New Developments

"I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase." 1 Cor 3:6

Well, 2009 has been rather short on posts, but full of changes and events. The biggest event was that our son, JC, was led to move here to help us with Living Water Fellowship. God was good to confirm JC's decision by giving him a job only two weeks after he got here. (God did a similar thing with me when we moved here in 2007 -- I had the job in Willow Creek two days after we emptied the U-Haul. :>) His coming has served as a catalyst and God has released us to take more steps toward taking LWF from being a concept we are believing for into becoming a concrete reality.

Just prior to JC's decision to move here God released us to take the steps necessary to incorporate the church. We did that last June giving us a practical mechanism for maintaining accountability with church resources. (We followed that up this fall by opening a checking account for the church.) It also turned Living Water Fellowship into a real, legal entity. That's a big step, even if it doesn't sound all that exciting.

There really was no action through the summer and then last fall the Lord spoke to Ruth suggesting we hold an "informational meeting" inviting people to come find out what LWF is all about. We did that on October 29, renting a room in the Montana Tech SUB -- after getting an announcement in the paper and posting some fliers around town -- and one person showed up. We had some deep ministry time with that person and we counted the meeting a success. After debriefing we felt the Lord was saying we should do it again and so on December 10 we held another meeting -- and no one showed up. We still count it a success!

Meetings with no attendees don't really sound much like successes, but there is more going on here than our meetings. On both occasions, as we were distributing fliers, the spiritual warfare was intense. It was especially oppressive in uptown Butte. The Lord gave me a picture of what was happening: I saw a great big lump of inky blackness (representing the spiritual darkness that resides in Butte). As JC and I were going from place to place putting up fliers, light-filled cracks -- following the path of our footsteps -- were developing in the base of that lump of darkness. It seems like a strange way to do spiritual warfare, but it really has more to do with our faithfulness in following the leading the Holy Spirit gives us, than it does with the direct confrontation of dark entities. As we moved from place to place the oppression was thick, yet by being faithful we are weakening the enemy's foundation and a weak foundation eventually brings the entire building down. That's a good thing! So, while we don't yet have a room full of congregants, we are having a significant effect on destroying the work of the enemy.

So, we are encouraged in what we are doing here. God is faithful and will eventually bring people to our meetings. We have scheduled monthly meetings for every third Thursday through April.

All along we have talked about how it is imperative that we follow the leading of the Holy Spirit in every step we take. If you look at what we are doing from the perspective of what all the church planting literature says, we are doing it all wrong. But this is the way God has led us, so that's what we are doing.