Recently James Hathaway, our Community Development Director announced that he and his wife Yulia are moving to Bergen, Norway to continue pursuing his education in the Masters program in Public Administration for Non-profit leadership at the University of Bergen. It is my understanding that this university provides a unique learning experience that was exactly what James was looking for as he furthers his education in this area of passion for them. This is a great opportunity for the Hathaways and we will miss them once they transition in August.
So, we are looking to fill this position. The job description is two parts.
1) It includes an emphasis on local community outreach. James was the area director of Unite, a non-denominational effort among churches to partner with government officials, schools and businesses to meet the needs of our local community (disclaimer: our church position doesn’t necessarily assume this parachurch leadership position, but we will remain involved in this effort). This involvement helped put Mt. Paran North folks into places of need to fulfill the Serving Others portion of our ministry vision. There were other local outreaches that help us take the Gospel outside the walls of our church, and we’ll want to continue those efforts while looking for even greater ways to serve our community.
2) This position oversees our Guest Services ministry. This includes managing a dedicated group of volunteers who serve in our parking lots, welcome areas, and within our sanctuary to help visitors and regular attenders have the best experience possible at North. They attempt to make people feel welcome and navigate what can be a sometimes confusing facility. This is an area that we have made great strides in recently and feel can be “beefed up” even more. This is a vital part of our Sunday and Wednesday experiences helping cut out the stress and distraction of getting in and getting settled so that people can worship and be presented the Gospel.
If you or anyone you know might be interested in this position, feel free to contact me at jeremy @ mtparan (dot) com or 678.285.3219. This is such an exciting time at North, and I believe God is up to big things. Maybe you’d like to be apart of that.
Last Sunday, May 30, I spoke at Mt. Paran North on the subject of Spiritual Gifts in our series “Holy Spirit – the mystery of God in me”. If the idea of speaking on Spiritual Gifts behind the pulpit usually filled with a brilliant communicator wasn’t enough…before the 10:30 service the power went out at the church. Thankfully I work with really talented, faithful people and our media staff quickly put together a portable sound system, a flood light system (shining on the ceiling to provide illumination) and a camera to capture the action.
Several people from our church and friends who knew I was speaking have asked if we captured it. So here you go…
Our Worship & Fine Arts Pastor at Mt. Paran North, Randy Sheeks, recently announced after 4 years he would be leaving as of August 1 to move to Lee University to teach in and provide his expertise in the area of Church Music. We will miss Randy, Debbie, Elizabeth and Meredith terribly, but bless them as they take this next step in their God-journey.
With that being said we are now in the process of acquiring resumes from and having conversations with interested and worthy candidates to fill this position. I am a part of a team our Pastor, Mark Walker, has tasked with this part of the process. After some initial screening and phone interviews, our search team will pass along worthy candidates to Pastor Mark for consideration of an on-site interview in Marietta. Ultimately, as you would expect, he will make the invitation to join our team.
My reasons for posting are twofold:
1) I would love for you to reply in this thread and tell me who some of the “diamond in the rough” Music Pastors are. Who should we consider that we may not know about?
2) If you are interested in this position I would love the opportunity to talk to you about specifics of the job description as well as the process. The best way to do that is through jeremy@mtparan.com
This past Sunday the Student Ministries at Mt. Paran North took over the church. Our students were the greeters, ushers, camera operators, welcome care folks. They led worship, did drama, the youth choir sang…It was an AMAZING day. I promised the video earlier in the week, but had some technical difficulty, but we got it worked out so here is the video of the entire service.
I have written several times about my observations while playing basketball at the YMCA near my house. This is another of those…
Recently I went to the Y again to play basketball. The usual suspects were there, mostly “streetballers”, guys trying to relive the glory days, and some guys trying to get in cardio to lose weight without the use of a treadmill. (I won’t tell you which group I belong in) Since the local high school teams have finished their seasons there were also several of those players and it was obvious who the HS players were and who the “streetballers” were.
From the first game there was a glaring discrepancy between the two different systems that existed on the court. One system existed on the team of high school players. They had a structure that hasn’t existed in my previous visits to the Y. Each player upon receiving a pass, faked a pass into the paint, made a pass, and cut through to the other side of the floor. They called out when a player was about to set a screen on their teammate. They took good, calculated shots. They were polished. It was a beautiful thing to watch.
They got absolutely KILLED in most games, losing everytime.
The other team didn’t call out screens. They usually laughed if there teammate got picked or fell down. They turned the ball over a few too many times. They attempted passes that were risky at best. They tried to recreate scenes from AND1 videos. They missed on a lot of these attempts, but made more shots than the other team.
This same thing played out again and again throughout the night.
So what?
