I wanted to share some good news with you. So far we’ve raised $5500 for the To Save A Life Campaign! We’re getting really close to our goal of $8000. That’s amazing for our church, especially during this time of year. Thank you to those who have given so generously!

In case you haven’t heard, let me fill you in on what I’m talking about. Last month we made a decision to reach 200 people this fall with the life-changing hope of Jesus. In order to do this, we need to raise $8000. That may seem like a lot, but it’s only $40 for every man, woman, and child we are able to reach. This is not going to be an easy task, but I know that God and His people are up to it. How do I know this? Because it’s God’s will that none should perish. He sent his Son because he loved the whole world, every last person. And He’s an Ephesians 3:20 God. And I believe He would do whatever it takes to reach the people of Missoula. And we as a church want to have (and should have) the heartbeat of the Father…a heart for his lost children. A heart to see them reconciled and made whole. And we should be willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen.

So although we’re well on our way to raising enough money to see 200 new people come through the doors at River City Church, we’re still $2500 short. Here’s where we need your partnership.

1. We need you to sponsor some lost souls. It’s $40 for each person we’re trying to reach. We’ve had one family sponsor 62 people. Another has sponsored 50 people. And yet another has sponsored 25.  That’s amazing. And that leaves us with 63 people left to sponsor.  And it doesn’t matter if you sponsor 1 or 50. But please consider sponsoring at least 1 person. If each of us did this, we’d be well on our way to easily reaching our goal!  Click here to make a one time donation.
2. If you don’t have the cash to sponsor someone, no problem. We’re having an RCC Yard Sale on Aug 25th. Please consider donating some items and helping out on that day so that we can raise some additional funds. But please, consider donating some items of value. Remember, each $40 could change someone’s life forever!
3. Please commit to praying for the people you are sponsoring. Ask God to show you your people, and pray and believe that God is going to change their life this fall through this campaign.
4. Invite, invite, invite! You need you to be inviting your friends and family. We’ll be kicking off a new series Sept 16th (see below). Invite them on this Sunday. We’ll have invite cards for you soon.
5. Last but not least, we need people to step up and contribute by serving. We need help in children’s ministry, greeters, worship, food and drink, setup, and LifeGroup leaders. If you haven’t already, please let me know how you can help to welcome and minister to all of the new people who are going to be coming through the doors in the next 2 months.

Here’s the plan for this fall. We’re going to be kicking off a series starting Sep 16th called “The New Normal”. The bottom line is this: Normal isn’t working. The normal American family is broke, stressed out, overworked, too busy, and lives a life of broken relationships.

There IS a better way… it’s the new normal. A normal where families have more than enough. A normal where families spend quality time together and aren’t running around frantically. A normal where relationships are whole and prosperous. It’s the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And it is possible for you and for all families. You’re going to want to invite your friends and family to this one.

We’ll also be kicking off a variety of LifeGroups. Relationships are the heart and soul of River City Church. And what better way to experience relationships than through hanging out with a group of great people each week.

So please, let’s partner with the others in your church who are giving generously to this campaign. It’s what RCC is about. And we’re not going to stop until we’ve done whatever it takes to reach Missoula with the Gospel of Jesus Christ!

For HIS Kingdom!

Brian

Just wanted to encourage you all to keep praying for the people on your Invite Initiative cards. We played a short video last week on the power of an invitation. You can click here to view it. It’s powerful stuff. Don’t underestimate the power of prayer. God will provide opportunities to share your faith and invite your friends to church if you are diligent in praying. Even if you don’t really know how to pray, just turn your Invite Initiative card over and pray the prayer on the back.

