I Wanna be Sedated

I've said it before on this site, but I'll say it again: There's never a dull moment with a church plant. When I was looking ahead at my post-seminary life two years ago, I considered opportunities in Seattle, Chicago, and various locations in Colorado before deciding on my home turf here in Queens. Each of those places would have presented its own challenges and this week we encountered some localized opportunities of our own.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, it's been pretty cold here recently and this week was exceptionally cold reaching low temperatures not seen here in a few years.

Well we at Ascension Church don't look for excuses for inactivity. When the rest of the world (or at least the people in Queens) were indoors protecting themselves from frostbite, a few brave souls from our church and me were hitting the streets handing out fliers for one of our ourtreach programs where we discuss a topic over dinner and drinks at a local restaurant. It's a great program and even greater when I see people from the church willing to sacrifice the nerve endings in their fingers and toes to invite strangers on the street to come in from the bitter cold and hear the Gospel.

We also tried to get a group of people from the Indie Society, our ministry for singles and married couples without children, to go to a dramatic presentation of one of C.S. Lewis' works before the rest of the city purchased tickets based on a favorable review in The New York Times. While we had to do some schedule juggling, we managed to gather up a few available tickets this weekend and a small gtoup of us will actually see the show.

In all, I've regained enough feeling in my fingers to type my blog entry this week, though several muscles in my body continue to thaw out, hopefully before the weekend so I can be prepared for whatever challenges next week holds.