Lakeshore: Day One!

Our theme for this week is "going the distance." After years of rebuilding the community, Lakeshore Baptist is finally seeing the construction of their own permanent church building. So for everyone who has come down to help Lakeshore Baptist, we are being encouraged to press on to see the completion of the church building. And for the church community here, they are moving into a new phase of ministry as the rebuilding is coming to a close and they look towards other ways of serving God through the church here. There will be closure to this phase of ministry at Lakeshore Baptist, but God's work is certainly not complete. On the contrary, the church continues to expand their outreach and influence in the community, and we rejoice with them in this.

The overall goals of the Rebuild Lakeshore Project have been to:
- Rebuild personal homes
- Rebuild church facilities
- Minister to members and community
- Promote inter-church fellowship
- Exemplify mercy ministries for other churches
- Minister and witness to the young people involved with the Lakeshore Project

The specific goals for this week are:
- Siding the church building
- Renovation on Pike St. House to make it sellable
- Outreach to the community through the Friday night service and the daily ministry team efforts

Today during the morning devotions we talked about the first line of Psalm 117, "praise the Lord, all ye nations." We were asked to reflect through the day on specific reasons for why God is worthy of praise. As time allows, I'll share my thoughts on this over the next few days and I encourage you to meditate on this also. You're welcome to leave comments on this post if you'd like.

Because I'm a strong advocate of efficiency, rather than rewriting the informational posts from last year, I'll direct new readers to those posts if you're wondering about the Lakeshore Project. This post recaps our daily schedule, which hasn't really changed from last year. Also, last year we did videos on each of the different areas of ministry here at Lakeshore, from the kitchen crew to the ministry team. Here are those posts, if you would like to get a better feel for what it is like here. Please note that these are videos from last year, so the specifics (like the construction projects) have changed. Of course we'll be sharing more about what we're doing specifically this week, but these posts might help you catch up if you're new to the blog. : )