We are so glad you're here with us today as we continue the celebration of 50 years of Lakeshore Christian Church. We have a special video we want to show you right now. I'm so thankful that the families made the decision to video this. This is a video with two of our founding members, Peggy Thigpen and Beverly Edwards. This was after they had discovered Beverly had cancer. They were able to get them together and do this video before Beverly passed away.
I wanted you to hear, we had to edit it down some for the purpose of this service, but I want you to hear some of what these two ladies said about the very beginnings of Lakeshore Christian Church. Amen. Welcome again, everybody. Welcome everybody connecting with us online, Smyrna campus. Welcome. We're glad you guys are connected there.
We loved hearing from those two ladies last night. We kicked off our 50th anniversary celebration with a service here at this campus. We had a combined praise team from both campuses, had staff and volunteers from both campuses here together, and we had a lot of people here from the early history of the church that we were able to celebrate with.
Peggy Thigpen was able to be here with us and her family, and we were able to present to her a certificate of appreciation. She is the only remaining founding member that has been with us the whole time, for over 50 years of service here at Lakeshore Christian Church. Many of Beverly's family were here as well, and we're so thankful that we have that foundation that we built on.
I said last night, I say it often, we all stand on the shoulders of those who've come before us. Every one of us do. Whatever life we have now, whatever good things we have now, others have come before us to help prepare the way and make the way for us to have what we have. We couldn't be the church we are today, be here today, doing what we're doing today without those who've come before us.
Last night, I saw a lot of people from the past, and it was so much fun to see them. But believe it or not, over 50 years, we've all changed a little bit. It reminded me of a story I've shared before of a lady who was sitting in the waiting room for her first appointment with a new man she had never met. She noticed his diploma on the wall, and it had his full name on it. She looked at that name and remembered a tall, dark, handsome young man back in high school by that name.
She thought, well surely it couldn't be the same guy, right? But maybe it is. She just wasn't sure. So she went on with her appointment, and when she saw him, she realized that that can't be the guy because the guy that walked in to check her teeth was kind of bent over and wrinkly and wore glasses. He just certainly couldn't have been that handsome young man from high school.
So he examined her teeth, and they got to talking a little bit. She asked him, "Are you someone that attended Morgan Park High School?" He said, "Yes, I did, and that was some of the best years of my life. I really enjoyed being there." She said, "Well, what year did you graduate?" He said, "1976." She just exclaimed, "Oh, that's amazing! You were in my class!"
Then she said that little old wrinkly, bald-headed man got up in my face and looked right at me and said, "Well, what did you teach?" Whether we realize it or not, we've all changed a little bit over that period of time. Now, I wasn't here at the very beginning, but I'm so thankful for those that were here.
So today, what we're going to be talking about, we're in a series called "A Life Well Lived." One of the greatest things we can do with life, in fact, the most important thing we can do with the time that we have here on earth, is to help build the kingdom of God because that will last forever. Those are the eternal things that matter the most. It doesn't mean other things don't matter; it just means this is the thing that matters the most: what we invest in the eternal things of the kingdom of God.
I want to begin in Hebrews. If you turn to Hebrews 11 with me, that's known as the faith chapter. The whole chapter really is like a roll call of the faithful throughout the history of God's dealing with Israel. It talks about all those who laid the groundwork by faith, who prepared the way, through whom God worked and did great things.
Now, I want you to know something. As you look at those names, it says, "By faith Abraham," "By faith Isaac," "By faith Jacob and Esau," "By faith Moses," and the list goes on and on and on of all those people by faith. Then in verse 32, it's like he's trying to summarize all of that, and he says, "And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell you about Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah, about David and Samuel and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, ministered justice, gained what was promised, who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword, whose weakness was turned to strength and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign enemies. Women received back their dead, raised to life again."
There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released. Some faced jeers and flogging and even chains and imprisonment. I mean, it just goes on and on talking about how these people accomplished such great things. It’s hard for us to imagine, as we read those names and read about the great and powerful things that they did, that they were just ordinary people just like us.
One of the things Peggy and Beverly told us about the resurrection of the dead is that they were talked about in that video that we had to edit down so much. The family has the extended length of the whole video, and in the rest of what they talked about, they said this: "We're just amazed. We're just ordinary people, and we see what God has done."
Here's what you have to know: the only kind of people God has to work with are ordinary people. We're all ordinary people. We all come from the dust. We all come from dirt. I always say if you want to trace your history, go back far enough; we all have the same start. We go back to dirt. Every one of us, that's our lineage. And yet, through ordinary people, God has done amazingly great things.
