Bee on the pulpit

I had just invited everyone to spend some time in corporate prayer for the needs of the congregation when I noticed a large bee (or maybe it was a wasp...I didn't wait to find out) sitting twelve inches from me on the pulpit. Good thing that everyone had their eyes closed because I carefully picked up my one-inch thick leather-bound prayer journal and dropped it on the insect. It reminded me of being the best man at a buddy's wedding five years ago when a candle fell during a song and I froze not knowing whether to go for it and make a disruption or not. In that case the pastor calmly took care of the situation. Ah, the trials of pastoral ministry!

Harmony and I took the "river road" down to Bismarck on Saturday. It travels along the Missouri River and was full of beautiful scenery especially with the fall colors all around. Harmony took a few pictures that I will hopefully remember to post in the upcoming weeks. This part of North Dakota is very pretty even if it is still rather flat (though I believe there are a lot more rolling hills than in the eastern part).

The are lots of small towns all over the state that are all about the same size (600-1000). There are a lot of German, Norweigan and Dutch pockets throughout the state. In fact there's one section in south central North Dakota that's referred to as "The Iron Curtain" because it was settled predominantly by Germans (take a look at some of the town names to see what I mean). Unlike living in Chicago or LA where you have ethnic neighborhoods but other than that ethnic origin does not characterize most areas, here it seems that even today many towns are still very much dominanted by one ethnic origin (Underwood's is German). One of the benefits of this combined with small town life is there are many local ethnic events. A couple from the church took us to an all-you-could-eat turkey and meatball supper (dinner for you city-folk) in a neighboring community called Turtle Lake. It was very good and very filling!

Last night we had the families with youth and any others from the church over who wanted to give input and help brainstorm about starting a youth ministry. Some great ideas came up during our time. One of the benefits of being away from city life is that families are at least somewhat less busy and in particular schools are not allowed to have evening activities on Wednesday nights so that churches can have youth group Bible Studies then. It looks like we may start up a Junior and Senior High combined youth group meeting on Wed. during the adult Bible Study hour with a few couples rotating as leaders. In addition, the idea of beginning some sort of community youth center came up and it just so happens that we still own the old baptist church and have been unable to sell it (Faith Evangelical is a combination of PCA and Baptist churches and we use the old PCA building). We talked about teaming up with the other churches in town and offering to use that space for a youth center to give kids a safe place to go on weekend nights and/or weekdays after school. There's really nothing else in town for kids to do on Friday and Saturday nights after seven and when there are no sports playing at the high school so it would seem serve the community well. Please pray for wisdom in regard to this.

This week's sermon was on 1 Peter 2:13-17 and began a three part mini-series called "Respecting Authority Glorifies God". This week we looked at respecting societal authorities and in the next two weeks we'll cover the workplace and home. If you like to listen to the sermon click here.