My Summer

I love traveling and have done my fair share of it this summer.  I have some short trips left, but I’ll be in town 12 of the next 13 Sundays.

-Two big trips: Our family saw 6 states plus the District of Columbia in June.  On this recent trip, I saw 8 more in both the Midwest and New England. 

-Craziest Day:  Last Friday…Got up at 3:30 central time in New Hampshire.  Flew through Detroit and landed at 9:30am central time in St. Louis.  Performed a wedding at 10:30am for Jenny’s uncle and hit the road after lunch for a 7 hour drive to Arkansas to hang with my parents and brother’s family.  Somewhere in there…got a speeding ticket (I said craziest day, not best day).

At the end of the travel, here are the simple objects of my affection…

-Love our minivan (never thought I’d say that)…It isn’t even 3 years old yet, but crossed 61,000 miles this week.

-Love worshipping different places and I almost always go to NEW churches if I can. Worshipped with one that meets in a school in Alexandria, Virginia; one that meets in a warehouse in Concord, NH; one that meets in a Hotel in Boston, MA; and one that has its own building (but still isn’t that old) in Hot Springs Village, AR.

-Love my parent’s place in Arkansas…room for all of us, incredible lake and 5 championship golf courses within 10 minute drive.  Late night card games, play station with my nephew, mini-golf with our kids, and…mom’s home cookin’.

-Loved the Lobster…most of my week in New England was focused on ministry development with high school students, but we did go out for dinner with the adult leaders on my birthday last week and I enjoyed a lobster dinner on the coast of Maine.

-Love the diversity of our country.  Each region is unique…and not just in how we refer to soft drinks (pop or soda or coke), though I did find the graph above fascinating.

-Love my wife.  She is so prepared for everything we encounter traveling as a family.  And she is a champ to make it possible for me to travel for ministry stuff on my own.  I take it for granted too often.

Vacation

Not that you hang on by a thread waiting for me to post something, but if you follow this blog you have noticed I checked out for a while over the weekend.  It was a great time away with family in Arkansas after spending that week with top-notch teens in New England.  I might post some reflections on it in the future.

The Picture?  My view from the tee of Hole number 1 on Isabella in Hot Springs Village…the top-rated golf course in all of Arkansas.  I shot a respectable 88.  Next day was better with an 84.  Can’t believe they are only the 3rd and 4th rounds I’ve played all summer.

Miss Sue

We had a little celebration last Friday.  OK…it wasn’t so little.

Sue Hertzfeldt (commonly known as “Miss Sue”) was the focus of a surprise party with hundreds of friends (we tried to get every one in this picture, but still missed a few).

The occasion?  Sue has been on the Suncrest staff now for 15 years!  Yes, it’s a little unusual to celebrate this since the church isn’t even 15 years old yet, but that’s the point.  Sue was on the Suncrest staff before suncrest even had it’s first service.

I won’t get long and sappy here, but it’s worth letting everyone know in this forum a bit of what sue means to suncrest…and to me.

1.  Sue has been used by God to change hundreds and hundreds of lives.  Even as the church has grown (and the children’s ministry has expanded incredibly), Sue stays personally in touch with more people than I could ever imagine.  She prays with them and for them, she writes to them, she visits them in the hospital and goes to their baseball games.  She teaches children and encourages parents.  It is simply who she is.

2.  Sue has the biggest heart of anyone — anyone — I know.  If you know her, you know that.  If you don’t know her, I could never explain it to you sufficiently.  Do you know anyone who loves people like she loves people?  I’d love to meet them.

3.  Sue embodies suncrest.  Our mission is her first concern.  She sacrifices every day to invest in people’s lives.  She thinks outward, not inward.  She has high standards.  And then there is that huge heart again…

4.  Sue thinks beyond our walls.  As much as she embodies Suncrest, she isn’t stuck in church-mode all the time.  Everyone knows her love for the Cubs and other sports teams from NASCAR to IU Basketball to Da Bears.  She also makes sure we are in the loop about community events, loves the NW Indiana Symphony, volunteers her own time for hospice, and more. 