So I want to start today by looking at those who've gone before us that we need to remember. We stand on the shoulders of these ordinary people that allowed God to work in them and through them. Noah built. Abraham went. Isaac blessed. Moses led. Joshua fought. Rahab welcomed. In the New Testament, John baptized. The apostles followed the call of Jesus. Early Christians sacrificed and obeyed the Great Commission and made disciples. And the church was established and grew through the work that God did through ordinary people.
As a church today, not just Lakeshore, but churches all over the world, we all stand on the shoulders of those men and women that God used throughout all of those time periods in history to bring us to where we are now. But I want us to think even beyond that now of others whose shoulders we stand on.
In the early 1500s here in the United States, there was a movement in Europe that began to influence and was brought over into the United States as they settled the territories here. It was known as the Reformation that was taking place in Europe. People like Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, Charles Wesley, and others were all part of the Reformation movement.
The Reformation movement was never intended to break away from or protest anything about the church. The Reformation movement led to what is known now as the Protestant church, right? Separate from the Catholic church. Protestant was a word that included the idea of protest. And there was a protest of things that were going on in the Catholic church, but it wasn't with the intent of breaking away from the church. It was a protest of things that were going on in the Catholic church.
Protestant was a word that included the idea of protest. And it was with the intent of reforming the church, to get it back in line with Scripture, with God's Word. That led to a whole group of people that stepped out and began churches and movements that led to new churches being established that were more in line with Scripture.
Later on here in the U.S., in the early 1900s, there was a movement that we know of now. It was called the Restoration Movement. That movement was very active and prevalent here in the Nashville area. Many of the leaders of the Restoration Movement came to Nashville and preached the gospel here.
That movement was a movement in the U.S. to restore the pattern of the church to what we see in the New Testament church. To try to get back to being Christians only, following the Bible only, letting that be the only rule and authority for us as a church and as individual followers of Jesus Christ.
People like Thomas and his son Alexander Campbell, Barton W. Stone, a frontier preacher I love. This guy was known as Raccoon John Smith because he wore a coonskin cap, kind of like Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone. He went out and preached the gospel in the remote areas, trying to call people back to just being Christians.
Friends, we stand on their shoulders today because our church exists as a part of the result of that movement to restore the church back to the pattern of the New Testament. Other churches here in the Nashville area are part of that heritage as well. We're so thankful for those who were willing to take the risk and make the sacrifices.
Then it leads up to the early 1970s with some Christians who moved here to the Priest Lake area and who saw a need for an independent Christian church from that Restoration Movement heritage to be established in that neighborhood, in that area of town around Nashville. They began to band together and work together to get that church started.
You heard Peggy and Beverly talking about that. I want to share with you some key things from kind of a timeline. We gave out this timeline last night at our celebration. We had a packed house. It was a fun celebration. We've got copies of this timeline out at the information counter if you want to pick up one before you leave. They're printed copies of an abbreviated timeline of these events along the way in the life of Lakeshore Christian Church.
This church was actually incorporated into the New Testament as a church on November the 20th, 1974. They had already been meeting together and praying together in their homes and doing some Bible study together as small groups within their homes. But it was actually officially organized and established as a church on November the 20th, 1974. That's why we had the celebration this weekend because it coincides with that date of incorporation of the church.
Now, many of you know I'm a Georgia Bulldog fan, and many of you are Tennessee Vol fans. When I scheduled this and we had that celebration last night, it never dawned on me in the original planning that it was going to be the night of the Tennessee-Georgia game. I was able to catch the second half, and it was the best half in my opinion.
But isn't it great that we could think back to 1974? The first meeting of the church was held at the home of the Krajewski family, and 19 people were present by their records on that day. On November the 24th, 1974, with Tom Rutledge, who was a student at Johnson Bible College, preaching for them.
In those early days, Dr. Owen Crouch, you heard them mention him, a retired minister and professor, came on Sunday mornings to teach the lessons, to preach the gospel in those meetings in the homes. As they said in the video, they grew the homes pretty quickly, and they were able to move into an elementary school in the area that still exists today. Lakeview Elementary School was the first school that allowed a church to come and meet there, and Lakeshore was that church that went to have services there at Lakeview Elementary School.
