Our GIC Continues this Weekend!
What a fantastic week we have enjoyed as we are mid-way through our Global Impact Celebration! Wednesday night we had a record attendance for an opening night with over 700 in attendance. Thursday we had great activities throughout the day at Northside Christian Academy and with our special Senior Adult banquet followed by Landlubber prayer meetings in nearly a dozen locations across the region. (Another record attendance at the prayer meetings.) Today we had special chapels once again at the school and a luncheon with hundreds of our NCA Senior High students. Tonight is “Testimony Night” at our International Banquet which will also feature music by many of our young people.
Tomorrow you will want to enjoy the Men’s Prayer Breakfast and the Ladies Luncheon. The Singles and Teens have rallies tomorrow night as well. Sunday is our grand finale with parades, Dr. Larry Reesor, our special offering, our Grace Giving Commitments, Missionary Christmas and much more! The excitement continues to build. For more information on times and locations through Sunday evening, check out the church website by clicking HERE.
WOW! What an awesome start to our Global Impact Celebration! Last night we kicked off withwhat had to be a record attendance for an opening rally. The first thirty minutes are always interesting. In years past, we have had people dropping from the ceiling, motorcycles running through the auditorium, space shuttles flying through the air, Bandellerocars racing down the aisles — so the air was thick with excitement as people came in to find treasure map markings all over the buildings leading them to a “Treasure Box” beneath the palm trees in the center of the auditorium. Thereamong the treasure was thisweek’s bulletin of activities among piles of “treasure” which the kids quickly pawed through and put on.
My personal assistant, Mrs. Cindy Smith, designs and coordinates these conferences as her own personal ministry. I don’t know of anyone in the country who does missions celebrations better than she does and I’ve worked with her for nearly fifteen years in putting these conferences together. She’s one devoted lady who has a heartbeat for missions! Her ministry to me and my family makes me a hundred times more effective in the Lord’s work and my own life than I would be otherwise. Few people I’ve ever known can balance all that she does and still have her level of passion for reaching others for Christ.
After the service, our eleven missionaries (who had already been introduced as they came down our ship’s gangplank) were hosted in our various lobbies by their hosts and hostesses as hundreds of attendees went by to see their displays, meet them personally and find out how we can patner with each of them.
$10,000 for the refurbishment of our Recreation Ministry Headquarters on campus. Taking this money for supplies, we plan on assembling a team of expert and not-so-expert volunteers and completely refurbishing the aging house located next to our Upper Room facility and turning it into the headquarters and offices for our Recreation Ministry which will be receiving new leadership and attention in the coming year. When completed, it will become Ground Zero for a very important ministry outreach to our local community using athletics as the point of contact.
$5,000 for a missions project journey that will bless Piedmont Baptist College in Winston-Salem. We will work with their administration in finding just the right area to help update an aging facility that has been training young people for over sixty years to enter the Gospel ministry. We will send teams of our own folks on day-long missionary journeys during which they can take this seed money and turn it into tens of thousands of dollars of improved facilities for this important Bible College.
$10,000 for remodeling the Cafeteria of Boston Baptist College in Boston, MA. This small school has been the target of two other Northside missions projects. They have a mission of planting church throughout the Northeast which is one of Americas great mission fields. The cafeteria there is a great need of updating and upgrading and we want to begin the process by obtaining new furnishings and equipment and sending teams of workers to improve this heavily used area of their campus.
$10,000 for Church Planting in Cuba through Pastor Noel Martin-Romero. My recent trip and subsequent reports showed how we are making a different in this island nation that does not have freedom of religion by helping missionary pastors establish house churches in areas where there are no evangelical churches. I, by faith, have already invested this money in the local ministries with which we work and there are multiple more opportunities available should we exceed our goals.