Gilbert Thurston

One of our core values at United is that everything should be done with excellence. I was reminded of this again recently as I read Solomon’s words as he was building the temple in 2 Chronicles 2:5.

     “The temple I am going to build will be great, because our God is greater
      than all other gods.”

In our day and time, the other gods are music, movies, money, etc.  So our music shouldn’t be as good as MTV’s, it should be better.  Our videos shouldn’t be as good as Hollywood’s, but better.  The same could be said of our systems…we should be better than any Fortune 500 company out there. 

Now obviously they have a lot more money than we do, so that’s why excellence doesn’t have so much to do with perfection, or how big it is, or how expensive it is, but rather are we doing the very best with what we’ve got.  You see our God is greater than any of those little gods that the world tempts us with, so He deserves nothing less than our very best.  So the reason we do United with excellence is its our statement to Chambersburg and beyond that our God is excellent and what we do isn’t merely as show, but as an act of worship to our awesome God.

In order to have enough time for our teams to pull off an excellent Experience each week, it means working and planning months at a time in advance of where we currently are. As an example, we’ve known since July that we’d be doing the Extreme Makeover series right now.

After this series concludes, I’ll be doing a Christmas series called CRIBS and then after a few weeks of stand alone messages, we’ll be starting a series on the value of doing life together as we prepare to launch a bunch of small groups. From there I have a few other ideas of series I’d like to do, but I wanted to open it up to you for input.

What topic(s) do you feel the people of CFCOG and the people in Franklin County most need to hear God’s plan for. Not saying we’ll take all of your suggestions…I know one of you would come up with something like, nuclear physics just to see if I could do it. Well let me just say I can’t…so please keep the comments to topics that fit well with living your day in and day out life. Use the comments feature below to let your voice be heard.

This Sunday will be the last week on our worship team for Joe Sheedy. Joe has accepted a worship pastor position at a church down in MD, thus fulfilling a dream Joe has had for a long while.

As some of you know, Joe was instrumental (no pun intended) in me coming into a relationship with Jesus 14 years ago and we’ve remained close friends ever since. When 6 months or so ago Joe left another church to begin looking for a full-time position, he came one week to check out United and has been there every week since…pretty amazing considering that he, his wife Michelle, and their 3 kids live over an hour away from Chambersburg. This means that not only do they make the commute on Sunday’s but Joe has been faithfully coming to worship practice each Thursday night as well.

To end his time with us, we’ll do a couple of the songs that have a distinct Joe flair to them and wish them well and God’s blessing as they begin the next season of their life. We’ll also miss Michelle’s creativity..she was a huge help to Lisa in graphic design these past few months…be sure to thank them both when you see them at the Expereince this week!