During that time, they hired their first paid minister, Danny Thurston. In the interim times when they didn't have someone there on staff, Herb McCoy, a local police chaplain, was also there. Then in June 1975, that group needed to get out of the school and they were looking for their next step. They prayed about it and found some land and contracted to purchase six acres of land at 3325 Anderson Road, which is near the intersection of Anderson Road and Smith Springs Road.
That building that they built on that property is still there today. I'll talk more about that here in just a moment. They purchased that property there with the intention of building a building on that property. In May of 1977, they hired Dr. Vernon Eaton and his wife, Denny, and their family to come and serve as the minister. He had a huge impact and served here for eight years.
I think we have a picture of their family. Do we have that? We could bring it up. There they are. That's from the time that they were here, them and their daughters. We had hoped that their daughters would be with us. Vernon and Denny have gone on to be with the Lord, but the daughters were planning to be here, but they called me late in the week this week and said they had some illness and would not be able to be with us.
But we're so grateful for this family and the influence that they had. During the eight years that he served here, they built the first building on that property over on Anderson Road. They built it toward the end of 1977 into 1978. They occupied that building there on Anderson Road, which was a great presence there in that community.
It was in the neighborhood, but they had six acres right in the middle of that neighborhood, right on Anderson Road there with that first building. I think there's a picture of that first building that is still there. I'll talk about how we've added onto it since then and the group that's there now, but we were so thankful to have that building.
Then after that, Vernon and Denny went to teach at a Bible college. I think they went to Mid-South first, and then they went to England as missionaries, and then they came back and served as teaching staff at Johnson Bible College over in Knoxville after that. I got to know them and spend some time with them, and they shared with me what a love they have for this church, and I know this church had a great love for them and the work that they did in the time that they were there.
I was able to attend their memorial services when they passed away, and we're just so thankful to be able to honor their legacy here at Lakeshore Christian Church. After them, others came through to preach here, Bob Gray and his wife Pam in '87 and '88, and then after that, Mike Southerns came with his family and led the church until he left to establish another church in the area as well.
It was during that time also that this church had a group to go out and plant another church over in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. We're so thankful that they had the vision to send a group out, even as a small church, to plant another church in Mount Juliet. Some of those were able to be back with us last night as well that helped start the church over in Mount Juliet.
Well, after Mike left, there was a time where they didn't have a full-time pastor. Elders and others filled in during that time. Then we get to March of 1991, which is a lot more personal to me because that's when they called me and my family to come and serve as the minister here at Lakeshore. I was thrilled to be able to do that.
I had met with them at the end of 1990 around Thanksgiving, and we began talking and praying about whether or not we should come to be the minister here. Then we officially started the first Sunday in March of 1991. I remember that Sunday well. We had 46 people present for the service that day. That's a preacher's count. It probably wasn't that many. You know how preachers tend to exaggerate, right?
Well, we had about 46 people here, and I think we counted the dog that walked through the parking lot as well. But it was a good core group. They had had people leave right with the Mount Juliet church. They had had to go start that. They had had some people leave with Mike Southerner just to go start another church. So they had a core group of about 46 people at that time.
I want to thank, especially, I did it last night, but I can't do it enough, my beautiful bride, Sue Ann, our kids, Bobby and Heather. Bobby and Heather more begrudgingly than Sue Ann agreed to come and support me in this move. I want Sue Ann to stand. She's sitting back there with her mom, who's also here with us as a part of that. I thank her.
When we started here, we were the staff. It was me on staff getting paid and her volunteering to help out in every way that she could. Then God, amazingly, we're so thankful for blessed ordinary people doing ordinary things, and the church began to grow very rapidly. It was a work of God that was amazing to watch and be a part of.
We were so thankful for that. In fact, we grew so quickly that by October of 1993, we had built another building. It was a metal gym building. When we planned the first planning sessions for that building, we thought it was going to be a great place for a fellowship hall. It had a kitchen. It had classrooms. It was just a great place to be.
The church began to grow as the church was built. It didn't end up that way. It was just going to be used that way. But by the time we got it built, we had so outgrown the other building and the space that we had there that we had to buy chairs and move our worship services into that gym building.
I think they just showed a picture of that gym building that was built right behind the original building. So we moved worship services into that area, and we continued to grow. More and more people came to Christ and were added to the church family there.
Over the next few years, it continued to grow even more. So we added on to that building, expanded the parking lot there three times, and added on to that building again with another addition to that building, a whole other wing of classrooms and a wing that attached the two buildings together there so that we could continue the growth that God was bringing to the church there.
