NEW...

I know it has been a while and I apologize, but there are many NEW things going on in my life right now that I am adjusting to.  During this adjustment time God has been doing a lot of amazing things NOT only in my life, but the life of Midtown here in Columbia.

• New Meetings - we have in the past combined creativity meeting and teaching team meeting and now we have separated those into 2 different meetings with 2 different groups of people. We have added a lot of new faces to those team and so far 2 weeks in...it has been great.
• New Schedule - I have so many things going on right now that I have had to set a whole new schedule on when I study for messages, meet with teammates, go on dates with my wife, study for class, meet with church planters, etc.
• New Intern - I have a guy who is interning directly with me and I am pumped about what God is doing and is going to do in his life. One of the big pieces of our vision here at Midtown is church planting. We are working with and training Nick Cunningham to plant a missional church in downtown Charleston, SC.
  
• New "Record" - I honestly hate using the word record there, but I couldn't come up with any other way to make it work with the "New" theme of this blog entry. We had right at 550 people at our Easter Gathering this past week. What is crazy about that is when we started meeting weekly just 14 months ago we had 128 people.  We normally meet 3 times on Sunday Nights, but for Easter we rented out a space in downtown so that we could all fit in one room at one time and well it was fun to see all of our people together. Overall, it was a really...really good night.
• New  School -  I am currently taking classes at my new school, Liberty Theological Seminary.  I am enjoying the class so far, but I must it was weird to turn in a paper the other day...it has been a while.
• New Series - we are starting a new series this Sunday Night @ The Gathering. Chaotic Joy will be a study on the book of Philippians and should last for the next few months. 
• New Numbers - a lot of church planters ask a lot about our financial numbers and so I was going to give some general new updates that may help or may not or may cause questions. By the way, Chris Kakaras (our business and financial director) is great to work with and would love to help in anyway he can. 
• Approximately 33.5 % of our income (money given to the mission here at Midtown) goes towards staffing. Avg. churches usually range between 45% - 60%.
• We currently have 2 full-time staff members (I am one of those) 4 part time (10-18 hours a week) and 2 contract workers (project based etc.) and when summer roles around we will have 11 interns...we have 3 now and will add 8 this summer (they are NOT paid by Midtown).
• We give a minimum of 10% of our money away to partner mission organizations we are affiliated with and the majority goes to church planting. **THIS DOES NOT  include all of the money we pour into Community Missions - that is a budgeted line attem. If that number was included then that percentage would probably range between 20% to 30%.
• This year we project our income (money given to the mission here at Midtown) to be approximately 61% inside support (from the Midtown Family) and 39% outside support (other churches & supportive individuals).

Anyways there is a lot going on new and it is my hope that I will soon have a new blog designed by my awesome friend Matt New...and yes that is his last name. He does incredible work. Check his site out here.