Gilbert Thurston

Other Weekend Thoughts

October 20, 2008 by Gilbert Leave a Comment

What a busy…but great weekend!

Friday night we had a bunch of the CAYA group over for games and a movie.

Saturday morning at 5am I got up to head over to the church to pick-up stuff for Applefest in downtown C’burg.

By a little after 6 we were packed up and ready to head downtown to set-up.

As you can see from the pic, our booth went from blue tent to just beyond the far blue tent.

We had games, balloons, music, videos, a place for people to drop off prayer requests, sign-up for free giveaways, pick up info about the church and mostly importantly…FREE popcorn.

We had specifically mentioned that we need power for our booth and were told it wouldn’t be a problem.

As were setting up, in the bitter cold I might add, the power kept blowing.

The city utility workers had to come to help us…there response was they were not equipped to handle any more juice than required to handle the Christmas tree lights each year.

I said, “Oh ok, no problem.”

If you believe that, you don’t know me very well.

No, I politely (I was told this by one of our volunteers) told them that our booth depended on power, we told it wouldn’t be a problem and that we needed to come up with a solution.

They mentioned that on the other side of the street was a more powerful transformer that could handle the load, so we ended up running an extension cord all the way across and taping it down with duct-tape.

Everything powered up then and we were on our way!

Throughout the day we handed out over 800 pieces of information about the church…some people even showed up yesterday to church after having met us!

We handed out more bags of popcorn in those 8 1/2 hours than we did in 8 total Experiences for the God at the Box Office series.

A couple of funny things happened….

We had cup stacking as one of the games people could play.
A young kid named David saw it and is really good at it…he stopped by and started showing his stuff.
It was drawing big crowds to our booth so we encouraged him to keep going…and he did…for 3 hours!
I joked to Brian Miller that we might have to pay him for his services.
By the way, I was the cup stacking champion amongst our people.
Not that I’m competitive or anything…just wanted to get that out there in case you were sitting there at your computer wondering, “Hmmm…who was the best cup stacker at our booth on Saturday?”
The other fun part for me was standing just outside our tent as people were walking by and yelling out, “Free Popcorn…who wants a bag of free popcorn.”
Fun because I got to work mostly with the Miller twins and fun because I make it fun.
For example, I’d yell it out but would add an “Except for Cowboys fans” or “Except for Penn State fans” if I saw someone with a ridicilous amount of team gear on.
My favorite moment came when I spotted an older gentleman about 30 feet away with his name on his jacket.
Right away I started yelling, “Free popcorn for anyone named Paul…free popcorn for anyone named Paul.”
He keeps walking on by and finally it dawns on him what I’m saying…he looks at me and says, “My name is Paul”. I told him he was in luck and to come on in and redeem his free popcorn.
Ah the little things I do to amuse myself.

All in all it was a great day…thanks to the 40+ of you who came out to volunteer throughout the day.

By the time we packed up, returned everything to the church and I got home, it was almost 7PM.

From the long hours, to having been on my feet all day to the cold weather, I was completly drained.

It really took a toll on me yesterday for the messages, so I’ll have to keep this in mind for the future.

During the afternoon, the Schwindt’s came over to hang out until we went to Jason and Megan Martin’s house for party for the worship team.

Jason is a farmer, so we took a hayride…which was again freezing cold but a lot of fun.

Another funny story…Jason had taken hay bales and set them up as tunnels that the kids could crawl through.

At one point Aaron’s son, Colin who is 3 years old went through but he got some hay down in the collar of his jacket which was scratching him.

He asked me to get it out…the problem was fingers were still freezing from the hayride.

Everytime my fingers touched his neck he’d start to cry because it was too cold…but as soon as I’d pull away he’d complain that the hay was scratching. It was sort of funny to see this pattern repeat 5 or 6 times as I got all the hay out.

Shortly after that we ate hamburgers and hotdogs and sat around a bonfire warming ourselves and then eating smores!

A good time was had by all!

Inside Today’s Experiences

October 19, 2008 by Gilbert Leave a Comment

What an interesting day.

After yesterday’s marathon day working at the Applefest…which I’ll blog about tomorrow…I was whupped and brain dead.

Luckily Aaron came in early to set up for me, so I didn’t have to be there quite as early, but still I woke up with a pounding head and huge bags under my eyes…I wondered if I only had 30 minutes to live, much less 30 days.

Set-up only had a few minor problems, so I went to my office to try to relax before the 9:15 Experience started.

Right at 9:15 I arrived at the back doors to watch the beginning of the Experience, but they were already through half of the song and I needed to be on stage at the end of it…which meant running all the way around to be able to make it on stage just in time…whew!

