Starting Point Class Two

Welcome to session two of starting point. So today is the day that we cover the history of the

Evangelical Free Church, of our church in particular, and so we have Rick here is going to be the one to to do that section.

You can follow along here. You got your stuff there? Okay. So if you'll find in your notes here this packet, we kind of go through some of them.

We finish the doctrine, we go through the story of the Evangelical Free Church. So you know what?

We can just have a have a reader. Louis, would you mind reading a little bit? You want to just read this 2 .1

and then we'll comment. Yeah, it's a bit hefty, but you got it. You know what?

I'm gonna put this near you. The Evangelical Free Church of America was formed

June 18, 1950 by the merger of two church bodies, the

Evangelical Free Church of America, Swedish, and the Norwegian -Danish Evangelical Free Church Association.

Both groups had been birthed in the revival movements of the late 19th century.

The Swedish group had its formal beginnings in Boone, Iowa, at a conference held in October of 1884.

In that same year, two Norwegian -Danish groups began to worship and fellowship together in Boston, Massachusetts and Tacoma, Washington.

By 1912, both the Swedish Evangelical Free Church and the Norwegian -Danish

Evangelical Free Church Association had been formed. Those two associations, representing 275 local congregations, were formally joined together as they gathered for a merger conference in June of 1950 at the

Medicine Lake Conference Grounds near Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The international and national offices of the EFCA have been located in Minneapolis since the merger took place.

The Evangelical Free Church of America is an association of some 1 ,500 autonomous and interdependent churches united by a mutual commitment to serve our

Lord Jesus Christ under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and obedience to the

Word of God. We are committed to cooperate with one another in ministry and fellowship as we seek to fulfill the

Great Commission which has entrusted to His Church. The growing ministry of the

EFCA currently extends to some 50 countries of the world. Wonderful.

Thank you very much. Good reading. So here's your quiz on that little section. About how many churches are in the

EFCA? About 1 ,500. And so it began in Scandinavia, kind of the northern part of Europe.

You picture the the Reformation which began with Martin Luther in Germany and then spread throughout Europe. Well, these were heavily

Lutheran countries. But here's the issue. Because of the way government and church were sort of wed together, they didn't have a separation of church and state.

The church and the state were wed together. The Lutheran Church was the state church.

Okay? And so there were some who didn't want to be run by the system. They wanted to be run by the

Bible. And so these are the free churches. The free churches come out from the state and that's the meaning of free.

So when you say evangelical free, somebody made a joke last week that they thought that that was free of evangelicals.

Which is the opposite. We are evangelicals who are free of the state.

We're not going to be run by government. We're going to be run by the Word of God. So that's where that came from.

So when the evangelicals from Scandinavia immigrated to the United States and began to meet the

Swedes and the Norwegians, they often stayed in their ethnic groups. But over time, there was a blending.

More people coming in and then those two bodies merged. And now since 1950, the evangelical free church is no longer just a

Scandinavian church. In fact, I don't know how many Scandinavians you think we even have here, Rick. Were the

Swansons? They have some? Yeah. And they came from Minnesota. And they came from Minnesota.

Yeah. So we have a few, but now it's not, you know, that's not the issue any longer.

So it came from that area. Oh, Rick's got something here for us. Yeah. Yes, the

Lutheran churches were from Germany. Yeah. Actually, Norwegian and Danish evangelical free church, they would be characterized, somebody's last name

Olsen is the Norwegian and Danish spelling, and the Swedish Olsson.

And the first contact I had was in college. I had never even heard of the evangelical free church.

And this was back in the late 60s. But there was a fella in my inner varsity

Christian fellowship, whose name was Johnson. And I hadn't seen the spelling S -E -N in Johnson before.

Yeah, usually. And people kind of made fun of the fact that they called him

Roy Johnseen to make sure that it wasn't Johnson because they wanted to make a distinction between Swedish and Danish Norwegian.

So sometimes, as Jeff was saying, the word evangelical kind of gets in the way, or even free, because people think not only are they free from evangelicals, but they also think that they don't have taken an offering.

And obviously, that's not biblical or part of the background anyway. Now, this church has had actually three different names.

It started out, and now

Cornerstone, started out as Fellowship Evangelical Free Churches.

And if you know this area at all, you know there are a lot of fellowship churches. So we thought when we moved into this area, and we actually met across the street at the middle school for a number of years before building this in the early 90s.

This church has been around since 92 or 93. And we wanted to identify with a community, so we called it

Mount Laurel Evangelical Free Church. But there, as Jeff was alluding to, there's a lot of confusion about what the word evangelical means, and that might encourage some, but discourage others from coming.

So Cornerstone was voted on as part of, to make us more unique, although there are banks called

Cornerstone and other churches called Cornerstone now. But as far as being in this area, we are the

Cornerstone Church. Now, even though the Evangelical Free Church is pretty well known out in the

Midwest, where, as I think you said, Minneapolis is where the church offices are, and up in the

Staten Island area, and even North Jersey, in South Jersey there are only three

Evangelical Free Churches. One is down near the shore at Beacon, it's called

Beacon, and there's a Joy Fellowship in Pitman, and us.

So it's not that well known, and that's why this history probably is important.

Now, the church began, let me erase a little bit of this, this doesn't do a very good job, does it?

1979 is the year that it all began, but it wasn't with the church building at that point.

