jeff mikels

So I was praying last week and asking God for a miracle or two to confirm that he was really in this church planting effort of ours, and then on Sunday I asked the people there to pray specifically about two things.

First, we needed the school board to approve our usage and specifically, we needed some clear guidance on how far into the future they would let us meet there.

Secondly, we needed something to happen with regard to the truck so that we could drive it around legally. The other church that donated it to us lost the title, and the plates had expired, so we couldn’t actually take the truck on the streets.

God moved in some big ways to answer these prayers.

Closed door, open window

I was so concerned about the title for the truck, that I had been calling Larry, the representative of the other church, to find out about the title, and he offered to look into what it would take to get a duplicate title. I was worried that it might end up being a couple of weeks, and I had internally just committed myself to thinking we would drive the truck to the school this Sunday anyway and run the risk of a cop seeing us.

However, Larry and his wife figured out a different solution. When she went to get the replacement title, she found out that she could just pay the registration fee to get new plates for the truck and thereby make it street-legal again! She did that, express mailed the plates to us, and we got them today! The truck will be drivable in an hour or so when I get around to putting the plates on it! Also, the duplicate title should be arriving in about 3 weeks. And if that weren’t enough, they also found the missing amplifier for the sound system. We should be able to go down there some time this week to go get it. Praise God!

God Uses Secretaries

The other answer to prayer completely shocked me. I got a phone call on Monday from Cheryl, the secretary of Gary Jenkins who is in charge of maintenance for the Tippecanoe School Corporation. I called her back on Tuesday and she wanted to know if we needed to use the school at any point in March or April.

Apparently, the principal hadn’t gotten our paperwork into them by the deadline and this lady thought she would call me to double-check that we didn’t need the school! Praise God! If she hadn’t called me, our request would not have made it to the school board on time. The school board was to meet the very next day (yesterday), and if our request didn’t get on the agenda, we would have been WAAAAAYYYYY up a creek with no place to meet, $4,000 out of our pockets for the postcards advertising our launch and no way to reprint them in time! As it was, our request made it onto the agenda and was approved! We are good to go all the way through April! I just can’t stop using exclamation points!!!!

God was looking out for us this week and has caused all these things to come together. I’m so thrilled and encouraged to see how He has confirmed just this week that he is watching over this whole process. Keep praying for the turn out at our launch service on March 25!

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Here in Lafayette, there is an association of ministers that is far more significant than some “ministerium” that many communities have where pastors of various churches get together to try to demonstrate some unity but never really get anything done.

TEAMM is the Tippecanoe Evangelical Association of Ministers and Ministries which has a couple things going for it that get me excited:

• They are committed to the core beliefs of “evangelicalism” which are basically the lordship of Jesus Christ and the authority of the Bible as God’s Word.
• They are developing a strong sense of unity among churches that have traditionally been at odds with each other in this town.
• They are being noticed both locally and nationally for their accomplishments in social programs and community prayer efforts.

This last weekend, TEAMM hosted its annual pastor’s prayer summit and I had the opportunity to go. It ended up being a very refreshing time, and since most of the pastors there were coming from a charismatic bent, it was spiritually uplifting as well.

Our two days followed a process of talking about what God is doing in Lafayette, what it’s going to mean for us and our ministries, and what he’s saying to us individually. We had significant times of worship through music before each session and long prayer sessions after each discussion.

On top of that, I had a great time getting to know a couple other pastors and allowing them to get to know me a bit. They were very encouraging and a few of them gave me some prophetic words that seemed quite authentic.

I also had the joy of playing my guitar as Randy Skidmore of Elston Family Church led the worship music.

All in all, I came away from that meeting with a deeper respect for the other pastors here, a deeper sense of the promises of God for Southside Church and some inklings of a more vibrant life of faith God is laying out for me.

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I just wanted to post something quickly to say that our time in Crown Point went really well on Sunday.

Jen, the kids, and I all went up there Sunday morning and had a good time at the service. Afterward, Pastor Tony and his wife treated us to lunch at Portillo’s. It was a great meal and a great conversation too.

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We had a great service this morning. It was our second monthly service and here is a brief rundown of how it all went:

Marketing

We really ramped up our marketing efforts this time. Here’s what we did:

• We sent out our “New Movers” letters this week. (We send a letter welcoming them to their new home and giving them a coupon to a local bookstore and one for a free Chick-fil-A sandwich.)
• We sent out a postcard to everyone on our mailing list inviting them to come to our service.
• We put an ad in the newspaper.
• I sent out an email to everyone on our email list.
• I made a bunch of phone calls.

Monthly Service #2 Postcard |Newspaper Ad

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I thought some of you might be interested to see some pictures from our house of the Indiana snowstorm that hit us yesterday, so I’m posting them in a little gallery here http://jeffnjen.mikels.cc/~jeff/snowstorm_2007/.

You should have seen the huge pile of snow that the snowplow left at the end of our driveway. I was out there shoveling from about 8:30 until 11:00 when a couple neighbors came by with a snowblower and made short work of the rest. Praise God for nice neighbors!

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Two weeks ago, we switched our weekly gatherings to Sunday morning instead of Sunday night. There was one major motivating reason for doing so. As we move toward our public launch, we need to feel a strong sense of building momentum, and we just weren’t able to do that with the low attendance we had on Sunday nights.

I’m not sure why it was such a struggle to get people to come to our house for a meeting on Sunday night, but Sunday morning seems to work out a lot better. We now gather for breakfast followed by a time of worship songs and interactive teaching, and for the past two weeks we have had pretty good attendance.

Another benefit has been that we are able to have a second meeting each week to focus on planning. For some reason, having two weekly evening meetings also seemed like a hardship, but now, having the morning gathering on Sunday, we can have another meeting to focus more on the planning end of things.

I’ve been feeling pretty good about it all.

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Last Sunday was our first sneak preview of “day one at southside church.”

Our Sunday morning service is based on the mindset that worship is what people should be doing with their lives throughout the week. As a result, we aren’t calling our Sunday gatherings a “worship service.” Instead, we call our Sunday Morning gatherings, “day one.” The purpose of our Sunday gatherings, then, is to motivate people toward living a life of worship, putting God first in all things, for another seven days.

There are three things we are doing to keep things unique and motivating, and each is an answer to a specific problem we have seen in a number of churches today.

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