In both Experiences, my mind was just not working and I was stumbling all over my thoughts and was doing goofy stuff I normally don’t do…like ryhming words and then being amused by it.

Now I remember why I don’t like to do anything too taxing on Saturdays…it throws me off for Sunday’s.

At the 10:45 Experience, Andy accidently hit the mute all button at the beginning of the music, which gave me a momentary heart attack and flashbacks to just 1 year ago when we were in the old buidling an would rountinely have power outages.

Glad it was human error :)

Met a few people today who we first saw yesterday at Applefest, so this headache is worth it.

At the Guest Reception there was a little girl who kept reaching up to take a piece of pretzel, would take a bite then put it on the plate and reach up for another…mmmmm!

Went to lunch with Aaron and his family and now they are here at our house waiting for all of us to go to a party the worship team is haivng this evening.

Think I’ll try to get in a quick nap.

The “Your church is too big” argument

October 16, 2008 by Gilbert Leave a Comment

Occasionally since arriving at CFCOG and especially in my days working for Purpose Driven, I heard an argument from people that smaller churches are better than larger churches. The reasoning was smaller churches could; better meet the needs of people, offer more personalized plans for spiritual growth and people can have deeper, more meaningful, relationships because everybody knows everybody.

My argument has always been in favor of larger churches…the reasons for which I won’t get into know, but most of it was subjective based on my own personal experiences in both large and small churches. Now however, a new book has come out What Americans Really Believe, by Rodney Stark that backs up my claim. Rodney with the help of the Gallup organization surveyed Christians throughout the country and broke the findings into two categories…Churches under 100 in average attendance and Churches over 1000 in attendance.

Chapter 5 is entitled, Super-sizing the Faith and here are a few of the findings:




 

Under 100

Over 1000


Believe in heaven

79%

92%


Believe in hell

69%

90%


Attend church weekly

39%

46%


Tithe

36%

46%


Attend small group or Sunday School

43%

52%


Have close friends in the church

25%

41%


Have no friends in the church

22%

12%


Have shared faith with friends in the last month

52%

83%


Have shared faith with strangers in the last month

35%

53%


Volunteer in the community

31%

40%


Volunteer in the church

34%

41%

So when it comes to personal beliefs, acting out your faith and personal connections, it would appear that the bigger a church is the better off your faith will be!

Random Thoughts on a Wednesday

October 15, 2008 by Gilbert Leave a Comment

As you can see from the pic…Lisa’s car hit 77777 on the odometer on the way back from small group last night.
Not sure why we found this so fascinating.
Yes we realize how dorky we are.
Honestly I’m not in a good mood today…haven’t been for a couple of days.
Would appreciate your prayers that I snap out of it.
Keep remembering Paul’s words that I quoted on Sunday and that we heard again in this week’s small group lesson…”Give thanks in all circumstances for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”
I was hoping that blogging would be theraputic but I don’t have anything else to share right now.
Have a great week…see some of you tonight and others of you on the weekend.
If you have a chance, check out our booth at Applefest on Saturday in downtown C’burg.

Inside Today’s Experiences

October 12, 2008 by Gilbert Leave a Comment

Inside Today’s Experiences

Another great day!
We never knew until late on Monday that Aaron would be availbable to lead us for the first time so we our team had quite a busy week.
Tuesday they got all new music…of which 4 were songs we’ve never done.
By the end of Thursday nights practice, everyone was stressed but as usual, God came through this morning and they did awesome.
Great to have Aaron up there doing his thing.
Hard to top last week’s Experience, so we threw in a lot of different wrinkles and it went well for the most part.
Had lots of people come up and tell me that they told anyone who would listen about last week’s entrance in the casket.
Must have convinced some to come visit…at the 10:45 Experience people kept coming in and coming in, until we ran out of chairs…the ushers had to go and start taking some from classrooms to keep up with everyone.
Seriously…if you currently attend at 10:45, please consider moving to the 9:15 Experience.
This is only October and the crowd size will only continue to grow between now and Christmas, so please, I’m begging you move over to the early time period.
As for the day itself, set-up went well this morning with only a few minor glitches.
We packed a lot of stuff into such a short time period this morning, but I thought everything flowed smoothly with a few minor mistakes.
Got to meet a lot of great new people to the church…it’s awesome to see so many new people and hear their stories of how God is changing their lives.
Tonight I’ve got a Council Meeting but in the meantime, I’ll watch the 2nd have of the Redskins game then take a quick nap.
Have a great week…don’t forget to invite someone to come along with you and don’t forget to come at 9:15 next week…thanks!