70's and 80's Bowling Night Tonight!

Yep! That's right folks... We're having a 70's and 80's Bowling Night tonight, Saturday the 28th, at the Down Under Rec Center under the University Center on UT's campus! It should be alot of fun for all ages!

Just show up at the Rec Center about 5:30 so we can get everyone organized on lanes, and bring $6 for shoes and 2 hours of bowling. (I know, great deal, right?) Kids are welcome to come and have a blast with us. Oh, yeah, and dress up like a character from the 70's or 80's, or just wear something that people wore during the 70's or 80's.

If you're looking at a last-minute decision to come or not, come on! Don't let a lack of "retro" or "vintage" attire hold you back! Remember, they wore jeans and shirts in the 80's. I mean, it might have been a mesh Joe Montana jersey, or a purple Pink Panther shirt with my name on the back in iron-on letters (sorry, no pic!), but it was a shirt, right? (Go here for more fun shirts!)

For more info, email Emily or call or text her. This is a great opportunity to get to know other peeps at The Ridge a little better and have some fun... That's one of our core values: Fun!

See you tonight!

Last Sunday and This Sunday at The Ridge!

Two Sundays ago, at our last Ridge Church gathering, we talked about Colossians chapter 1 and the fact that the Gospel is a living thing. Living things grow and bear fruit. We talked about how the Gospel changes everything about a person, from the heart out. If you have a relationship with Christ, you are adopted into God's family. Because of that, everything is new--based purely on that relationship with God through faith in Christ.

As an object lesson about the Gospel and growth, I gave everyone at our gathering a plastic cup, some cotton balls, and some green bean seeds. The idea was to put damp cotton balls in the cup, put the seeds on the cotton balls, and then keep the cotton moist so that the seeds can grow.

When we look at the seeds growing in our cups, we are reminded that having Christ in our lives should lead to spiritual, social, emotional, and pretty much every other kind of growth. Being a Christ follower means that we can expect to experience spiritual maturity and our lives should "bear fruit"--others should be drawn to Jesus by the things we say and do.

I asked anyone who wanted to take a pic of their beans to send them to me, and I would post them here for others... Here's a couple from Ken Garrison (Thanks Ken!):

Seeds soon after "planting" them in the cotton balls.

Seeds really growing after about a week... Ken looks like he's got a serious green thumb!

See you Sunday at 10 a.m. at Marli's in Fountain City! Bring a friend and introduce them to all the great folks that are part of The Ridge!

Trey and Kitten, Evansville, and Discovery Church

Last weekend, Emily and I drove to Evansville, Indiana to visit our friends Trey and Kitten McClain and their church plant, Discovery Church. Discovery has committed to supporting The Ridge financially each month with 5% of their offerings. They also financially support a church literally "on the Strip" in Las Vegas called Verve.

Pretty cool! Both Ridge Church and Discovery Church are committed to planting churches. The first church plant we are supporting at The Ridge is Journey Church of the Highlands in Boone, NC. You can learn more about Journey in an earlier blog post. We will be supporting more churches as time goes on because New Churches is one of our core values!

Trey had Emily and me come up front at their gathering and share a bit about what God is doing here in Knoxville through The Ridge and the awesome folks who call Ridge Church home. It was good to be there and be encouraged, and it was also good for the Discovery folks to meet firsthand the real live church planter types that they are supporting with their prayers and God's money. We did a little Q&A from the stage, and then their church prayed for Emily, Chloe, me and all of the Ridge Church folks. So, know that there are people in Indiana behind us!

Here's a pic of all of us (including Trey and Kitten's kids Alyssa and Morgan) together at Marx Barbecue on the West Side of Evansville this Sunday after Discovery's worship gathering. There's also a purely gratuitous one of Chloe asleep in the car when we stopped for gas:


Discovery has been great to us! We thank God for their support and the support of other churches like them, including many Acts29 East Coast churches.

God is up to big things in Knoxville, but that's not the only place! There is a new generation of churches that are serious about living life transformed by God and His love and truly loving their communities... It's pretty exciting... It's great to be part of something bigger than ourselves!

Recap from Last Sunday!

Last Sunday (or "this past Sunday"...) we had another great Ridge Church worship gathering. God has blessed us in so many ways! We have been having a great time getting to know each other as a group of believers and people exploring Jesus over the past 6 months as The Ridge moves toward having weekly Sunday morning gatherings.

Being a church isn't just about having formatted services on every Sunday morning. We believe that the local church should be a healthy community of God-followers and a welcoming, Christ-glorifying place to include and involve others.