5.  Sue made it possible for me to come here.  She started in a part-time role and volunteered to delay coming on full-time in year 2 with the church so that they could have a little money to bring on another staff member.  That was me.

6.  This church has largely been built on children’s ministry.  Our children’s ministry has been largely built on Sue.  Enough said.

7.  Whenever I think of how Sue invests in all of our children, MY children are the faces I see.  YOUR children are likely the faces YOU see.  She has created a context for my children to grow in knowing their Bibles and loving Jesus.  Is there anything more important to me?

Sue,

I love you from the bottom of my heart.  For who you are…for what you represent…and for the sacrifices you have made for 15 years to serve our church family.

A very grateful leader…

Greg

Click here to listen to John Wasem’s (our founding pastor) video message to Miss Sue.

Another Suncrest Church Plant

I spent the evening with some people I’ve become a raving fan of…the staff of the next new church Suncrest is helping to launch.

Why am I such a fan?

-All three of these families picked up and moved from the Midwest to the challenging field of New England.

-All of these families are committed to creating something out of nothing.  Before churches are built, they are born…with only faith and a mission.

-All of these families are raising their own financial support.  Not only are they, moving to an unfamiliar place to start something out of nothing…they are fully dependent on financial supporters to carry them through.  Raising support is a humbling experience…and practically it is a TON of work.

So with all of this….why would people do it?  Because they trust God will use them to change the spiritual landscape of New England.

Tonight, I had the great privilege of telling them the “Suncrest Story” and imagining that on a night much like this 15 years ago, a Suncrest launch team gathering was being held in someone’s backyard.  It was a humble but faith-filled gathering that now is the story of people finding Christ, lives being re-shaped, marriages being restored, broken people finding wholeness, and hurting people finding a church family that cares.

I’m confident that 15 years from now…their staff will sit in a launch meeting for another new church and tell very similar stories.

From all over…

I’m teaching this week in New England to a group of high school students from around the country.  They are some of the best, brightest, most spiritually mature, and ministry-focused students that you would ever find together. 

They come from all over — near Evansville, IN; Pittsburgh, PA; Portland, ME; Dallas, TX; Quincy, IL.  I’m sharing the teaching with some very accomplished pastors/teachers from Indianapolis, Evansville, and Springfield, IL. 

What brings us together for such a purpose?  All of the leaders/teachers believe that:

-Youth should be invested in more than critiqued.  The best ideas for ministry (and most everything else) are going to come from them.

-We want to lengthen the runway for high-potential students when thinking in terms of leadership, worldviews, and ministry (especially church planting).

-We think changing this region of New England is a critical element to changing the world.  I love Chicago and the midwest, but Suncrest has a major church planting focus in New England because it is a center of influence culturally and a bellwether for the country.

I fell asleep on the duck boat tour…

I’m wiped out.

After camping Wednesday through Friday, we came back to Suncrest’s party Friday night to honor Miss Sue. (She’s incredible and will get her own post later this week!) It was a super-late night because Jenny washed everything and we re-packed to head various directions on Saturday.

At 6:30am Saturday I was with Jack on my way to Dunkin Donuts.  I knew breakfast was my last chance to see the kids for a week and they love donuts!  At 9:00, I was teaching our pre-marital classes, at 12:15 meeting with some potential leaders, and after another 1:30 appointment I went to perform a wedding in Highland at 5:00.  Then, rushing to the airport for a flight that was delayed anyway.  Finally landed in New Hampshire after 12:30am.

I fell asleep on my bed last night out here trying to type a few emails…and then was up early (especially with that lost hour from eastern time) to worship with two different churches out here, including the one we helped start in Boston.  The rest of the day we spent seeing the city of Boston.  I’ve done the Freedom Trail enough times that I can give the tour by now, but I had never been on one of the duck boat tours.  I was excited, but once we drove into the ocean, it must have been a little too peaceful and I fell asleep!

I start teaching the classes I’m out here for tomorrow.  It’s an incredible chance to shape some the lives of some high-potential students out here in their thinking about leadership and church planting.

Now…to bed.

So…how was camping?