I tend to strive for polished. I work at a very polished church. While I don’t do everything perfectly, I try to do things well and with excellence. Because I’m demented, as I watched the 2 differing styles I thought about some raw churches and fellow ministers I know. They “make some mistakes” (by some observations). They aren’t polished in many areas, but they are just flat out getting the job done.
My prayer is that I don’t become so polished that I lose the raw. The raw for me was really falling in love with Jesus, which didn’t really happen until college for me, though I was raised in the church. The raw for me was my first few years in student ministry when I made a lot of mistakes I’m sure, but I just loved kids, spent time with them, and constantly looked for ways to get better at my job.
I guess what I’m saying is great systems don’t always mean results. There’s something refreshing about the kind of teams that have fun, and laugh at themselves but know how to make the shots when they need to. While systems can help produce fundamental repetition, sometimes that causes us to miss the talented artists and leaders who struggle inside the lines. Think about this: Who could you reach and empower if….
You went with a 9:00 p.m. service
You’re creative types were able to have office hours from 9pm – 3am
You’re staff meeting turned into a ping pong tournament
Some office days were shirts and skins (ok maybe not that one)
Hopefully you get my point. I just hope I never get satisfied executing within the system only to find myself on the losing end when it’s all said and done.
In December we decided to offer water baptism for our HS students in the gym (where we normally meet) during a Wednesday night service. In the past, the only 2 options for students to be baptized were in our Sunday worship services along with adults or at our Summer Camp in Panama City Beach, FL. We wanted to offer students an opportunity to go public in front of their friends in our worship context. So we bought a portable swimming pool and set it up in the gym. Several students were baptized that night, including one who took advantage of our spontaneous invitation toward the end. Below is a story I wrote for one of our church communication pieces about a young man who went public with his faith that night.
It all started with a conversation about religion.
That’s how Jacob Gillespie describes the events that led him to Mt. Paran North for the first time. Jacob is a 17 year old student at Sprayberry High School who began attending the High School ministry at North in the Spring of ’09. He was friends with MPN member Amy Sever and one night while they were talking she asked him about religion and his beliefs. He described his current views about the church and religion that he admits were not based on personal experience and just on perceptions since his family “never talked about church or religion”. However, Amy told him that his beliefs were similar to those of her church and invited him to come with her to a service. Though he claimed to be “afraid of church” and not wanting to get “sucked into the mess I thought it was” he accepted her invitation.
He goes on to say, “I had originally planned to wait until I was 18 to go to church just to avoid any influence from my family as to where to go and what to believe. I wanted my beliefs to be my own, but I knew I had an empty place in me that could not be filled by anything the earth has to offer.” So he began attending the High School Wednesday night worship service and Sunday School class with David and Helene Hindman before joining in the Sunday morning services in the Sanctuary. This thing he was once afraid of began to make him feel “complete” and “happy”.
After going to the HS summer camp in Florida his understanding of God began to grow. He said, “I learned that as a human I wasn’t too insignificant to matter to such a supreme entity because he loved me, and it was just that simple.” He started to use the skills he had been taught at camp to pray and read God’s Word, which brought on so many more questions.
Thankfully Amy’s parents, Charles and Sheila Sever were there with understanding and patience to answer his questions. Jacob said, “They would take any question I had, no matter how blasphemous, crazy, or disrespectful it was and calmly answer it because they understood my thirst was simply for knowledge and they were more then willing to help quench it.”
When we announced that we were going to offer water baptism in a HS Wednesday night service during December, Jacob knew immediately it was for him. He invited his family, and they enthusiastically agreed to be there for such a big moment in his life. On that December night Jacob was baptized and here is how he describes what he felt:
“When I finally came out of the water, I didn’t feel much different but somehow, I don’t know, I just felt clean. I know, ‘of course you felt clean that’s the point’ but it was weird. Like no matter how hard I could scrub in the tub there were these metaphorical crevices of muck and grime I just could not clean. I had never really noticed it before because it was all gradually accumulating, but when I came up I knew it was all gone.”
That night, the outward expression of baptism finally matched the inward change in his life over the previous few months. However, this story isn’t just about Jacob Gillespie. It’s about Amy Sever. It’s about her parents. It’s about the Gillespie family. It’s about the cross intersecting with a boy who’s family never talked about religion.
So he stepped into the pool with his family and friends sitting on the front row, and started talking about his new found religion!
This is my personal blog. Most of what is written is my opinion, observation, original thought, or things I find interesting somewhere else. While I am employed by Mt. Paran North, the things expressed here are not endorsed or necessarily accepted by Mt. Paran North or it's leadership. So don't go sue the church because you don't agree with something I write. Just post a comment and tell me I'm an idiot. It'll just be better for all of us.