I think, yeah, there's a picture of that as they were connected together. Those two buildings were there on Anderson Road. God so blessed our church that even then we were growing to the point that we knew we needed to relocate because we were landlocked. We had neighborhoods all the way around us there. There was just no more room to expand on that property.
We were praying about the next step. In our praying, we brought in an organization that was supposed to be guiding us as consultants, as church growth experts. I use the word experts loosely. They came in and analyzed our church and the neighborhood and said, "Well, here's what you need to do. You need to relocate out of the Antioch area."
Now, the reason they were saying that was during that time period, the area was changing drastically. It was becoming more and more diverse. When a neighborhood begins to get more diverse, most churches relocate out of that neighborhood. That's what the experts told us we needed to do to get further out into the suburbs so that we could be a strong, healthy, financially strong church out there instead of staying where we were.
Here's the thing: it was almost unheard of for a church to embrace that kind of diversity and grow with it. That just wasn't the norm. It just wasn't what normally happened. It usually didn't work. People weren't sold out on that. They weren't willing to commit. They weren't willing to do that.
Well, our leadership got together for a really good prayer session, and we fired the experts. Because we believe that God called us to reach this area for Christ. That's why he put us here. We believe that if he brought diversity, that meant we were supposed to bring diversity to the church.
Because if you win the neighborhood around you and it's diverse, what's the church going to look like? It's going to be diverse. It's going to be diverse, too. So we made a commitment that day. We weren't going to leave the area. In fact, we made a commitment to find a more prominent place in the area where we can be even more visible and more effective in reaching people for Christ in this area.
Now, here's the cool thing. I thanked them last night. They were connecting with us online. But we already had a family here that helped us with that process and helped lead the way: Art and Joe Laird. Art served as an elder for many years before his health now prevents him from doing that. He's now an elder emeritus for us.
Art and Joe and their family were the first African-American family to come to that all-white church and become a part of it and stay there. They led the way for us, and we all worked together to embrace the diversity. God blessed that decision, and we continued to grow.
We looked for a place, and I made a funny mistake. It was kind of humorous. We were sitting there. I was talking. We had two youth pastors on staff, and I was talking to them. I had a middle school and high school youth pastor, and I said, "Why don't you guys go out and just check out the neighborhood and see if you see a good opportunity for us to relocate somewhere?"
They came back to me and said, "We found the place." I said, "Really?" They said, "Yeah. It's a big-box retail store that's gone out of business, and it's an empty space there, and we can move our church into that space." I'm thinking, I'm all for that, but I'm not sure everybody else will be. But let's pray about it.
That's when our leadership team looked at this space and prayed about it, looked at all the financial things that needed to be taken care of to do this, and we committed to purchasing this property, which at that time was a Media Play store.
On August 15, 2007, we bought this building that we're in now here at the Antioch campus. The Smyrna campus came later, but at that time, we purchased this building, and it had been a Media Play. Some of you have no idea what Media Play is. You're not old enough. It was kind of like an old-school Best Buy, except they sold 8-track tapes and great big old TVs, not the flat ones and all that, you know, stuff like that.
They had bankrupted all over the country, gone out of business, and this part of the building—the whole building was empty, but the owner of the building owned the whole building, and he was selling the whole building. We looked for a way maybe we could purchase that building and be in a more prominent area here in this community, more visible in the community, to be able to keep growing the kingdom of God here.
In our prayers, we found, by the way, the guy who owned the building, his name was Moses. Just thought I'd throw that out. We talked with Moses and worked out a deal without a real estate agent involved or anything, and we just worked on it personally.
But in order to do the deal, we had to sell the other property to get the money out of it to be able to purchase this property. So we had to look at ways to do that. We had a real estate agent we talked to about listing the property. He said, "You'll never get it." We told him what we needed to get for it. He said, "You'll never get it."
So after prayer, we fired him too. I called up a pastor down the road from us on Anderson Road. I knew their church was growing, and they were in a smaller facility than what we had there on Anderson Road. So I called them up, and I'm so thankful for Pastor Freelix at Priest Lake Baptist Church.
I called Pastor Freelix, and I said, "Would you be interested in this property?" He said, "We sure would." I said, "Well, would you like to talk about it?" He says, "I'll be down there in a minute." So he came to my office, and we sat down in our office.
