Today’s service (7/1/12) at Tri-State was one of the best I can remember in my (exactly now) 18 years in Hagerstown. It was a Sunday focused on our missions outreach – featuring three of the families with long-term connections to the church.

Marlin and Ruth Brubaker were the first to say they could be with us on this date. They now work in Colorado Springs for HCJB World Radio. This ministry was founded in Quito, Ecuador in 1931 by a guy with a transmitter in a city where only six people had radios … and he named it a “world ministry” because he had a big vision! It has covered ¾ of the world’s surface. Marlin is an engineer who keeps the technology working.

Bill and Michele Nelson met and married while at TSF – where Bill was a staff member for five years in the early 90s. For the past 14-15 years he has directed the InterVarsity ministry at Johns Hopkins University and medical campus. Bill is especially involved in the personal work that goes on with international medical students. It is a relationship building, evangelism, and discipleship ministry with a lot of turnover … as students eventually go back to their home countries where they will be church leaders. These are often Muslim and Hindu countries.

Pete and Carolyn Bitner have now served over a decade in Togo, West Africa. They shared an incredible array of stories of their work in discipleship with two different people groups. Pete has done such things as play in a soccer league of mostly Islamic guys. The team picture makes it very clear which one is Pete!  Let’s just say that he really stands out among all those Africans!

Marlin, Pete, Bill and Me – You’d think we were a bunch of girls who called each other up to wear the same outfit!

It was a great experience for these three families to be together at the same time – and that was some of the plan for today. They estimated that it was about 15 years since they were all in the same place at the same time. Another key player in all their lives is Bill Kesecker and the discipleship class he led years ago for young adults of that time. So many of these folks are now in missions work – including Anna from our Kazakh team.

Much of the talk today was about the idea of being a team / an army – serving together in various roles. Like with any organization, it is not just about the people who are public and on the front lines. It takes a support structure. I estimate that we have given about $2,000,000 to missions projects and people in the years I’ve been here. For a large church, that is not much … but it is a big number for us. It is equal to about all the money spent on our facilities purchases and construction. And in other terms, our mortgage payment is now in the lower 400,000s.

But today surely reminds me that it is worth it all to have a worldwide focus. God does; we should.

I did something in church yesterday that I’ve been planning for some time – to pull a surprise on our friends Lyle and Miget Geiger.

The Geigers moved to our area a couple years ago from the Lehigh Valley, as Lyle works for Volvo. When in Allentown, they attended our denomination’s church there – Faith Evangelical Free in Wescoesville (just west of Allentown). As you may recall, this is the home of my wife Diana, and is not that far from where I grew up. Faith has always been a rather large church, and even when I was a teenager, I’d often go to concerts there – as this church hosted many of the best-known Christian musicians of the time.

The Geigers have three married sons – one of whom serves in the Orlando, Florida area at a very large church (Northland Church – Joel Hunter pastor). He is on the musical/worship staff (yes, lots of people). He is an outstanding keyboard player, songwriter, and singer. At various times, his songs have been a part of their worship services and may be seen in the media section of their web page.

So, for the 11:00 song to gather people for the iGrow session, I had Diana (in the sound room) connect to one of these links and project the song. It was fun for me to watch the Geigers go to their seat and sort of begin to realize that, hey, their son was playing on the projection!  Lyle told me later that Miget said to him, “That sounds like one of the songs Pete has written.”  And then, looking at the screen, he said, “It is Pete; there he is!”  So that was fun for me to watch.

An extra connection of this family to our church is through the Craver family. Fred and Norma’s son and family attended Faith in Allentown, and the Craver’s granddaughter was a very good singer who grew up in the youth group together with the Geiger’s son – doing some music things together as well.

If you want to see the song that we projected, here is the link:

http://www.northlandchurch.net/media/youre_the_joy/

I am sure that when my TSF years are all said and done, some of the warmest memories I will have will be of the annual youth spaghetti dinner and talent show (held Friday night). This was originally the idea of my 2^nd oldest son Ben – who turned 28 a few days ago. Back when he was at Williamsport High School, he was in the famous Sophisti-‘Cats Show Choir, and they did numerous spaghetti dinner fundraisers. That first year, Ben pulled together a bunch of the teens and put together a choir number that was performed in a “Black church” style of soul – the song “Oh Happy Day” – as in Sister Act. He borrowed a collection of pure white choir robes from the high school, and it was great.

