What a Great Summer!
As I am writing this, it is Tuesday, August 5, the second day of school for most of our students. The SHINE Academy Home-school Cooperative is here at the church, getting ready for their new semester starting next Tuesday. The brutally hot temperatures of last week have given way to a much more manageable mercury level this week, although we all know August will eventually get around to breathing its yearly fire. Meteorological summer may still be with us, but in most of our minds, summer ends when school begins, even if it’s been decades since we entered a classroom.
Looking back, it’s been a good summer here at CBC. We discovered the bigness of God in the smallest of things at VBS this year. We had two successful events in July: our FunFest block party Village Fest, and our School Supply Giveaway. We gave away 72 backpacks donated by the North American Mission Board, along with a bunch of other supplies to approximately 100 kids going back to school. All of the families who came through were prayed for and given gospel tracts and information about Calvary. David Caywood brought his interns from Global Youth Ministries, and their help was invaluable for Village Fest. We hosted them as they did mission work and a youth camp/revival that next week.
One of the big projects of the summer was gathering together an offering for Voice of the Martyrs’ efforts to send Bibles to persecuted believers in very Christianity-hostile places around the globe. Between the VBS children and the gifts of our congregation, we provided approximately 180 Bibles for this purpose. We in the United States are so blessed. Rare is the believer who does not have his own personal Bible. A person who wants a Bible in our country can easily find and acquire one. Many, if not most of us, have more than one. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I don’t even know how many I own. And none of us is in danger of being arrested and jailed for owning one. That is not the case in many other places around the globe, where the availability of Bibles may be scarce, where the Bible may not yet be translated into a particular language, or where anti-Christian regimes do everything imaginable to keep Bibles out of the hands of their citizens. We will have a great time in heaven one day learning about where each of those 180 Bibles went and about how many lives were changed through those Bibles.
Coming up soon will be another project by which we can touch the world from Kingsport, Tennessee: Operation Christmas Child. We will once again be partnering with Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse ministry to provide Christmas boxes which will be distributed through churches around the world in evangelistic and ministry outreaches. Those who have put together boxes in the past and know what’s involved, you can go ahead and get started. For others, information will be forthcoming soon.
Looking a little further ahead, I am looking forward to going to Chattanooga on September 14-18 for my yearly conference. It’s a wonderful time of worship and renewal for me each year, a time to soak in the Word and a time to fellowship with some wonderful friends, many of whom I went to Israel with back in 2023.
To my mind, based on nothing but eyeballing the congregation each Sunday, our attendance held up pretty well during the summer. There’s always some attendance decline as people go on vacations and other outings during the time the kids are out of school, and summer break isn’t what it used to be (am I the only one who remembers not going back to school until after Labor Day?). The same number of people going on vacations in a more compressed time frame makes for more pronounced attendance slumps. But now that summer is over, let’s be in our places on Sunday and Wednesday.
I love worshiping, preaching, fellowshipping, serving and pastoring here with you all at Calvary!
I hope to see you this Sunday as we continue our journey through the book of Acts. Our long-term study of Christian theology on Wednesday nights has come down to its last subject, appropriately, the doctrine of last things or eschatology. We will begin that last unit on the 13th.
Numbers 6:24-26,
Bro. Donnie