It’s funny how being a portable church plant can make some things easy and yet other things become much more difficult. When you hold your services in a coffee shop, it isn’t hard to create a warm atmosphere. But finding space for a full band or figuring out where to have a baptism service? Seemingly simple tasks like that become increasingly challenging when you’re portable.
That’s where we found ourselves in the week heading up to our first baptism service at The Gathering. After holding our first baptism spontaneously in the fountain at the square a few weeks back (if you haven’t seen that video, it’s worth two minutes of your time), we had decided to actually get permission this time to baptize four more people at the square this past Sunday. You won’t be surprised when I tell you that we were denied because of liability issues, but I was. Even after suggesting we’d sign a waiver releasing any other parties from responsibility, the answer was “no.”
That left us a few days out from what could be one of the most impactful services in the short history of our church and with no idea how or where to pull it off. These are the things most churches take for granted. They just fill up the old baptistry and dunk people! Plan B turned into buying a 300 gallon watering trough from Mauney’s Feed Mill in New London, which would be wide enough for me to get in the water with the people being baptized, and deep enough that if they sat down, we could baptize them easily (except for the really tall ones, which you can see ran out of room in the video!). Plan B got even better when the fantastic folks at Mauney’s heard what we were using it for and just told us to pick it up, use it, and then bring it back. Saved us about $250 right there, and so when I sat down Saturday evening and saw that the weather on Sunday was going to be 84° and sunny, I couldn’t stop smiling! God was indeed coming through!
It was raining when I woke up Sunday morning. Hard. Hard enough that I checked the radar map on my phone as I drove into the coffee shop to set up for service. I couldn’t believe what I saw. The entire screen was filled with a big circle of yellows and oranges and reds, and there was no end in sight. Forecast was for 100% chance of rain until 11, and then a 75% chance after that. That’s when I asked God to punch a hole in the sky. I wish I could say my prayer was more fancy than that, but it wasn’t. I just asked Him to make a fist and punch it through the clouds so that we could baptize the people that He had drawn to Himself and to our church.
It rained all the way to the church. It rained the whole time we set up. It rained when we started the service. It rained while Phil and Jen led us in worship, right up until the LAST SONG. It was during that song that I noticed it wasn’t raining as hard and so I checked the radar map again, and I found that we were right on the edge of a hole in the storm. It literally looked like someone (gee, I wonder who?) had punched a hole into the storm!
God was moving on our behalf, and He was just getting started! As worship ended, I knew that God wanted to set free people who struggled with 2 things: addiction and cynicism. I know, a pretty weird combo! But we watched God break people and begin to set them free, and it was so powerful that 4 of those individuals ended up being baptized spontaneously simply in response to what God had just done in their lives moments earlier.
It was raw. It was real. It was exactly what we needed.
How does God break addictions? He fills the addicted so full of Him that they can’t squeeze in anything else. How does He break cynicism? He makes a display of His grace through 8 individuals who are so hungry for Him that they would step into a 300 gallon Rubbermaid tub in the back alley of a building in downtown Albemarle in order to go down in the water so they can come up clean.
This, church, is why we do what we do, and the great thing is that we are just getting started. The best is yet to come!