In one day, I said, "We don't want to negotiate. We're not going to play games here. This is what we have to get. If you can do it, great. If not, we understand." He went back to his church family and his leadership team. They prayed about it and came back and said, "We'll do it."
We were able to sell that property for the amount we needed to get, but we were able to keep it as a church in that community through—it's still there now—Priest Lake Community Church is still there now on that property, still doing the work of God there in that neighborhood. We're so thankful we were able to do that, and that Pastor Freelix and that group were able to purchase that property.
But here's the thing: God has a great sense of humor. He always likes to make sure we're really sold out in faith to step out and do what we needed to do. When we sold them that property, remember, we just purchased this property. This property was an empty shell of a building in this part of the building. It had to be built out to be used. You couldn't use it the way it was.
We sold the other property, but we needed to be somewhere because they had to get into that property when they bought it, the other campus. They needed to move right away when they purchased it. So guess what we did? We moved to a church of about 500 people. We relocated again to a school. We went back to another school.
This was another, a newer school in the area called Thomas Edison Elementary School. So we moved our services into Thomas Edison Elementary. We met in the cafeteria and in the gym building there. We did Bible study classes out in the hallway and in different rooms there at the school. We did two services in their cafeteria. It wasn't big enough to do it all in one service.
So we set up and took it down every week for about a year while we built out this facility to be used as a church. The church growth experts said, "Pastor Andy, that's a bad move. You're going to lose half your church when you take them out of a permanent building and go back into a school and do portable church."
Not only did we not lose anybody, we grew by another hundred by the time we moved into this building. That speaks so highly to the vision of the family of God at Lakeshore and their willingness to say, "We'll do this. We'll do whatever it takes to be able to keep reaching lost people for Jesus."
So we dedicated this new campus. By the way, last night as we were talking about it, somebody brought up something I didn't remember. We had our first service here on April the 12th. Our first official service on April the 12th. That was Easter Sunday 2009.
Now, we didn't have our occupancy permit in hand at that time, so I hope nobody from the building department is with us today, the codes department. But actually, even before that, while we were building it out that previous Christmas, we had a candlelight service in a building that wasn't even finished yet. We had construction stuff all over the place. Dust was everywhere.
We just brought in some chairs and had a candlelight communion service in here. No occupancy permit. We didn't advertise it to the public because we didn't want the building inspector to come by and see us with lit candles in a building that had not even been approved yet. But it went well. In fact, we had our first baptism in that building that night.
I think Carol is here today. Carol, where are you? I know she's here with us for the service today. There she is. Stand up, Carol. She was our first baptism over here. Amen. Amen. Carol, you didn't know it, but we had just put a little water in there right before that. It was the first time it ever had water in that tub.
So it was cold. Yes. But it was fun. You remember it well because it was so cold and for other reasons. But we're glad that you're still here with us. Well, we dedicated this new campus, and God continued to bring growth to us.
We noticed something was happening. We had a good core group of people that were traveling, especially down the La Vergne, Smyrna, Murfreesboro corridor. A good nucleus of people that were traveling to this campus from that area. We began to pray about maybe putting another campus down in that area.
In our prayers, we were looking for the right people to be a part of that. We had a core group that committed to going down to help launch that campus. Our middle school youth pastor, Mike Swartz, was praying about his next steps. He wanted to do something different. He came and met with us and prayed. We prayed, and he went to some training to become the new campus pastor at our new campus down in Smyrna.
In April of 2018, after we went as a team down there and did some build-out on some space that we've leased there, we launched the Smyrna campus in April of 2018. Now, here's the thing. On that timeline, I've talked a lot about building projects. The only reason I've done that is because they're markers of time for what God was doing.
None of what we were doing has anything to do with the buildings. The buildings were a result of what God was doing. The buildings were just tools. The expansions, expanding the parking lot, those were just tools to allow for and accommodate what God was doing in this church.
But listen, the buildings required change and sacrifice and commitment every single time from the people that were in the building. I'm so thankful for those who were involved in it. I'm so thankful for those who caught the vision, who cared more about reaching the lost than they did about themselves, and were willing to make sacrifices and get uncomfortable and do what it took to get the job done to continue to grow and reach more and more lost people for Jesus.
That's still happening here today among so many people that are a part of our church. So, I just want to thank everybody that was a part of all of that process during that time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
I'm going to take a few minutes next, and I want to go through these pretty quickly here. Those who serve alongside us now. We are so thankful for our staff that we have here at Lakeshore. We've got an amazing staff and a great group of volunteers who make things happen here on a regular basis. They make me look good. That's why I'm glad we've got a good staff, because they make me look good, like I know what I'm doing.
