Pantano Christian Church

2 years ago we started Vail Christian Church. Today it is reaching over 600 folks each week. They are already planning on how they might open a new site next year! So PCC, through Vail CC grew the Kingdom by 600+ (while we have reached attendance highs here at the Houghton campus).

Pantano Christian Church – Sierra Vista is our first effort to develop an off-site campus. We are moving to become “one church in many locations.” PCC -Sierra Vista campus is Pantano Christian Church, just in another location. It is the same church, same message (via video), same spiritual oversight (elders & leaders), same budget but most important of all – same vision, beliefs and values.

Why do this? Here are a few reasons:
• Reach more people WHILE growing smaller! We can reach more people for Jesus and not have to outgrow our current facilities. Our passion in this strategy is reaching people that have not been reached. I daily think and pray about folks that don’t know God and are not experiencing a place to call their spiritual home.
• New AND Trusted! Pantano Christian Church already has a good name and has a great “DNA.” Research tells us that churches that reach new folks best are NEW churches. Let’s combine the two – new and trusted.
• Less cost WITH greater impact! We don’t have to duplicate message preparation (staff time), media art work, accounting and HR processes, etc. We can reach a whole new area without having to duplicate efforts. Plus we are able to produce quality through a great staff that can be used beyond the Houghton campus.
• New church excitement WITH big impact! We can do church in a new, exciting way that is smaller and relational but with all the expertise, skill and excellence of an established thriving church.

These are practical and wise reasons. But here is the most important reason of all. God has led us to this. It was two years ago that some folks from Sierra Vista came to me and asked that we come and plant a church there. I tried to kill it in a kind way (I’m being honest). While God was more than ready, I wasn’t! It wasn’t the place or in my time frame (I’m a pretty good planner and it wasn’t in my plan at this time and God laughs!). God made it as clear as anything that He wanted us there. God, through His people wouldn’t go away. The rest is history. God is forming a team to join the other good churches in Sierra Vista to expand the Kingdom of God in that town. We want to love Sierra Vista to Jesus. We want to see the community transformed.

Please pray. The challenges are significant. Reaching people that have not been reached in Sierra Vista is a huge challenge. We are up for it, but it is God who will open the physical doors and the doors of the heart.

Together to make Tucson, Sierra Vista and Southern Arizona a different and better place,

Glen

Lots of great stuff is happening these days. I’m getting ready to go on vacation with my family for a few days of water skiing. Yahoo! Both kids are done with college for the summer so here we go. Did I tell you I love to snow and water ski? The snow’s long gone, but the water is great. But there’s way more going on of much more significance!

Baptisms
Maybe you’ve noticed that God has been stirring folks to take the step of commitment through baptism. Since the beginning of the calendar year there have been 85 baptisms (that we know of). Robin Blumenthal, our Children’s Pastor, held a class for parents and their kids to learn about baptism and the room was overflowing with 67 people! What a wonderful celebration baptism is – making a promise to God to follow him with all our heart all the days of our lives. God is moving among us – can you sense it?!

Elements
We have re-started our Elements service. It meets on Sunday nights at 6pm in Towne Hall. This is a great group of 20, 30, 40, 50 and even 60 something’s who like an informal, authentic, relational and interactive service. It has great worship, the same message as the weekend, communion and offering, snacks & drinks and lots of hanging out afterward. If you miss Sat. PM or Sun. AM services, you can catch the message Sun PM at 6pm – but come prepared to not just listen to the message, but discuss it!

Sierra Vista
Things are booming in Sierra Vista. The youth had 23 High School & Middle School students last week. We think we’ve found a GREAT building to rent – a converted theater. We are still planning on an August 17th launch. Before then, we’ll be having a church birthing shower to help outfit the site with some of the stuff they’ll need to open.

Next week in my blog I want to talk about our multi-site strategy, which PCC – SV is part of. I’ll explain what it is and why we are doing it.

Keep Hugh and Lisa Sexton (Site Pastor) and Jesse and Julie Colburn (Worship & Associate Pastor) and the Sierra Vista launch team in your prayers. We are asking God for 100 people to serve on the core launch team and for over 400 attendees on launch day. We love to dream and pray big. Let’s redeem the phrase “Go big or go home!” from the world and apply it to our prayers and let’s make a huge difference in Sierra Vista!

Together to make a difference,

Glen

I’m passionate about changing the world. More than 10% of our budget is devoted to our mission work around the world. In a recent report, Pantano Christian Church had the highest percentage of people going on mission trips of “mega-churches” (1000 or more attendees). We are on mission with God!

My friend Doug Lucas just sent this report from his visit to Trujillo, Peru, where we are partners in Project New Hope (PNH). Listen to what God is doing. THIS IS HUGE! We are partnering with Project New Hope to change a city of over a million people and God is doing AMAZING things. PNH is …

“simultaneously reaching out to 7 barrios, university students, and professionals. They’ve built 7 community centers, psychological counseling for those who need it, assistance to beaten and battered women and a medical clinic (with another one on the way), micro-economic business start-ups, and even larger business start-ups to provide jobs to those in the barrios with some of the profits being used to sponsor new leaders in local churches. One business, a snail farm, has grown so rapidly that it is now said to be the 3rd-largest snail production facility in all of South America.