Of course, along the way, the boys of the youth group have put together the annual Male Interpretive Dance Team. This is a spoof that the guys originally did because the girls, many years ago, had a serious interpretive dance team. The girls were really good, but the boys of course did a lot of running into each other, etc.  This is one of those things that is sorta like when your infant child does something that is not exactly a good thing, but it was really funny and so you laughed – which encouraged the child to do it even more! Well, the “Male Interp” thing has grown to have a monstrous life of its own. It is now the highlight and finale song of the program. And now also, it has become a tradition for there to be an introductory video.  Some of these have been incredibly funny. A couple of years ago, one of them had me laughing about as uncontrollably as anything I’ve ever seen!

These events are fundraisers for our annual youth summer trip: on even-numbered years to the denominational National Youth Conference, and on odd-numbered years to a missions project trip. This year there is a conference to be held in New Orleans. Previous conferences have been at Georgia Tech, Purdue, Colorado State, and in the civic centers of Columbus and Salt Lake City. About 5,000-6,000 youth from around the country attend these life-changing events.

Here are a few pictures from what was truly a variety show:

I put this picture of a back-flip off a step ladder on our church Facebook page, and it was seen by our EFCA home office in Minnesota, and they re-posted on the Denominational page – to be seen all over the country.

Word came to us at church yesterday (Thursday) that our dear friend Larry Goldman was taken from his place of employment with symptoms that sure sounded like a heart attack. I was relieved to catch up with him a couple hours later and discover that it was a case of vertigo.

I have now seen this happen to church people no less than at least a dozen times in my pastoral career. But there is one instance of it I’ll most remember forever.

It was the winter of 1994. I was a pastor in Phillipsburg, NJ and had recently established contact with this Evangelical Free Church in Hagerstown, MD.  They appeared interested in my resume, as this fellow named Fred Craver called me to inform me of such. He said that two couples from the church were going to visit incognito at my church the next Sunday – a Paul and Karen Bitner and a Clarence and MaryAnn Brubaker.

I obviously wanted to do my best and make the best possible appearance toward getting the new job at this way cool church in Maryland! With only about 225-250 in attendance, I was pretty sure I saw who these visitors must be – as they sat about 2/3 of the way toward the back to my left side.

We had just finished the songs for the morning and the pianist had walked back to the 3^rd row near the front to sit with her husband and college-aged son. Let me further describe the scene by saying that this lady was THE leading lady of the church in terms of leadership and involvement – and still is to this day. She is a frequent women’s conference guest speaker – known and loved by every person in the church.

Well, I was about 60 seconds into my introduction of my sermon on Psalm 42 when I noticed a great deal of commotion around where this lady and her family were sitting. I tried not to look too closely – not wanting to draw attention to whatever was going on over there. But before long, even I noticed that her husband and son each had one arm around her, and were literally dragging her down the side aisle – in the same way a football player would be dragged off the field after getting his bell rung.

By this time, everyone in the room had seen what was going on, there was a mild murmuring, medical people in the congregation were getting up and running out, and I just had to quit trying to pretend like nothing had transpired. Once they were outside the sanctuary doors and into the foyer, I said something like, “Obviously our dear friend Mary has been stricken in some fashion, so let’s pray for this situation even now.”

After the prayer, I attempted to go back to the sermon and make some sense of the passage, but by this point, I’d totally lost the room. Nobody was much listening; they were all lost in their own thoughts. I soldiered on through the sermon, but I also was depressed – figuring it was a total lost cause for getting to Maryland. But the funny thing was that my visitors thought I had handled a difficult situation fairly well, and it all played into my favor. And the rest is history!

As you can guess, the lady was diagnosed with vertigo due to a recent inner ear infection. I visited her later that day, and she was as good as new.