I'm so thankful for all of these great men and women that serve with us. One of the unique things about Lakeshore—friends, this is hardly ever found in any church as it's gone through all those changes and had that kind of growth—and that is the unity we've been able to maintain and the longevity of the staff that we have. That's not the norm.
I have been here over 33 years, almost 34 years now as the lead pastor. Thank you. That's not the norm, and we realize that. But it speaks highly to the leadership and to the congregation and the volunteers and everybody that helped make that possible.
In addition to that, that's unique enough. We have five people on staff who have been here over 20 years on staff at our church. I want to call them out to you. That's myself, but then we have Michael Scherer and his family who've been here over 28 years. Mike came to start as a youth pastor, and now he's still here with us for this family.
Mike Swartz down at the Smyrna campus. He was a pastor, started out as a middle school pastor for us, has been here over 23 years now. Walter Rouse, who is our church administrator, has been with us over 22, almost 23 years now for Walter.
And our daughter Heather, who I recognized last night, who up until two weeks ago was my administrative assistant for over 23 years here at the church. I'm so thankful for that as well. Heather's right there. Stand up, Heather. I want to call you out for just a minute. She's waving.
Of all the nerves, she just moved to St. Augustine, Florida with her family. So I've got to get a new administrative assistant. But it's been so great to have my daughter serve in that role for that long because she could anticipate everything about me and what I wanted to have done.
On the week-to-week operations of the church, she knew. She could even read my handwriting, which was really a bonus in the early years before I started using computers more. She's been such a blessing to us. But I have nobody to blame but Sue Ann, and I took her and our family to St. Augustine on vacation in the summers for many, many years as she was growing up because that's where Sue Ann is from.
My wife grew up there, and we went back on vacation, and they fell in love with the place, and they've just moved down there. So let's thank Heather again for her service there.
We also have a great elder team, and I'm so thankful for the elder team we have now. They can't all be at this service. There were many here last night. There will be some here at the next service here at 11 o'clock today. But I mentioned Art Laird as elder emeritus.
We have Mike Edwards, one of our elders, who, by the way, has been here at Lakeshore over 40 years and is now our longest-serving elder. We have Hugh Coleman. I know Hugh is here at this service. Where is Hugh? There's Hugh right over there. Let's thank Hugh and his family.
We also have Jeff Schicks, who is probably down at the Smyrna campus, another one of our elders, who also is the director of Nashville Youth for Christ. We're happy to have him on the elder team as well. Then we have Dean McConaughey. Dean is here. There's Dean and Nikki right there. We're so thankful for them and their service.
I serve along with these guys as elders, and I've got to tell you, their love for this church knows no bounds. They just are willing to do what it takes to lead the church ahead. That's why I'm so encouraged about the future here at Lakeshore.
Another reason I'm so encouraged is because of the long-term membership we have with a core group of people that have been here so long. So real quick here, I want you to do this at the Smyrna campus too. Mike Swartz will lead you in this down there.
I want you, if you've been a member here, active here, you're still here, and you've been here over 10 years, would you stand up right now? Yes. Thank you. All right. Now, if you're still with us, still active with us here, and you've been here over 15 years, keep standing. All right, amen.
If you've been with us and still here with us over 20 years, please keep standing. Amen. Over 25 years, keep standing. Yeah. Over 30 years, please keep standing. Yeah, I know you guys were over 30 years. You were here, Mark and Jill, when I got here. So I know you've been here over 30 years.
So thankful for that, for these folks who have been here over 30 years. As I said, Mike Edwards has been here over 40 years and Peggy Thigpen over 50 years. So let's thank all of them.
Now, the reason I wanted to mention them in particular is this: no church can do what God has done at Lakeshore without people who are willing to stick it out through a lot of changes and transitions and challenges and times in the valley and times on the mountaintop and everything in between.
They have stayed consistently faithful, serving and supporting through all of those changes. Believe me, they weren't always in favor of all those changes, but they love the church and they love Jesus, and they wanted to reach lost people. So I want to thank them one more time for how they've done that.
One other thing we decided to do many years back is understand that as a church, we need to keep it simple and not try to do everything because no one church can be good at doing everything, and we shouldn't even try to do that.