God has been great to us recently! This Sunday, our worship team used our "new" sound system for the first time; we bought it for a great price from a guy in Bean Station (incidentally one of Tennessee's earliest settled places) who had used it in a church singing group. Gotta love Craigslist! Our worship team enjoyed having a good system to use as they led us on Sunday.

Another local church, Knox Life Church, has blessed us with some other equipment needs! Knox Life is a church that reaches out to the folks who live and work downtown in our fair city. They used to meet in the Regal Riviera Theater in the heart of downtown on Gay Street but have moved to the Old City and started a coffee shop called Remedy. Knox Life gave us the use of their multimedia projector. What a great gesture of sharing with another church! Our style of ministry is different than Knox Life's, but that's OK! We're all on the same team.

We haven't used the Knox Life projector yet, but it will make its debut soon one Sunday at Marli's. We also are the happy recipients of some of those cool squishy puzzle-piece floor things in our children's ministry area for our kids to sit on during our gatherings. Those were also a gift from Knox Life! Thanks so much!

So, God has been really providing for our fellowship's needs. Our goal has always been to honor God with good stewardship of the Ridge Church finances. Instead of spending a ton of God's money on new and fancy stuff, we can direct more of God's funds to church planting, missions, and helping those who need it in our town. It's also a great picture of the Kingdom when one church can help build up another by sharing gently used things that they no longer need. After all, it's all God's stuff, and we share a common mission--spreading the Good News of Jesus!

Emily and I are headed to visit our friends Trey and Kitten (and thier kids!) and Discovery Church in Evansville, Indiana this week. Discovery is one of the churches that has been financially supporting The Ridge. We are excited about seeing them, and also hope that one day they will be able to come to Knox Vegas to meet you all!

Prayers for safety are appreciated...

By the way, if you're interested in being part of the Children's Ministry Volunteer Interest Meeting at Marli's this Tuesday evening, email Emily and make plans to join in. She'd love to hear from you!

Enjoy these pics from last Sunday!

Acts29 Boot Camp in Raleigh

Hey! This Sunday was another awesome Ridge Church gathering... But, I'm still kinda "gathering" it all in my head, so I thought I'd share with you a little about our trip to the Acts29 Boot Camp in Raleigh last week.

After being laid off (for lack of a better word) for two weeks at the HoneyBaked Ham Store while they restructured their workforce, I was fortunate to start working there again last Monday in a new position with more hours per week. That was a blessing for sure... Money is tight for all of us these days. Tuesday, after I helped close the store, Emily, Chloe, Sue (Emily's mom--Bill couldn't go due to work stuff) and I left for Raleigh and the conference.

Of course, the night we needed to drive through the Smokies would be one of the worst nights ever for accidents in the snow through the North Carolina side of the National Park on I-40. We spent over three hours stuck and/or crawling through there. We finally made some progress by following a salt truck at about 1 a.m. while dodging jackknifed and sliding 18-wheelers. You can read about the fun evening if you like.

Then, east of Asheville, the roads were worse than they were in the mountains. There was pretty much nothing on the roads with us except a few tractor trailers... But then again, it was about 2 am by the time we left the snow-covered parts. Of course, once we got down the mountains into the flat places, the roads were perfect!

We finally got to our hotel in Raleigh at 4:30 a.m. and slept for about 2 hours before the conference started. I drank a ton of coffee that day, that's for sure!

The conference was awesome... We did Track One and had a great time. As Emily and I have already attended a previous boot camp in 2008 and been approved as church planters, it was an enjoyable (and less anxious!) time. We saw some familiar church planters, met many new ones, and heard some great speakers.

We learned a great deal, were challenged in our spiritual lives and church planting ideas, and met a ton of new young couples who are being assessed as potential church planters. There were 25 total couples being assessed on Friday. God is certainly using Acts29 and raising up those who He is calling to expand the Kingdom of God!

Anyhow, it was a great couple days. We're glad that we were able to go, regardless of the difficulties in getting there. To think we almost spent the night in Asheville and went back home because of the scary weather... Sometimes the hardship on the journey is difficult, but worth the reward to be found at the destination. I believe church planting is just like that!

On a totally unrelated note, we've posted our 2008 Ridge Church Financial Report on the website for you to have access to... The link in the "Simple and Secure Online Giving" area at the right side of our homepage.

We want to be totally transparent at The Ridge about where our funds go and what they are used for. It's God's money, so there's nothing to hide! You can expect future financial reports to occur each quarter. If you ever have questions about our funds, please ask!

