April 2016 Pastor's Points
Dear Church Family,
Wow!! What a great Easter weekend we had this past month! The Easter
Eggstravaganza was a great event. Thank you to all the volunteers who made it happen. Also, a big thanks to April Sharp our Children’s Ministry Director for giving great leadership! Kids and parents alike had a great time and I know personally that I was able to have some great interaction with people that are not normally a part of our church! We followed that event up with our three Easter services the next day. All of our services were led by our new worship pastor Jared Mitchell, and he did an outstanding job leading us! We had right at 800 in our worship services and had one person join the church and two people pray to receive Jesus as their Savior and Lord! We need to thank God because He is the one that brought the people to worship and moved on the hearts of those that made decisions. He is a good, good, Father and He truly blessed us this year at Easter.
Also, I am looking forward into the future as our good father is going to continue to move among us and bless us with His direction. I have been seeking hard to know His will for our church family for the next months and years and I feel Him giving me leading in this area. In May I will have been the lead pastor of Oakhill for ten years. That just does not seem possible. We have seen God do many things in those ten years. We have seen many salvations, people have grown in their faith, we have built buildings together, expanded our worship services and ministries, and seen our budget grow. Our lives truly have changed as we have worshiped, grown, served and given together! I am so thankful for all that God has done for us and in us. And I am very excited to consider what He is going to do in the next ten years of our ministry together.
I shared back in November of 2015 in two separate messages that I know part of what God is leading us to do is to invest like never before in the “Grow” portion of our “Life Change Cycle”. Our worship has expanded, our service in the ministry is strong, and our people are giving faithfully. Now we need to invest in our disciple making here at Oakhill. And we are going to come to understand that the only way to grow as a disciple is to be “counseled” by God’s Word. So we are going to intentionally set in place a discipleship emphasis that will include a biblical counseling ministry that will help us come to understand that biblical counseling is simply a part of the discipleship process. Please pray for your ministerial staff as we continue to ask God to show us the details of this emphasis. You will be hearing more about this in the months to come. I cannot wait to see what God is going to do!!!
I love you and I love being your pastor,
Pastor Alan