Post Easter Reflection

After all the build up, work, and effort put into Easter services you hope and pray that people come back the next week. It looks like we had a lot of people back this week at all our campuses. Most notable is our new Firewheel campus. We built a 500 seat room and our church leaders had hoped that we would have 400 at 2 services the first week. We had a core group of about 250 that we knew would be helping to give the new church some momentum. The first week there were over 800 people. Certainly, a number of people from our other campuses adventured over to Firewheel to check it out but that was a big number. The next week there were 755. Ok, now we have the start of a trend. As you can imagine our tech team was scrambling to get video setup in some other rooms to provide overflow space. We added cameras, which we had not planned to do for a long time, and made 2 other rooms ready for more people. Week 3 saw another week of over 750 and Easter is only one more week away.

A quick decision was made to add a 3rd service on Saturday night before Easter, but we only told those who were in attendance the week before. It was not on our website or advertised anywhere. Saturday night there were 595 people at the service. When the weekend of Easter was over, more than 1800 people and several hundred more children had attended services at our new campus. We have kept the 3rd service for this week and had over 1000 people. This church is only 5 weeks old! God is moving in big ways in that community. It is so obvious that our church leaders were listening to God in planting that church. Its a good problem to have, busting at the seams, and honestly I think we have handled it about as well as could be expected. What's next? More space, more services? There, I'm not sure, but one thing I do know is God is leading us to reach an entire community that is need of Jesus and that makes all the hard work more than worth the effort.