I am just returning home from our evening worship service at church; tonight we had our largest crowd since we started one year ago: 43 people. When my wife and I moved here two years ago we had a church of 4 (my wife and I and our two children!). Next Sunday is the one-year anniversary of when Christ Church began meeting publicly. God has been so faithful.

This coming week our small groups will reconvene, after taking the summer off. We consolidated our groups for the summer and we met as a whole community each week at Hohlt Park to watch our children play, to pray for each other, and to go through selected Psalms. It was a beautiful and fruitful time of community, reflection, and solidarity (as we suffered through the summer heat together).

Since the last entry of "Our Story So Far" our church has purchased a building: 1302 Washington.

1302 Washington is a project by Christ Church in Brenham, Texas. The building will serve the church as a meeting place for weekly worship services and gatherings and will serve the greater community as a local venue for promoting local/regional art and artists; by hosting a parish clinic with local physicians to provide free health care to families in need (Spring 2009); and by offering other various community services such as tutoring space for students; lectures, seminars, and conferences; neighborhood BBQs; and community events.

For us, this building is much more than the brick and mortar that provides the walls and roof for our weekly gatherings. It is a missions outpost through which we can reach the neighborhoods and communities that surround us; in which we can train and encourage God’s people to be faithful to their calling as Christ-followers; and from which we can send people out as missionaries into the world.

In addition to purchasing this building, we have been hard at working trying to put into words the deep calling we feel as a new community. We wanted something we could share with others to clarify “why we do what we do” at Christ Church. Inspired by Darrell Guder’s book The Continuing Conversion of the Church, we came up with three primary callings that compel us as a young community: Proclamation, Service, and Community.

We believe that the Christian faith is a call to Proclamation. Therefore, as we experience transformation through the Gospel, we are compelled to share God’s story with the world, always pointing people to the sacred Scriptures as the final authority for faith and life.

We believe that the Christian faith is a call to Service. Therefore we submit our lives to Jesus as His servants and seek to imitate Jesus by serving others whom we value more highly than ourselves.

We believe that the Christian faith is a call to Community, not individualism. Therefore we embody the Gospel by living a shared life of intimacy, hospitality, and generosity as we establish a family of pilgrims on a journey of faith together.

In other words, these three elements are the Saying, Doing, and Being of our Gospel call. This is what the church (the ekklesia, the called-out ones) should be compelled by. This is the church’s mission.

This call energizes us, and fuels our work as witnesses on a mission.

We work with eager anticipation, waiting for further evidence of God’s provision in the coming year.

With the deepest gratitude in God,

Pastor Justin Hyde
Christ Church
August 31, 2008