The service was a beautiful sight to behold. Every face was a person that Laura and I could trace back to either an act of kindness, or a friendship from the jobs we have both worked. This is a testimony to the power of reaching people with kindness and relationships, instead of pouring money into mass marketing (nobody showed up because of our online advertising, newspaper announcement, or flyers).
There were 20 people in attendance, which was enough to fill the small room with sweet worship music that echoed off the walls and into God's heart. Keeping with the 3o Days of Kindness, every family in attendance received an Easter lily as a gift, which gave the room a nice fragrance.
Looking back, the amount of work that went into all of this was extreme. When we kicked off the 30 Days of Kindness campaign, we still had a building that needed remodeling, no PA system, only 10 chairs, no tables, and we were launching a new ministry format that was untested. On top of all of this, there were dozens of small churchy details that still needed to be taken care of; details like, making visitor forms, sign up sheets, printing off handouts for worship, food, figuring out a way to collect offering money, the list went on.
By God's grace, all of these things were taken care of; even while we organized and performed an act of kindness every day after getting off work. Sure, the building was not 100% done, the sermon suffered a bit from being preached by an exhausted Pastor, the offering envelopes where blank with a sticky note that read, "write your name on the envelope," and everything could have been promoted better, but on that Good Friday, none of these details mattered. This was a time to celebrate the establishment of a new work that will bless the Oneonta community for generations to come!
The message for the first teaching session was me pouring out my heart and sharing the vision of The Redemption Movement. A rare time where I get personal when I preach, only because Laura and I are so personally involved in this work. For the second teaching session, I looked at Acts 2:42-47 and compared the beautiful picture of what the first public meeting of the New Testament church looked like, with what we were accomplishing at the first public meeting of The Redemption Movement, 2,000 years later.
One of the coolest comparisons was when I talked about the church meeting in the upper room for Pentecost in Acts 2. When I got to this point I paused, looked around our small/simple room, filled with a small group of diverse people, and I said, "I bet the upper room was not too much bigger than this room." It was a powerful Pentecostal experience.
At the end of the night we had a time of discussion and prayer. I talked about the death of Christ by vividly describing the agony of crucifixion (which is where we get our word excruciating). We then remembered Christ's death through communion.
A lot of work went into that Good Friday. You can trace it back to Laura and I moving to Oneonta back in 2009, or even us committing to church planting back in 2007. It was a special night, I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world, and even with the craziness of all the work that it took, I do not regret any of it. Because I am convinced that every step taken, every mile driven, every nail hammered, every kindness card passed out, every late night Laura and I spent second guessing ourselves, every single sacrifice we made, was necessary to proclaim God's restoring love to the lost and hurting people of Oneonta. People who God values. People who are in need of a hope and a freedom that's paid for by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, found in the abundant life of His teachings, and made real by the power of His resurrection.
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