Calvary Blog Page

I wanted to write a quick note to let you know what is happening the next few weeks here at Calvary.

Starting Sunday we will be gathering cans of soup in the adult Sunday School classes. This will be competition between the classes to see which class can gather the most cans of soup from now till ‘Soup or Bowl’ Sunday, February 7th. The soup will go to the local food pantry to help feed the needy. The class which wins will be awarded a football grill. The grill will be displayed this Sunday in the hall.

We will be holding a special time of prayer for our church, state convention and national convention on the 31st of this month. Our Sunday School hour will be spent in prayer as we join together in the gym to pray around prayer stations.

We will be emphasizing stewardship through out the month of February, so Sunday the 7th will begin that.

On Sunday the 14th I have a special service planned geared towards marriage. We are also going to collect a special love offering for Jim and Ruth Dotson as they will be leaving at the end of the month for Uruguay to serve as volunteer missionaries with the DBC. There will be a special send off after church with a pot luck dinner in the gym.

On Sunday the 21st I will be emphasizing the role of a deacon as a servant in the church in order to prepare the church to elect more deacons.

March will be dedicated to the GPS emphasis, (God’s Plan for Sharing). The national convention is calling this emphasis ‘Across North America’ The state convention (DBC) is calling it ‘Across the Dakotas.’ March will look like this.
* March 1-19 we will pray, prepare, and promote this.
*March 20th is the weekend we will do prayer walking.
*March 27th is when we will go out in mass according to Sunday School Classes and distribute evangelistic material as well as an invitation to Easter Sunday service. We have 3000 invitations.
*April 4th is Easter and we will need to be organized in our efforts so that all the visitors that day will be able to park close, have a seat on the main floor, plenty of ushers, plenty of greeters at the doors, plenty of child care workers, etc.
We must prepare for the harvest which God is sure to send.

My prayer for our church is that we can meet the challenge before us. The GPS emphasis is huge and will take a lot of help and hours to accomplish all we have had a vision for. If we put forth the effort in God’s name to reach out to 3000 homes with prayer, the evangelism material, and the invitations to come and worship with us, I know that God will bless and honor His name. I can see many salvations occurring due to our faithfulness. I hope you set aside these weekends in March. Oh by the way please pray for good weather. You all know how South Dakota can be in the spring. Last year we had three snow storms during this time. God bless us as we work towards the harvest. Pastor Steve

Church family and others who may read this blog. I would like to share with you a burden I have had for over a year now. It is the need for myself and for Calvary Baptist Church to go deeper in our prayer lives.

When I was approached by the Greg Lourie crusade team and asked to head the prayer effort which prepared the way for that event to happen last May, I began a journey that led to this moment. After the crusade was over we joined the crusade team with the National Day of Prayer team and begun to plan city wide prayer times. Our first city wide effort was in cooperation with a group who had been praying for school teachers and students. We held this prayer time in August just before school began.

As we met to seek God’s direction for the next city wide prayer gathering, our hearts were moved to hold a prayer time on January 19th and to label it ‘A Call to Prayer: A Solemn Assembly’.  This is  based on Joel 2:15-19 and 2 Chronicles 7:14.  The call is to every church in Rapid City and the surrounding area. Not just the Southern Baptist churches.

Just a week or two ago I was contacted by the Dakota Baptist Convention and told that the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) had called all our churches to a solemn assembly prayer time. I have taken the liberty to copy parts of the Baptist Press news article which Johnny Hunt our current president of the SBC wrote concerning this. I would ask you as your pastor to attend the prayer time on the 19th and then to join me in a special time of prayer here at the church on January 31st.

Johnny Hunt is pastor of First Baptist Church in Woodstock, Ga. He writes:
“God requires humility, confession and complete dependence on Him before granting healing to a land (2 Chron. 7:14), it is time to ramp it up a notch by inviting all SBC churches to set aside Sunday, Jan. 31, 2010, to pray specifically for our denomination.

At their annual “PrayerLink” meeting held in Vancouver, Canada, in October, our prayer leadership spent much time in prayer and felt led to ask all Southern Baptists to pray for the Southern Baptist Convention without delay.

“In light of the moral decline across North America, the meetings of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force, God’s Plan for Sharing and the 2010 campaign ‘Across North America’ and search committees for three of the entities — the Executive Committee, the International Mission Board and the North American Mission Board,” the group said, “if not now, when?”
Some of the suggested things to pray for include:

–A spirit of repentance to fall on our churches corporately and personally for individuals, and for genuine revival of first love for Jesus. (See Matt. 4:17; Rev. 2:4.)

–A great spiritual awakening across our land so that the lost will be drawn to a personal relationship with Jesus. (See John 6:44; Rom. 1:19; 2 Cor. 2:14.)

– A sweet spirit of reconciliation among any Southern Baptists who are at odds with each other, or other works of God. Love for one another in the body of Christ to grow and blossom. (See Prov. 28:13; 1 Cor. 13:25-27; John 13:34-35.)

– Wisdom for the members of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force as they prepare their report in February. (See Jer. 33:3; James 1:5.)

– Guidance for the search committees for presidents of the Executive Committee, the International Mission Board, and the North American Mission Board. (See Prov. 3:5-6, 13, 15:22, 27:17; Acts 1:21-26.)”

God will honor you if you honor Him. As your pastor I know no better way to do that than to bow your head in humble reverence and cry out for forgiveness of any personal sin, over our national sin, and the sin of the world.  Ask God to bless your family, our church, our nation, and our world.  Pray for our denomination and the search committees as we need the right men to lead our North American Mission Board and our International Mission Board and the Executive Committee. These are the top positions in our convention and it is no small thing that all three of them are vacant at the same time. We need God, and we need him right now. This is urgent prayer time. This is desperate prayer. I guess I am asking you this, will you join me on the 19th and again on the 31st ?     I want to know Him more.    Pastor Steve

I read this statement recently. “It is hard to be upright without being uptight.” I have found that over the years there are people who do not think the same way as I think about how to live a Christian life. They seem uptight about everything. Oh they say they are not uptight, but everything–is a thing. They have issues with the way I preach or the way I handle a situation, and even the way I wear my hair. On my face that is. The top part took care of itself. I often wonder, if I could see into their secret life, would they be as holy as they think they are, or are they just as flawed as the rest of us.
It is like the person who approached me recently and told me that their child was reamed out by another well meaning person over how the child conducted themselves. Then that person turned around and stated a position that offended the first child. It seems that all of us have various levels of tolerance for how others conduct their affairs. I have experienced this over the years and the result is the same. Division. We divide over the songs we sing. We divide over the translation we use. We divide over the clothes we choose to wear. We divide over the length of service time. We divide over the programs we run or the lack thereof.
All the while our Lord and Savior tells us in John 17:23 that He wants us to be in complete unity so the world will believe that Jesus was sent by God because He so loved them. My prayer for the new year is that we find a way to keep our opinions to ourselves and that we suffer our differences in silence. I pray that we tell God on them and let Him take care of them. (Whoever them is). I know one thing for sure and that is at any given moment I might be them. I would hope that as Christians we would give to each other the same grace that we expect from one another. I believe I read that somewhere in the Bible. It goes like this. Whatever you would have men do unto you do unto them. There the them is. I hope and pray that in 2010 we can all be a little less uptight and more upright. pastor Steve