It can seem like every pastor loves his or her church.  Or thinks the volunteers in their church community are the best.  And they work with the greatest staff.  And so on.  It can feel like every pastor is saying God is doing amazing things in the life of the church.  I trust this to be true on many occasions.  But let me just say I know God is moving at Grace Fellowship.  It is not a question.  There so many incredible things that have been happening.  Just another happened the other day and I wanted to share it.

A few years back, our church was leaving our old building and going to a high school for a season while we built our new building.  As we left our old building, we did something called the Grace Initiative.  The plan was to give a pretty good amount of cash to help a family pay their mortgage for a year, give away a minivan to a single parent and help a family in need with childcare for a year.  People in our church could nominate themselves or others with a story.

A girl named Amanda was selected to receive the van.  At the time we gave her the van, Amanda was loosely attending our church and may or may not have called herself a Christian then.  Fast-forward a few years later and Amanda just got baptized at Grace this past weekend.  It was really cool.

Here is what is crazy.  When we planned Grace Initiative our prayer and hope was God would get glory.  It was not about whether or not the people we helped were going to our church or not.  It was not about whether they were believers or not.  It was about doing the right thing and the people seeing this and then how that would impact them.  We dreamed that maybe these individuals and people in our church would see the love of God being demonstrated and then would fall in love with God himself.  That happened.  And that is just plain awesome.