So we started partnering with other Christians and other Christian organizations to maximize our impact by working together with others. I just want to list some of those that we've partnered with. The Branch of Nashville started out as a food pantry. Now they've expanded that ministry even more, and we've supported it financially and with volunteers. We're so thankful for that partnership.
I love this: we've partnered with Ezell Harding Christian School. Here's the cool thing about Ezell: they just, this past year, celebrated 50 years as a school themselves, and they've gone through all those transitions of this neighborhood transitioning and everything, and committed to staying here and being a Christian school opportunity for families in this area.
I want us to welcome the new president of Ezell Harding Christian School and his family who are with us today, Clint McCain and his family. Would you guys stand up for just a moment? Yeah. Clint didn't have to stand up for you to see him, but the rest of the family, even his son probably didn't have to stand up, but you can see them pretty easily.
We're so glad to have that partnership with them. I'm so proud of Clint and his family and the commitment they've made to Ezell. Ezell is in good hands, and there's a great future there at Ezell Harding Christian School. We've got a lot of families here that have their kids there, and we have a member here that's a teacher there at Ezell.
So we have a great family. We have a great partnership there with them. Next month, we're going to be hosting their Christmas party for their staff and administration like we did the last couple of years, and we're so excited to do that.
We've also partnered on outreach with Thrift Mart, a thrift store here in the area, with CORE, a ministry in Haiti, with a ministry in the Dominican Republic with churches that are local there. We've partnered with Stadia Church Planters. This church has been instrumental in helping to plant, now that I remember, those before we partnered with Stadia, has been instrumental in 50 years.
We've planted seven churches, six in the U.S. and one in Ecuador that we've planted out of this church. We also partnered with Youth for Christ here in Nashville with Jeff Schicks, one of our elders, as I said. We partnered with White Mills Christian Camp, and we have great summer camp programs and other programs through the year there at White Mills.
We've partnered with an outreach to the homeless here that some of you may know. Some of our members do, and we support that. We have recently partnered with an organization that calls themselves Mechanics on a Mission, and we partnered together with them and the people that are a part of that.
In the past 14 months, we've been able to give away six vehicles to families in need that needed transportation. We've also partnered with Point University, and I'll talk more about that at the end of the service and the opportunity we have.
We're offering a scholarship through Point University that our church is funding for people that might have had their continuing education interrupted along the way, and now they've got an opportunity to go back to school and get that degree. I'm so thankful for the generosity of our church family to help fund that.
So I want to close with this third thing: those who are yet to be reached through us. Remember Hebrews 11, that roll call of the faithful? Remember all the great things God did through those people? Well, God has continued that in our day and time too, and I want us to read this verse, Hebrews 12, this right on the end there of Hebrews 11, beginning with verse 1, as a challenge to us as the church today at Lakeshore.
"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders, the sin that so easily entangles. Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, for the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners so that you will not grow weary and lose heart."
The challenge in front of us now moving forward is this: there are still so many people yet to be reached for Jesus. Nashville and the Smyrna area is one of the fastest-growing areas in the country. On average, about 90 people a day are moving into the Nashville area. Think about that. People that are going to need a church.
They're going to need—many of them aren't connected to Christ or a church in any way at this point in their lives, and we need to be, along with other churches in the area, one of those that is doing what God has called us to do to continue to reach lost people.
So until Jesus comes back, we exist to do these three things, and we're going to come back and keep our focus there: to connect people to Christ and each other, to grow people to maturity in Christ, and to serve people in the name of Christ.
There may be people here today who want to join with us in that mission, and we want to give you that opportunity. As our praise team comes back up, we're going to have a time of invitation where we stand and sing together. If you have a decision you need to make, we invite you to come right up front while we stand and while we sing.
Let's stand and sing together. Got the praise team coming up? Come on, guys. Come on, praise team. They never expect me to finish on time, so that's the problem. Here they come.
Lord of all, Lord of all, and lift up the future of what God's going to continue to do here at Lakeshore.
Let's pray together. Father, we thank you that we can boldly approach your throne of grace through your son Jesus and what he's done for us, not because of who we are, but because of who he is. We know that you promise when we do that, you hear our prayers and you answer them according to your will.
We lift up these needs to you, Father. We know that what we want more than anything else is for your will to be done on earth as it is in heaven because we can trust your love, your love for us, your will for us to be the best thing always. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.
God bless you. Thank you.
At this time, Dr. Ed's going to come and lead us in a time of communion around the Lord's table. If you want to go ahead and get your communion kits out there.
Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.
