Today’s Martinsville Bulletin has an article on yesterday’s workday.

We had over 165 volunteers show up for our Comcast sponsored work day for the Boys and Girls Club teen center at our facilities today! We had a great showing from our Christ’s Church family. I’m so thankful for everybody who showed up and served! I can’t believe how much work was accomplished!

Our involvement in this was through our partnership with our local chapter of the Boys and Girls Club. Their teen center uses our gym and youth center each afternoon during the week. It’s a small way we are attempting to serve our community. The Boys and Girls Club teen center was selected by Comcast to be one of the recipients of their “Comcast Cares” sponsored work days. Comcast not only funded the project, they also sent a number of volunteers to help with the work. We are very appreciative of their interest and generosity to the teens served by the center.

There were volunteers from the Boys and Girls Club, several churches, Carlisle School, several local businesses, as well as a whole bunch of folks from our community. I’m sure there were other groups represented that I’m forgetting. It was an awesome day!

I’ve posted two photo albums of pictures from the event on our Christ’s Church Facebook page.

For years I’ve joked about Pizza Hut’s Meat Lover’s pizza being my favorite. But I think it has been de-throned by these two bad boys: the Chicago Style Stuffed Pizza which is so thick that you could almost call it lasagna, and the Bacon Cheese Pizza Burger, which is probably packs about 2000 calories of heart exploding goodness per slice!

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From 14 Pizzas Worth Dying For

Look who joined us for staff meeting this morning. Actually, he woke up right at the end and was ready to play!

A couple of weeks ago my Dad emailed me an interesting article that discussed some of the factors that contributed to unity among Christians. In it the author referenced this terrific description of the difference between a CHURCH and an AUDIENCE. It comes from a 1910 lecture at Yale by Charles E. Jefferson:

It is to be regretted that we have come to. . . judge preachers by the number of persons who listen to their sermons. A superficial man is consequently tempted to work, not for a church, but for an audience.

An audience, however, is not worth working for. An audience is a group of unrelated people drawn together by a short-lived attraction. . . . It is a fortuitous concourse of human atoms, scattering as soon as a certain performance had ended. It is a pile of leaves to be blown away by the wind, a handful of sand lacking consistency and cohesion, a number of human filings drawn into position by a pulpit magnet, which will drop away as soon as the magnet is removed.

An audience is a crowd, a church is a family. An audience is a gathering, a church is a fellowship. An audience is a collection, a church is an organism. An audience is a heap of stones, a church is a temple. Preachers are ordained, not to attract an audience, but to build a church. Coarse and ambitious and worldly men, if richly gifted, can draw audiences. Only a disciple of the Lord can build a church.

Wow! Talk about hitting the nail on the head! It may have resonated with me so strongly in light of where we are in our on going study of the book of Ephesians. What a great reminder of the difference between GOING to church and BEING the church.