Haiti Love Bags

We outdid ourselves this past weekend. We went for a new record 350 Love Bags and ended up handing out 400! We'll have 50 more this week. The bags go first to the kids at the orphanage. Then to the students in the school. And what is left goes to kids in the community. And the kids do come from all over the town when they hear about the bags. This year we may be able to give a bag to every kid that comes!

This is also a great partnership with the GVCM church because the church is the one that gets a lot of the credit and gets to make an impact on that community.

So, way to go and keep taking bags!

Launching Large

One of the church planting philosophies that's being used today is called "launching large." Lots of church plants are doing things differently so that they have critical mass on the first "official" launch day. It looks like a great approach because the plant hits the ground with greater traction. That's one of the ideas behind the multi-site approach to starting campuses. We've seen an average of 200 folks at Hudson. That's launching large. Some of those folks are there to help in the first few months, and we don't know what it will settle into yet. The baseline likely to be smaller than 200, but that baseline to grow from is much larger than most church starts and has most of the benefits of a much larger church from day one. For example, the Hudson youth will participate in the Jr. High and Sr. High Camp Getaway retreats with about 175 of the Woodbury youth. We're off to a great start. I will be at Hudson the weekend of October 14 since Dana will be preaching, and I can't wait.