September 8th is closing fast!

Life seems to be developing nicely in Durango. Our relaxed "vacation" schedule is coming to an end as we get busier and find more to do. Jenn has taken on the role of assistant cheerleading coach at the high school. She coached at Watsonville High for several years in California and is looking forward to developing a new group of girls here. I have been busy managing the Hummer tour business. I started a couple weeks ago as a part-time driver and now I am answering the phone and working on strategies to finish this season (through October) and prepare for next Spring. The guy who owns the business moved to Utah a year ago and has been trying to manage from a distance. The most exciting part of this job is it's potential for partnership and perhaps eventually a buyout situation. Someday, this would be a good business to own because it requires most of the work during the summer and then the rest of the year is background work developing relationships in the community--I think I would enjoy it and it would work well with the schedule of CTK Durango.

Steve is having a similar experience at the local soccer shop--meeting a ton of people in town and finding himself more of a commodity than he initially thought. The rest of our group are getting established as well...Heidi is generating work with mortgages, Daena got hired in her position of choice working with special needs kids at a local school...even my mom, who doesn't officially move here until mid-September has leads on a couple jobs.

Outside of jobs, CTK itself is developing and growing. We have continued to meet in my living room on Sunday evenings. As our relationships expand, we are finding more and more evidence that this is exactly the kind of church this community is looking for. Joe, Steve, and I have been putting the details together for our information meeting on September 8th. We have chosen our advertising and rented a room in the local recreation center where we will most likely meet on Sundays in the future. Our greatest focus right now is praying for people to come to the information meeting who will want to join small groups. I can't wait to see what happens!

Another bit of exciting news is that we will start meeting at the Rec Center for worship on September 10th. We decided that, by meeting on Sunday mornings we would net a greater amount of families who might not be able to meet in the evenings after bed times. We still intend to create a culture where people feel they have permission to "miss church" when being part of the community and people's lives requires it--sounds great in theory, we'll see how it works out!

This is really exciting! The more people we talk to, the more we hear that what this town really needs is a church who genuinely cares about its community and loves people. It seems that many churches use this "community" vocabulary, but turn out to use community action only as a means of pushing an agenda or promoting their programs as opposed to simply loving people. I desperately want to be different from those churches. I long to see a church that promotes its community, takes care of people, and humbly seeks after God.