Great Morning In Church

One of the joys of being a pastor in a small church is that you can never be sure how many people will come on any particular Sunday.

If you're in a biggish church, say over about 70 people, statistical laws come into play so that while there is some variation the variations are not that large, or else are predictable.

With a small church it can only take one or two families to be away and that's a big hole in the people actually attending. While numbers aren't important as such, there are practicalities that you have to think about like how many communion cups are needed, how high to fiill the urn, whether you get the 2 litre offering bucket out or the 50 litre one :)

So today with Margaret & Tim away, along with the Misons and the Nashes, Gary & Tania it was starting to look like a big hole in our usual high 20's congregation was going to look decimated. The Coopers were supposed to be away, and Margaret Baxter came along with another bunch of likely absentees and it was starting to look like a bad night at cell group!

By the time we had finished the praise time we had 20 people. We had nearly all of our "likely absentees" present and the Coopers had decided that they were too crook to go to Newcastle so they came and shared their germs with the family- nice gesture guys! We also had a bunch of people there whom we weren't expecting, so it was all a pleasant surprise.

I'm sure that my sermon was hard to listen to because my voice is very scratchy right now and by the end of the sermon I thought my voice had given out completely.

We had a great time of fellowship afterwards also with people hanging around for quite some time.

On the surface it was a pretty ordinary morning. But it's often in the ordinary that God starts moving the extraordinary.

I wonder what night church holds tonight?