I found your blog through Facebook. I was curious about where you Pastor. How big is your church?
I need to get my kiddos ready for church but I just wanted to stop in and say hello.
I’ll stop by again sometime. : )
Thanks. 🙂
It’s a small church–the second in a row for me, though this one doesn’t have the great seasonal swings, at least–with the attendance usually in the 50-75 range. We need to grow, for reasons both demographic and financial, but there seems to be the room to do that; Warsaw and Winona Lake between them have a population around 20,000, and though it’s a Bible Belt-ish sort of community, there are still a lot of folks here who are interested to some degree in going to church but don’t actually attend anywhere.
It’s an unusual church, but then, it’s an unusual town, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s a great deal of money–the three big orthopedic products companies (false joints and the like) are all based in Warsaw, as are smaller firms and the orthopedics divisions of other companies, so we literally have janitors in this town who are millionaires. Winona Lake was a center of revivalism from Billy Sunday through Billy Graham’s early days, of religious publishing (particularly music), and of three different denominations; the Grace Brethren still have their headquarters and college here.
We sit right on the edge of the Grace College campus–our music minister, Dr. Patrick Kavanaugh, is also the Dean of Music there. That’s the money angle again; he used to live in the DC area and run his ministries (Christian Performing Artists’ Fellowship and the MasterWorks Festival) from there, but some of our rich folks got together and convinced him and his family to pack up and move. The result, for us, is that I have a church of 70 or so with a music minister who’s widely known on at least two continents. Like I said, it’s an odd church. 🙂
How about y’all? What’s your church like? I hope things are off to a good start for you (the laryngitis excepted, anyway). From your blog, it sounds like life is good (though I imagine getting five kids out the door on a Sunday morning is a bit of a trick some weeks 🙂 ).
What a great picture…
I found your blog through Facebook. I was curious about where you Pastor. How big is your church?
I need to get my kiddos ready for church but I just wanted to stop in and say hello.
I’ll stop by again sometime. : )
Thanks. 🙂
It’s a small church–the second in a row for me, though this one doesn’t have the great seasonal swings, at least–with the attendance usually in the 50-75 range. We need to grow, for reasons both demographic and financial, but there seems to be the room to do that; Warsaw and Winona Lake between them have a population around 20,000, and though it’s a Bible Belt-ish sort of community, there are still a lot of folks here who are interested to some degree in going to church but don’t actually attend anywhere.
It’s an unusual church, but then, it’s an unusual town, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s a great deal of money–the three big orthopedic products companies (false joints and the like) are all based in Warsaw, as are smaller firms and the orthopedics divisions of other companies, so we literally have janitors in this town who are millionaires. Winona Lake was a center of revivalism from Billy Sunday through Billy Graham’s early days, of religious publishing (particularly music), and of three different denominations; the Grace Brethren still have their headquarters and college here.
We sit right on the edge of the Grace College campus–our music minister, Dr. Patrick Kavanaugh, is also the Dean of Music there. That’s the money angle again; he used to live in the DC area and run his ministries (Christian Performing Artists’ Fellowship and the MasterWorks Festival) from there, but some of our rich folks got together and convinced him and his family to pack up and move. The result, for us, is that I have a church of 70 or so with a music minister who’s widely known on at least two continents. Like I said, it’s an odd church. 🙂
How about y’all? What’s your church like? I hope things are off to a good start for you (the laryngitis excepted, anyway). From your blog, it sounds like life is good (though I imagine getting five kids out the door on a Sunday morning is a bit of a trick some weeks 🙂 ).