It’s always interesting to me about what resonates with people.  This camping trip generated WAY more conversation than I ever anticipated.  So, here’s a quick summary of our experience:

It was a lot of work AND a lot of fun.  We talked on our way home about whether we would do it again.  Jenny and I both have trouble imagining we would do it with just our family, but with the chance to do it with friends again…yeah.  It all started a few months ago with some friends inviting our family to go and because of them we had a great time.  All of our kids played together, we laughed endlessly canoeing, the ladies rode horses together, some of us went for a run one morning, the peaceful campfire (Read:  after the kids went to bed) sets the table for good conversations and a card game or two. 

We did come back tired…and my schedule has only led to more fatigue, so it wasn’t that “refreshed” feeling that you would like to have coming back from time away.  Still, it was a blast…thanks to friends.

One great memory…Jack brought his own tent (pictured) and announced that he was going to set his own up and sleep in it.  Honestly, I was pretty sure he would last 20 minutes and sleep the night in ours.  But he took it very seriously and confiscated the first power strip I pulled out so he could have his own fan .  Better yet, the tent we had borrowed from a friend also came with dangling lights…which jack took for his own also.  He wired it up so some decorated the outside and some decorated the inside…with the power strip hanging from his “ceiling” so he could just reach up and turn out his own lights.  He slept the whole night both nights in that tent…and loved every minute of it.

Camping Day One

Any updates while we are camping will have to be brief. Updating my blog with only my blackberry is a little challenging.

Let’s just say it is about. 11:00PM and I’m having my first peaceful moments. We were suppossed to leave the church at 10am and after our first stop we were leaving cedar lake at noon. Once we got here…lots of work, lots of kids, lots of heat.

I can’t really say its been a great experience, but I am enjoying time with friends under the stars right now.

Canoeing tomorrow with the whole fam. Stay tuned.

“Greg, Did you know they actually listen?”

The title of this post is a quote from a guy who just finished teaching at Suncrest for the first time a few years ago.  He had some great conversations after the message with people asking questions about one of the ways he had suggested people live out the message.  My answer was something eloquent like “Uh…yeah.”

But given his experience in ministry, he had grown to assume that most people come to church, put in their time, and head out to lunch to start a new week with no real desire to actually take what they heard Sunday and use it.  But his experience at Suncrest was full of people who were different:  They came because they wanted something helpful for their lives and they took seriously the teaching and application.  It’s among my favorite things about this church…people are here because they want to be here…they genuinely want help week in and week out to guide their life…and when things apply to their life they really take a shot at changing.

I was reminded again today in kind of a funny way.  In our Integrity@Work message, I was trying to lift the conversation beyond just “stealing paperclips” and then I said something like, “If you have a box of pens from work at your house, you should take them back, but this message is about so much more than that.”  Today, a young woman came in and asked for me.  I was in a meeting, but Cindy (my assistant) went out to greet her and the lady handed her a bag full of pens from the last place she had worked.  She didn’t work there anymore and couldn’t take them back, so she did the next best thing — she brought them to me to confess and turn them in!  (The picture is literally some of the pens from in the bag).

I love it — both these simple applications and the more complex ones that the Suncrest family wrestles through each week.

ONE CHURCH two locations

When I welcome east campus in the camera every Sunday morning, I’ve gotten into the habit of saying “we love what God is doing out there.”  I know it might seem trite to hear it over and over again, but I still haven’t figured out a concise way to say it any better!

Sunday was cool.  While we were doing baby dedications at West Campus (St. John), there were also baby dedications at East Campus.  And while West campus went our separate ways Sunday afternoon, East Campus headed to Lake Michigan for a party — A party to celebrate 5 baptisms in the Lake!!  You can watch the video on the east campus blog here. 

Scroll down on that East Campus blog and you’ll see a profile of a new staff member at Suncrest.  His name is Andy Kaser and he is doing a leadership residency here.  He has dreams of planting a church someday and has come to soak up our culture.  He is raising all of his own financial support for the position, so you can see what a blessing it is for us and how dedicated he is to developing as a leader!

And while there are dynamic things happening at our individual locations, there is power in still being ONE church.  In fact, for our Party on the Parking Lot this Friday, we’ll see everyone come together for one event.  I love you, Suncrest.  All of you.