Again, we're so grateful that you're here today. If this is your first time with us, be sure to stop by the information counter. We have a gift bag we'd love to give you as a first-time guest. We hope that you'll come back and be with us again.
I also wanted to mention something else. We want you to take some time to look around the building. If you've not been in the building before, you're welcome to look around some. The picture with the Media Play—can you get that again, you think? Could you find that and pull it up again?
All right, I want to show you something that's pretty cool that we did as we built out this space. You see the letters P-L-A-Y? We took those off the front of the building, and they're now in our indoor playground on the wall there, and they light up in there.
We wanted to preserve some of that history, bringing it back and repurposing this space for something really good for the kingdom of God. So you might take note of that as you see the playground out there. We have a picture station set up in the hallway coming into the auditorium.
We want you to stop by and get commemorative photos that you were here as a part of the celebration of 50 years of the church. If you need somebody to take your picture, we can all do that for each other, right? Everybody's got these phones that have cameras, so you can take some pictures with that.
We'd be glad to help you with that so you'll have a commemorative photo for that time here. We also have some great refreshments at the cafe area. If you want to get something there, you're welcome to do that. We'd love for you to celebrate that.
We've got 50-year anniversary commemorative t-shirts at our bookstore. They've got those out for you if you'd like to purchase one of those. They are available today as well, and a lot of you are wearing one.
Let's say I didn't—I had my t-shirt on last night. Clay, stand up and show everybody your shirt. Look at that! Yeah! Mary's got one. A lot of folks are wearing them today. We're so thankful to have those available also.
We want to thank you for being here. We're doing a couple things too that we want to remind you of. Out in the lobby, we already have a Christmas tree up. Some of you have already decorated for Christmas at home, I know. I have not, but some of you have.
We've got a tree out there, but it's not just for Christmas. It's a partnership we have with Youth for Christ, where we are helping families and individuals that need some help this holiday season. So if you want to take an ornament off of that tree, you purchase the items on that ornament and bring them back to the tree, and then Youth for Christ makes sure they get to the people that need that help this year.
A lot of people have already taken ornaments; there are still more available there. So if you'd like to stop by that tree and pick up one of those, that would be great. Lots of other fun things going on here at Lakeshore. Follow us on social media. You can also visit our website, lakeshorechristian.com.
One more thing I want to tell you about before we go: if you'd like to do an offering, of course, we have offering boxes available. There's one in the back of the auditorium mounted on a post there, one in the hallways you exit. You can drop your offerings in the top slot there.
You can also give online. You can scan the QR code in the bulletin or just go to lakeshorechristian.com and click on the give tab and do an online donation there. You can mail in, of course, checks to the church office here. Either way you do it, it's an act of worship, and it's a way to support the work and the ministry of the church.
But we're also doing another special thing. I mentioned the Point University partnership we have with the GAP scholarship program. What we do as a church is we give a lump sum every year, and then it funds up to seven people can go to school online through Point University to get their degree completed through Point University at no cost to them.
We've funded the first year already through the generous donations of some families here at Lakeshore. But if you would like to help contribute to that fund, it's a special offering separate from the regular operating budget.
We have a lot there to really help you. Just go to lakeshorechristian.com, click on that Give tab, and there's a drop-down menu where you can click on that option to give to the Point Scholarship. We also have the QR code up on the screen right now on the graphic there. You can just use your phone camera, look at that QR code. It'll take you to that page as well to be able to choose that option to make a donation to that scholarship fund.
We would like to fund that scholarship not just for the first year, but for the rest of the years it's going to take for them to complete their degrees. So if you could help out with that in any way, we'd love to continue that as a blessing to people moving forward.
We're committed to being a teaching church, and this is part of how we do that in partnership with Point University. So thank you for helping to support that.
Again, we thank you for being here. Let's all stand together. We're going to close with a word of prayer, and we want you to have a fun time of fellowship after the service.
Let's pray together. Father, we thank you again for this joyous occasion of celebrating 50 years as a church family. We do thank you for all who have come before us, whose shoulders we stand on today. We honor their work and their sacrifice, their legacy, their faith.
We pray and thank you, Father, for those that even today are still a part of the family, supporting and contributing and serving and volunteering, making ministry possible here. We thank you for our partner ministries and the great work they're doing. We pray for continued blessings on them.
We just pray, Father, that the name of Jesus will continue to be lifted up from this church until Jesus comes back. It's in His name we pray. Amen.
on Nov 18, 2024
