The meeting went very well. There are still some concerns on my part, but I'm content with the general direction the church is headed.

I asked if I were the only one who had brought forward concerns - the answer is no, there were a lot of concerns brought up in small groups that Sunday and they were addressed in church the week that we were out of town.

I asked the pastor if he had looked at the Firehouse Family Ministries website and he told me that he didn't even know they had a website. I explained what I had found and gave him a printout of my post from here. Ok...

He also told me that our church did not know, when the work team headed for New Orleans, who they would be helping. The context of the work team was that they were working through another evangelical disater relief organization. The "hookup" with Firehouse was not planned ahead of time.

He could somewhat anticipate my questions because of all the concerns brought up by others.

No, we are not "going all Pentecostal"
No, we are not going "word faith"
No, we are not going "Five fold ministry"

Parts of the service were not expected - the Shelton's had come to give a "thank you" message.

Yes, the pastors are, at their core, very reformed (I ate dinner at the "all church supper" with Pastor Brian with a couple who is new to the church - they decided that there were things in Roman Catholic teaching that are not in the Bible so they left that religion - and we talked about "election" for about 45 minutes)

We went over what I discovered by just poking around and he agrees with what I found, other than his take on "language barriers" - sometimes the words that we use "sound like" what other people are using, but we don't mean the same thing. Yeah. Then don't use the words that have been co-opted by heretics.

There are big plans for our church and they are definitely talking about a singles ministry! Brian asked me what I thought would be the best route to take - a ministry that targets specific needs, or a general social group? I told him, why not both? with our small group system in place, a single person could have their social needs met, while addressing specific needs in a small group setting that targets their circumstance.

Anyway, there were a couple of other things (minor) that we talked about and I left feeling pretty good about the whole thing.

😉