Creative Scribble

Over the next two weeks our launch team will be visiting other churches. Since we won’t be meeting together formally, I am going to take these two weeks to blog about our systems and structures. Then at our next meeting together we will “debrief” about our church visits and these blogs.

The first and most important system for OneLife Church is simplicity. Our mission is simple: to see people discover God and how their one life can make a difference. The strategy to accomplish this is also simple. We will embrace our culture in a way that engages people who are far from God with his unchanging message of salvation. Specifically, we will be laser-focused early on in how we do that.

That’s where it can get interesting.

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This past Sunday was our first Launch Team meeting and this Sunday morning will be the first time we get to meet at the high school. We are very excited about that!

The challenge has been trying to determine what exactly we should be talking about. For nearly two years I’ve been thinking, planning, praying, and preparing for launching this new church. So now I have to whittle down those two years into just a couple of months for these people who have bought in to the vision and are ready to roll up their sleeves to make it happen.

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Wednesday night was OneLife's first official Launch Team event and this Sunday is our first official Launch Team Sunday. I'm stoked! I took some pictures on my phone Wednesday night and tried to TwitPic them but for some reason they didn't go through. But anyway, this is the first time we went through our portable church system to see what all we bought. It was in even better shape than I had hoped. A lot of the stuff hadn't even been unpacked from its original packing! Click "Read More" below to see.

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Tonight was our first official Launch Team event. We met at one of our sponsoring churches for a cookout and unpacking party. It was great to finally get together in an official capacity and to also see all of our equipment.

For the first time since we bought the portable church system we unpacked the entire trailer. Our team then broke down into smaller groups and worked their tails off. Some set-up the sound equipment for its first test run while others inventoried all of the cases to see what OneLife now owns. It turns out we have all of the children's and sound equipment we will need and everything is in unbelievable shape. Another group spent the night scraping the other church's decals off and washing down the trailer so we can get our decals put on it (for free, might I add, thanks to a generous business in Blount County!).

This Sunday will be our first Launch Team meeting with everybody there so needless to say this is an exciting week! I will post pictures of tonight soon since TwitPic let me down. Keep praying for our finances and our growing launch team! We are within about $20k of what we need and would love to add a few more folks to the team. We are trusting that God will continue to provide!

One of our sponsoring churches is having a focus on church planting this Sunday and asked us for a video promoting the opportunity to be part of the launch team. It so happens that this is also Tyler's first video for OneLife Church. I'm a little biased but I think it's great! He still has a few tweaks he wants to make but it's pretty close to finished. Enjoy!