PASTOR’S NOTE

As some of you know, I have a business.  I never dreamed at this stage in my life I would start a business and three years later start a church.  Eight years down the road and here we are.  The words of my father still ring loudly in my ears, “Son, learn a trade, if you will you can go anywhere God leads you and make a living for yourself if you have to.”  Very prophetic, more so than he knew.  I have been in Ohio ten years, eight of those I have had my own business.  The trade I learned while pastoring in Virginia Beach has now come about as the method God has used to sustain us while founding this church.  Who knew?  Evidently God did!  I learned the trade that now is the basis of my business through the back door.  That is, I started helping a businessman in the church I pastored as an attempt to keep him in church.  He and his wife were the first people to be saved in the church after Joanne and I went there to pastor.  God did great things in their lives.  Yet, he had the tendency to be a workaholic.  After missing several Sundays in a row I made a phone call.  I asked if he needed any help.  He indicated he did and then asked why I was inquiring.  At that point I informed him that I thought if I could lighten his work load by helping him, he might be able to come to church on Sunday.  The rest is history, over the next nine years I helped him off and on.  As long as I worked with him he had no problem getting out to the house of God to worship.  I thought I was just helping a man get established in his walk with God.  God, on the other hand, was preparing me for this wonderfully difficult task of founding a church.  The point is, we do not have to know everything and its purpose, as long as we have hold of the hand of He who does.