cities by using the ultimate spiritual weapon, the gospel, a message from God with enough power to change an entire planet.

Pursued by his enemies, the Apostle Paul races to Corinth where he writes a letter to one of the churches he's just planted, the church in Thessalonica…

The new message-series, Future-Proof, starts Sunday!

Allen