FUSE Preview #1!

It's 11:14pm Sunday night. I should have long since gone to bed, but I can't turn my brain off. What an incredible weekend. Way too much happened to put everything down, so I'll stick to tonight. It was the first preview service of Fuse and God absolutely showed up in an amazing way.

I guess a little background is required. 10 months ago when Kelsey, Steph, and I moved from Blacksburg to VA Beach, we had prayed for a church. Within weeks of arriving God pretty much dropped us on top of Coastal Community Church. I was really looking to help out with a youth group, and they were in desperate need of women youth leaders. We also connected really fast with the other youth leaders (most of which are our age), so Coastal became our church home.

Then, what started as a small band of six new friends, grew into a significant number of youth adults looking for a ministry of our own. So, Wednesday night Bible study began. It was just a group of us, hanging out, doin a little worship, and readin some scripture. Then a small group, became a bigger group, and it became apparent that God was really trying to do something here.

At the same time, Pastor Hank (lead pastor at Coastal) had been praying about reaching out to the 18-30 age group. This is a group that is frequently neglected within church ministry. For one thing, we're very mobile at this age - we change jobs, schools, towns, without much notice or worry because we have had little reason to sink roots anywhere. Also, we tend to be a skeptical age - focused on questioning and challenging the world as we know it - many times the church just doesn't know what to do with this type of questioning. So this means most churches just ignore this age until people get married and have kids and "settle down."

But, Pastor Hank issued a challenge to James (our student minister and now young adult minister) to start looking into the possibility of a venue devoted to our age.

For nearly 6 months we have been planning and praying for something we have named "Fuse". The definition of a fuse is an object "for the purpose of igniting an explosion." The goal of this is to affect this generation - to meet with people our age and seek the truth about this Jesus guy and what affect he might have on our lives.

So tonight was the big night. We had our first preview service. God really blew me away. We had more than 50 people show up. Honestly, where did they all come from? Clearly God was ready for this ministry to happen, he just asked us to show up and watch. That was quite an honor.

We all feel so over our heads with this task, but it has been incredible to see what God will do when we ask him for big things. We don't know what will come of this 6 months from now, or three weeks from now when we have our 2nd preview service, or for that matter tomorrow, but God challenged our faith tonight, and then came through 10 fold when we trusted him.

What an incredible night.