They’ve got a dairy farm, a new guinea pig operation coming on line, and they do Bible story-telling (orality) like it’s going outa’ style. They teach “Character First” to every member of the staff and virtually every new worker and believer. There’s a new women’s village in the works for ladies that have been abandoned. They’re involving Peruvian professionals in reaching out to the poor in their own city, which gives them all the more help addressing citywide problems. We’ve noticed a distinct change in the people in the barrios we’ve visited.

As a result of the teaching, they seem to have much more dignity and a higher self esteem than they would have had otherwise. There are sports outreaches in the works, educational groups, kids outreaches, a new “Amigos en Accion” outreach that pulls together buddy groups, a car wash business, flower vendor carts, and even knitting groups. The list goes on. Now all this would be impressive under any circumstances. But what I have a hard time understanding is how they’ve launched all this in less than 3 years! Shew. Makes me tired just thinking about it.

Only God could have caused all this to come together in such a short time… but he chose to do all this through the hands of hard-working visionaries. Only two of these families are from the USA. The rest is being carried out by Peruvians. It’s astounding. Makes me think that sometimes we underestimate what God can do.”

Wow! If you want to be a part of our Peru team, contact Tim Coop or David Thoresen. Together to make a difference for a million people in Trujillo,

Glen

I’ve enjoyed sharing my discoveries from the book of Ecclesiastes. I hope all of us are finding more satisfaction with God in life under the sun. So let’s move on and catch up on a few other items.

Free & Clear
Thank you for all who have participated in Free & Clear. Free & Clear is our four year project to eliminate our church mortgage debt with gifts given above regular giving. Every dollar given reduces our mortgage expense by $2.21! We want to be Free & Clear in order to devote more of our resources to direct ministry. As of this week we have received $178,600 – Yahoo! This has already helped us to reduce our debt service from 15% of our budget to 11%. We still have over 4 million dollars to pay off. 89 people have made a commitment to get out of personal debt to be free and clear – YAHOO!

Mother’s Day
We’ll be honoring not just our mothers this weekend, but all women. The Bible is full of stories of women who made a huge difference for God. Our faith rests on the legacies of both great men and women who risked all for God.

No Compromise
After Mother’s Day weekend, we start a new 9 week series called “No Compromise.” This is a study from the book of Daniel. If you have joined us doing the Book of the Month (reading a book of the Bible a month) you might want to consider reading Daniel this month or next. You can see the resource on how to do the Book of the Month on our web site.

Kenya
During Lent, those who participated gave the money they would have spent on whatever they were fasting from to help out our friends in Kenya after the tribal civil war. We sent the money to Bishop Mark Kegohi. He reported that the biggest need they face is food shortages and starvation. The funds we send were applied to helping build a kitchen. The church has decided that it needs to prepare meals for those in greatest need. Mark has noticed that many kids quit going to school in favor of rummaging for food.

Sierra Vista
The Sextons have relocated in Sierra Vista. Hugh is our site pastor there. Jesse Colburn has joined the launch team as the worship leader and associate pastor. They have had 3 significant events to serve the community. Our launch date is set for August 17th. We hope to open with two services with about 400 in attendance. Keep the Pantano Christian Church Sierra Vista team in your prayers.

Toilet Paper
Hugh Sexton calculated the distance of the 2328 rolls of toilet paper we collected and gave to the schools of the 29th Street Corridor. If we stretched out the rolls end to end it would reach from the PCC – Houghton campus all the way to Sierra Vista (70.3 miles). Maybe not a coincidence!

Loving life under the sun;

Glen Elliott
Lead Pastor

Carl Jung (1875-1961), was a Swiss psychiatrist, the founder of analytical psychology and the first major alternative to Freud. He reported that a third of his clients suffered from no definable neurosis other than the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. He went on to name meaninglessness the general neurosis of the modern era. Not bad Carl!

Solomon, 3000 years ago said it first, under the guidance of the Spirit of God. He said that life under the sun is meaningless (vanity or “vapor”). He also said there’s nothing new under the sun (Eccl. 1:10). Sorry Dr. Jung, you were not the first to observe this.

Yet we know that life is not meant to be meaningless and the message of Ecclesiastes is that it doesn’t have to be meaningless. In fact, satisfaction (the opposite of meaninglessness) is already available to all.

You might have missed a simple word in my last sentence – “already.” Yet in the context of the teaching of Ecclesiastes, happiness or better, satisfaction is already here. Happiness and satisfaction are not things we hope for or strive for, it is something we embrace. God has already given us everything we need for life and for goodness. The blessed life is not future, but a gift given now.

God wants to bless us. He has blessed and wants us to enjoy our food, drink, spouse and work – the simple gifts of God (9:7-10). He wants to bless us so we’ll live a life of happiness and satisfaction in order to bless others! Here’s a simple but powerful equation: unhappiness leads to cursing (not just bad language but sucking life out of others) and satisfaction leads to blessing (enhancing the life of others).

Listen to the words of Thomas Merton: “To live well myself is my first and essential contribution to the well-being of all mankind and to the fulfillment of man’s collective destiny. If I do not live happily myself how can I help anyone else to be happy, or free, or wise? Yet, to seek happiness is not to live happily. Perhaps it is more true to say that one finds happiness by not seeking it. The wisdom that teaches us deliberately to restrain our desire for happiness enables us to discover that we are already happy without realizing it.”

So again the consistent refrain in Ecclesiastes: “A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?” (2:24 & 25 – NIV)

Embrace God’s blessings ALREADY here!

Glen