7 1/2 Years Ago

Yesterday my friend Mike found an old video tape of a couple of my sermons from right before I left to college. I always hate watching my sermons afterwards because I'm so critical of myself when it comes to preaching, but this was different because now I was watching a sermon from when I was 20. The thing that made it so strange is I'm watching a message where I talk about how God is calling me to leave town in order to follow what He wants to do with my life and here I am almost eight years later on the other side of that call. I just felt like telling myself, "If you only knew where you were being led you'd never believe it."

For those of you that don't know, back then I was at Grapevine Fellowship acting as one of the assistant preachers to Dave Pinzon at our Saturday night services. The Saturday night services were started by a bunch of us twenty year olds to give Grapevine a "Gen-X" service. It was a full service with a younger edge and a really cool coffee house afterwards that people would hangout at for hours after service. We grew to something like 70 or 80 in attendance, we saw the unchurched saved and changed, and we had a great time. The funny thing is even though we called ourselves a "Gen-X" service, we had people of all ages and backgrounds showing up and a lot of them had never been to the morning services at all. Looking back, I don't think any of us realized that we were one step away from having a great church plant, we were just doing what we loved to do.

Leaving there was a hard thing to do. I knew that God had called me to preach, but I also knew I needed to leave to California. I remember that last message I spoke there being hard because I knew I was saying goodbye to a lot of those people.

Not too long after I was gone Grapevine ran into some hard times. A decision was made that the Saturday night service should be shut down because it was taking attendance from the main services. Not many people were happy with this. Some did fold into the morning services, some found other churches, some left church altogether.

Many people mourn the Saturday night service as something that almost was, but I think you have to look at it from a different angle. Both Dave and myself are church planters today, I have two members of my staff came from the Sat. service and Dave has a few with him as well. People were saved, lives were changed, God was worshiped. Lastly, I think I learned just as much about church planting there as I did in college. So now when people tell me that you can't start a church with all young people, I just smile because I've seen it happen before.