Full Day...

Offering this week was $2200 or roughly that. I left the exact # on my office desk and can't remember but it was close to that. lol

Adam and I met for our weekly Monday morning PP time. Planning and Prayer. We've reduced that and called it pp. Each Monday morning at 9 am we meet to start the week with prayer. If any prayer requests are given on the connection cards we specifically pray for them. We also pray for the week, Element Church and the great people God has sent us. We struggled early on to give proper time for prayer so we literally made it a calendared event on Monday mornings. We've made it an appointment that we won't miss. We feel it's that important. We typically spend a good amount of time talking about the previous day. What needs to change for the next week. We evaluate how the day went, if we missed anything, etc. We're just getting to the place now where we are getting comfortable with how the Sundays go (based on how we did personally) and don't have to tweak as much stuff. We then spend a good amount of time talking about the upcoming Sunday and what needs to be done.

In staff meeting today we debriefed The Tour and were REALLY critiquing how we can make it better. For our first Tour yesterday it ended up being really good. There are definitely some things that we feel we can do better to make it a more pleasant experience for all. Some things that we didn't like happened outside our control. Others we felt we could just do better. Our first group at The Tour was GREAT! They were MORE than patient and were very responsive and appreciative. Thanks to all who came and made it a great event.

THEN we took on the challenge (as a reaction to the Colorado shootings) to develop and evacuation plan for our e:kidz area were something horrible to happen at Element Church, as it did at New Life and YWAM. We understand that we cannot control everything but we recognized that we didn't have ANY plan in place so we developed that. We are also going to take some measures to try and insure some more security to our morning. It's sad we have to devote 45 minutes of our staff meeting to talking about that, but we feel it's necessary. Our prayers go out to those involved in the shootings.

Finally, for the remainder of the day, Adam and I worked on budget stuff. We have been blessed to be supported in part by High Plains Church, in Gillette, and by our Denomination. That funding will end come February 1st which means we will be a self-sufficient church plant. SO, we spent the final three hours of hour day hashing out budget stuff. I HATE IT! I hate budgets but I know they are necessary. They are scary, challenging, convicting and down right ANNOYING. We trust that God is going to provide EVERYTHING we need to exist as a full and thriving church. These are just some of the details that are not the most enjoyable part of the process.

That was our day in a GIANT nut shell. Monday is MEETING day at Element Church.