Meetings

In the last couple of days Todd and I have had the opportunity to meet with some cool and or interesting people. Yesterday for lunch we went up to Cartersville and met with the connections pastor of Oak Leaf Church, Tim Samples. Again, this was very educational for me. They have only been around for about nine months or so and are already doing well in attendance. It was very helpful to here some of the ideas of how they do things.

Let me take a second to say how amazed I am at how friendly and helpful the "church planting community" is. There are so many people around here that have planted churches and now are doing anything and everything they can to help other church planters. They will meet with you, help with recourses, let you sit in on there meetings, basically open up the back door on everything they do so that you can learn how to do things and not to do things. These people believe in church planting and are willing to do whatever it takes to help you in your journey. Amazing!

We also got the interesting opportunity to meet with the Mayor of Acworth with about 25 others from local churches in the area. There was a whole mix of people that came. We thought it was going to be awkward because when we showed up, most everyone else around us had on suits. We had jeans and polos and as Todd said earlier to J.R. "I dressed up today...I wore shoes." The Georgia heat demands that you ware flops if you have any hopes of staying cool! It ended up being ok, however, not everyone wore suits. It was a great time to make some good contacts with other churches of Acworth as well as with the Chief of police and, of course, the Mayor.

Networking is everything! Ok, maybe not EVERYTHING, but pretty close!