Support from sister churches

We continue to make steady progress on getting the building ready for meetings, gatherings and worship services.  It always seems to take longer than we wish it would, but we keep trucking along.  Still lots of stuff to remove from building (some junk, some sellable on Craigslist).  The good news is that since the weather is cooling off, it's becoming less oppressive to work inside the building.  For the most part, it was rather comfortable in the building today.

We are grateful for the support of area pastors and churches.  This was evident over the past couple weeks.

The Seventh Street Church in Shamokin, PA recently reached out to us to ask how they could help.  We told them we had a need for cleaning supplies and paper products.  I met up with their pastor, Dave Wildoner, last week and he filled my trunk with supplies and told me, "There's more on the way!"  Thank you Seventh Street!

Generous donations from our sister church in Shamokin!

This afternoon, Pastor Kerry Ritts from the Hatboro Community Church brought his paint clothes, grabbed a brush, and painted trim in the room that is going to be the future nursery of the church once the new church is planted.  Thank you Kerry and HCC!

Pastor Kerry Ritts helping us get the nursery room painted

We're grateful for sister churches that value church planting and are stepping up to help.  Keep praying for us as we seek to get the rest of the building concerns addressed quickly so we can move on to Phase 2 of this work.

Big improvements to the building's exterior

The exterior stucco has been repaired and the building has been painted grey with white trim.

Well, it's been more than a month since I have been able to post an update.  We had a work day earlier in August, but then were forced to take several weeks off because of other ministry obligations.  During that time, however, the work continued in our absence as we contracted with a local professional to repair the exterior stucco of the building and then give the outside a fresh coat of paint.

I was looking forward to seeing the newly updated exterior yesterday when we arrived to work on the building.  Everything looked great.  The outside of the building looks so much nicer now that it's been cleaned, repaired and painted.  Several neighbors made a point to tell us just how nice they thought it looked and how much they appreciated the improvements we have been making to the property.

This side of the building needed the most repair to the stucco, but we are very pleased with how it looks now that it has been repaired and painted.

During the afternoon and evening hours, we had the privilege to talk to six neighbors.  Some we had spoken to before, but most were new people that we just met.  There has been a lot of curiosity as to what is going on with the building so we have been sharing about our vision for a church and letting them take a look inside to see the progress we're making.

We spent the evening cutting the grass, removing more garbage/clutter, repairing some lights and painting some trim.  We also made a change to the color of the front doors.  They were bright red, but we didn't like how that looked so now they are being painted "Norwegian Blue" which is the same color we used on the accent wall behind the stage area.

As schedules allow, we are going to keep aiming to work at the church at least one day each week until we have the building updates completed.  We still enough to do to keep us all busy for a while, but the progress is starting to become very evident to our volunteers and to the community.  Thanks for your continued prayers.