Here are a few ideas on inviting your friends and family to RCC:

1. Pray!
2. Personally invite them to join you on a Sunday. Tell them you’ll pick them up and even take them out to lunch afterwards.
3. Give them an invite card. It is good for a free latte or mocha (we’ll be handing these out this Sunday)
4. Personally invite them to come to our Birthday Bash on Sep 13th. We’ll have bouncy houses and fun activities for the kids, and we’ll be talking about all that God has done and what the future holds for RCC. We’ll finish with a BBQ afterwards. This will be a fun Sunday.
5. Send them an evite from the RCC Homepage. This is a very simple way to invite someone. Don’t rely only on this method though. It is too impersonal. Use this tool as a way to remind someone whom you’ve already invited. Or use it to prime someone before you personally invite them.
6. Personally invite them again.
7. Personally invite them again (this is not a typo).
8. Give them another invite card.
9. Repeat steps 1-8.

The bottom line is that you can’t invite someone too many times. It often takes a few times before someone comes, not because they don’t want to, but just because their lives may not be scheduled around coming to church on Sunday mornings.
Again, watch this video to see how important the invite is. You may be thinking “I don’t want to bug anyone”. But this could be the most important decision they ever make. God wants us to be a part of that. Never be ashamed of bugging someone into the Kingdom of God.

• We had 19 first and second time visitors today! The Empty Chair Prayer is working. Thanks mom!
• The greatest part is that we’ve connected with most of these people and it looks like they’re going to make RCC their home.
• We also kicked off the INVITE Initiative today.  We’re going to pray together that God would give us opportunities in the next 30 days to share our faith and invite friends and family to RCC.
• I really believe this is going to be effective, and that God is going to provide opportunities for each person who is willing to step out in faith just a little.
• Worship was great today. Alex led 2 songs today and rocked it. Emily finished it off and it was great as usual. The team really flowed today. I’m loving it. It’s great watching the team grow together. It’s hard to believe that just 6 months ago we couldn’t even find musicians to play on Sunday.
• Spoke on Joshua 4 today. The podcast is available here. We talked about remembering all of the great things God has done in our lives. Each person has a testimony of God’s greatness. We need to share it with others.
• The Joshua Generation’s memorial stones were to be a testimony to Israel, their children, and the entire world.
• When we forget about the greatness of God, we will begin to worship idols. We may not make a golden calf like the Moses Generation, but perhaps we begin to focus on ourselves and our own strength. That my friends, is idol worship.
• When we focus on ourselves, not God, we will live our lives in fear, not faith. We will focus too much on our circumstances, not God’s strength to overcome.
• We closed the service by taking communion together, with the traditional bread and wine. Then we shared a communion meal together! Doesn’t get any better than that. Talk about building community. There is no better way to build community than to share a meal, imho.
• Can’t wait for next Sunday!

As we approach the month of August, we realize that the upcoming fall season tends to get people back into their “normal” routine. Kids are back in school, vacations become fewer, and people are thinking about coming back to church on Sundays. In fact, the fall is a time of natural growth for churches. We want to take advantage of the natural growth cycle that is coming to help grow River City Church. We want to ride the natural momentum of this wave. However, this time around we aren’t going to do a 40,000 piece mailer to all of the households in Missoula. No radio ads. Nope. This time, we’re relying on you, RCC members, to get the word out. Fan-based marketing. Word-of-mouth marketing.

There are a lot of advantages to using word-of-mouth marketing over mass marketing strategies. Perhaps the most important is that it gives each one of us personal ownership in helping out with the Great Commission, which is to make disciples of all the nations. Furthermore, an invite to church from a friend or family member tends to be much more effective than receiving a piece of mail from a church you’ve never heard of. If someone comes to church with a friend or family member, they are much more likely to stay and get plugged in, because they have relationship.

Here’s how it’s going to work: I want each person to come up with 2-4 people who don’t currently attend a church, or who at least aren’t actively involved in a local church. Then, I want you to commit to praying for each of those people for the next month. In fact, we’re going to pray for them as a congregation each Sunday through the month of August. We are going to pray specifically that God would stir their hearts to want to grow spiritually and start attending a church. We’re also going to pray that God would provide a perfect opportunity for us to invite them to River City Church.