More later this week on the Gathering from Sunday!

Our Last Gathering, The Ridge, and New Churches

Last post we talked about Ridge Church's commitment to Serving Others and missions. We are committed to supporting missions with both our time and our funds. As a part of that commitment, we give 5% of every dollar that we receive in our offerings on Sunday to missions activities. Serving Others is one of our six core values, and we mean it when we say that!

(On a somewhat irrelevant side note, when you come to our gathering tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. at Marli's in Fountain City, you'll notice we have a new "offering basket." It's made of banana leaves and it's pretty cool... It must be cool cause I got it at Target. Fits right in with Marli's Caribbean theme! Haha.)

The Ridge is also strongly committed to church planting. New Churches is another of our Ridge Church values. It's also a core value of the Acts29 Network, to which we belong. As part of our commitment to planting churches, we give 10% of every dollar we receive in our "offering basket" to church planting.

The first church plant that The Ridge is supporting is Journey Church of the Highlands in Boone, NC. I have become excited about this church's work in Boone. It's an honor for us to send Journey Church a $400 check to support his church from our 2008 offerings.

We hope to have their pastor make a special guest appearance at one of our Sunday morning gatherings in March.

Core Values:

a) God: We rejoice in the reality of the Triune Infinite personal God.

b) Gospel: Transforms how we think and live before God and others as reconciled people of God.

c) Community: An authentic community of friends who are committed to Christ and one another.

d) Mission: We exist to bring God’s Redemptive message to our culture and the world.

e) Culture: We value displaying the truth of the Gospel in all aspects of culture by thinking and living to His glory in all things (art, vocation, family, society etc…)

I'm excited about what God has in store for both The Ridge and Journey Church of the Highlands! I'm also excited about our gathering tomorrow... There are new things every week (such as a sweet new offering basket). This week, you might just see a new sound system, too!

See you in the morning...

Our Last Gathering, The Ridge, and Serving Others

At our last Sunday gathering after our Bible teaching time, we heard from Jimmie Hodges, the first local missionary that The Ridge is supporting. Jimmie shared some really cool stuff--like how God can call you at any time to be a missionary, even if you're retired. How God can use a simple trip to Canada, and a simple concern for some poor Native American kids, to create a desire to serve others with your time in Christ's name. How God can use one man's energy to serve hundreds of people in the poor areas of Appalachia and impact dozens of small towns.

Jimmie shared some great stuff, and if you heard him I'm sure you were motivated! God can and will do anything with anyone, often through the most unexpected ways. What better way for God to glorify Himself?

The Ridge is committed to supporting Jimmie financially, as well as in more tangible ways. Jimmie spends around $700 of his own money each month in gas on his nearly daily trips to Kentucky to deliver food, clothes, and all kinds of other stuff. So, we gave Jimmie what he needs most to make his ministry successful--money for gas.

(Believe it or not, Jimmie has more stuff to give away than he can find space for... His uncanny ability to attract massive amounts of free stuff is a story in itself! Ask him about the jelly sometime. By the way, if you know of a cheap place that we can use to help Jimmie store things, like, say, 6,000 t-shirts, let me know, OK?)

We also took up a collection of baby clothes for Jimmie to deliver to the people he helps in the mountains. We'll do things like that for Jimmie (and other ministries) enough that you should have no problem keeping your closets and garages well-organized... You're welcome!

The Ridge has been committed from Minute One (as I say it) to supporting missions with our time and 5% of every dollar that our people give in our offering at each gathering on Sundays. We gave Jimmie $200, or 5% of our 2008 financial offerings from Ridge Church folks. At the end of March, we'll distribute 5% of our January through March offerings to missions. It's simple and it helps those who've committed their lives to taking the Good News of Jesus to others through both word and action.

The Ridge has also volunteered with KARM twice already, and we will again in the future. This summer, we helped set up the KARM thrift store on Merchants Drive. At Thanksgiving, we helped distribute over 1,400 turkeys to needy Knoxville families. We really mean it when we say we're serious about missions at Ridge Church!

We're also very serious about church planting. Our next post will discuss the first church plant that The Ridge will be supporting. Again, we will support church plants both financially and in tangible ways.

Serving Others and New Churches are two of our six Ridge Church Values, and we will stay true to them through thick and thin! We will always give 5% to missions endeavors and provide ways for you to become involved with your time and talents as well. Stay tuned for more missions opportunities all the time!