Prayer is going to be key to the INVITE Initiative. I’m not asking you to commit to inviting them to church. I’m not asking you to commit to proselytizing them. Right now, all I’m asking from each of you is that you commit to pray for 2-4 people every day. That’s it.  What’s going to happen as we pray for these people, is God is going create opportunities for you to share your faith with them, and for you to invite them to a Sunday service or other RCC event. These opportunities will not feel forced, but rather will come very naturally. People will start asking you questions about your faith and your church out of the blue. We are going to be amazed at how God works through us.

For the next few Sundays, we are going to be handing out wallet-sized cards that we can write people’s names on as a reminder to pray for them. Ask God to give you the names of 2-4 people for this Sunday. Bring them with you. And remember last week’s sermon on stepping out in faith to overcome obstacles. I realize this is going to be a stretch for some of us. That’s okay. What’s not okay is allowing fear to rule us. Let’s step out in faith together and believe that God is going to use each of us in a great way to see His Kingdom grow through River City Church.

• Worship rocked today! Ryan King came over from Lewiston and led worship. The team did awesome.
• There seemed to be a flow today. Really sensed the Spirit moving.
• Attendance was up quite a bit. Looks like the “Empty Chair Prayer” is working! See my earlier post on this if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
• If I’ve learned one thing through planting this church, it’s that you can’t just apply some recipe to church planting and hope that it will work. You’ve got to hear God in every instance. In the case of praying for empty seats, I really believe that God told us to do that. So we’ll keep doing it.
• Steven Furtick was right on with “God is Great, God is Good”. A number of people responded to the call at the end.
• Offering was up today. God is good!
• People’s lives were changed today. God is great!
• Ended with my new motto/challenge to the people: “Go and make God famous in Missoula this week!”

• So we planned for 2000, and we had 5000, but it rocked! I know some people aren’t happy, but our volunteers are absolute heroes and we raised about 2000lbs of food for the Missoula Food Bank. How cool is that?!
• More later….

We’ve got the website up for the 1st Annual Missoula Egg Drop! This is fixing to be the biggest Easter event Missoula has ever seen! It’s amazing how good God is. The other day I sat down with Andrea and told her that I had to make a crucial decision about moving forward, even though we didn’t have the money to do it. We stopped and prayed and felt like God said “Go”. I took a huge risk. Today we got a $3000 donation that put us over the top! As a matter of fact, it’s going to be even bigger than we first dreamed. Go God!

In addition to being an awesome event for the community, we are partnering with the Missoula Food Bank and asking everyone who comes to bring a food donation. We’re going to have a blast and fight hunger at the same time. Doesn’t get any better than that, does it?

It’s crazy how many people already know about the egg drop. I’ve got people calling me, sending me emails, and I even got a fax today. Who woulda thunk it? It’s going to be bigger than I thought. No, actually I really thought that God was going to make this big. From the start it was way bigger than anything I could have pulled off. More money, more people, more everything than we’ve got. That’s a great place to be. Those are perfect conditions for God to do something big. Something bigger than me, our team, or RCC. A perfect storm if you will. It’s going to take God and the rest of the community to do this. How cool is that?!

We met with the pilot and his crew at the fairground today. We also met with our planner, Brandy Greer of Wahooparty.com who is organizing this whole shindig. The site is even better than we first imagined. We mapped it all out and planned the event on paper. Amazing. Did I mention this is going to be big?

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I let the proverbial “bunny out of the huey” today at church. We want to do an Easter event for Missoula that was over the top. So we decided we’d drop 20,000 Easter eggs out of a helicopter for the kids to find! I know, I know, you’re probably asking “why only 20,000 eggs?”. Well we felt like 25,000 was just too over the top.

So here’s the scoop as I know it today. We’re doing it at the fairgrounds in a huge open area. There’s plenty of parking, which is good because we’re expecting 2000-3000 people. We’re going to divide the field up into 3 areas according to age groups. We’re ordering all of the eggs prefilled. And we’re going to drop them out of a helicopter and let the kids go get ‘em. Then we’re going to do helicopter rides. I’m still looking for someone willing to put on a bunny suit and parachute from the helicopter. Serious. Any takers? The only catch is we’re looking for someone who has experience. I’ve totally struck out at Monster.com.