And there were two couples, Stan Wilt is still here with his wife

Tammy, and the Weintz. They now live in South Carolina and we support their son who was a missionary and who was part of the youth group back in the early 80s.

But they had Free Church backgrounds. The Wiltz, there's a large

Free Church in Hershey, Pennsylvania that they were part of, and the Weintz were part of Free Church in Arlington Heights, Illinois, not too far from Chicago.

And they had Free Church background. They both went to the same Presbyterian Church in Cherry Hill, and when they were meeting they said, you know, they would prefer to have what they had in the

Free Church where they came from. So they, along with four other couples, kind of got together.

They were the ones who kind of financed calling a new pastor.

Only six couples committed to funding that first pastor and his wife, and they came from the

Evangelical Free Church Seminary, which is Trinity, that also near Chicago.

And it is a well -known, very good seminary. So the first pastor that we had was

Steve Hobson and his wife Jan, and they were called and we actually met as Fellowship Evangelical Free Church in a school in Cherry Hill, Thomas Paine Elementary School.

And after a few years we moved, as I said, across the street and we were there for at least six or eight years probably before building over here.

Now there was a couple, the Connells, who lived on Elbow Lane right behind the woods over here, and they owned all this land and they were very favorably disposed to help us out.

And they sold probably around 11 acres or so to us at a very reasonable price and then they became members of the church and it was a wonderful opportunity that they provided us with.

Now since the Hobsons, by the way we support the Hobsons as missionaries in the

Philippines right now. They have an international school of theology in Manila.

I have a map which I'm sure the camera won't be able to see, but I just want to emphasize the missions that go out from our church, missionaries as well.

I mentioned the Weyants. The son of the Weyants who are in South Carolina is in Brazil with his wife and daughter,

Sao Paulo I believe. We have the Camelons who have been part of our church in Portugal.

We have the Dagenas which are part of the Evangelical Free Church Reach Global mission.

That's what the mission agency is referred to for the Evangelical Free Church and again that's centered in Minneapolis.

We have homegrown minaries who will be going to India. They have spent a little bit of time there.

They'll be going back. We have, I mentioned the Hobsons, the first pastor. He's in the

Philippines. Takamotos. Sue Takamoto was also part of a youth group in the very early stages of this church and she and her husband,

Eric Takamoto, he's from Hawaii even with the Japanese heritage and they have four adopted children.

The Seminicians are, Lois Seminician is the daughter of one of the founders of the church.

So many of the missionaries have a connection. I even have a connection because my brother

Neil is, he's actually, he served for 20 years as a missionary doctor in Thailand.

He's married to a Thai woman and he now recruits medical mission whether it's nursing or doctors and he lives in Littleton, Colorado.

We also have a couple of mission -oriented people, the

Dorises and D'Souzas who are stateside but they support missions in South America especially.

So most of the missionaries that we support have a connection with somebody in the church.

Yeah. And you can, I think there's a map outside on the wall here that you can see where those locations are more clearly than on my map.

Yeah. You can pass that around. Okay, now we also had the

Schicks. In the 80s he was a pastor who studied in, actually he was a

Princeton student before he became a Christian and served as five or six years here.

And from 88 to 98, the Farrises were here.

They are, Dave Farris, wife has dementia but he and she live in South Carolina now, also have retired.

He, after leaving in 98, he did a lot of interim pastorships in different churches but now they have settled down there.

And his youngest son, Scott, is married to my daughter, Katie, which is another connection.

But after that we had the Nathans. Todd Nathan, they stayed from probably 98 to 2005, somewhere in there.

That's just circa, about. And he went on to have a pastorate in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and now he's back in Blairstown.

The Wallenmeyers followed. My, yeah, that's right.

And they're about 2005 to 2014 or 5th, somewhere in there.

He is a pastor in South Dakota now. They had gone to the south and then moved out there, so they're still ministering.

And then we had an interim period. And were you 2017?

Okay, that's when you began. To the present and beyond.

That's infinity. So there are an awful lot of interconnections which somebody coming into the church knew you weren't aware of all those connections.

But as you get into fellowship with other people, you'll see how some of that works, I trust. And an awful lot of our focus is on care groups and interaction with others and developing a real fellowship.

Now, one question I would like to ask is, what is your interpretation of the word evangelical?

If you're going to be part of the evangelical free church, it might be important to know what that means.

Any ideas? Well, if you, if somebody asks you,

I hear you're going to an evangelical free church, and they would say, what does evangelical mean?

Do you think maybe we should have an answer of some kind? Because if you hear the word evangelical in the news, it doesn't always get a very favorable reaction or implication.

Yes, that would be my interpretation. I don't know that it would be the interpretation of the general public.

There are four distinctives that I would like to point to, and I'm sure it's in your notes somewhere.

The Bible is the highest authority for what we believe. And this is not so much evangelical, but the evangelical free church.

It's very important for me personally to encourage non -Christians to trust Jesus as their

Savior. Jesus' death on the cross is the only sacrifice that can remove penalty of my sin, and only those who trust in Jesus alone as their

Savior receive God's free gift of salvation. It boils down really to that, which is very specific, and I think tells an awful lot about who we are as a church.

Now, coming in kind of cold to this new environment, a lot of this information probably, it's just going to have to osmosize after a while, because I, as I said, when

I first began here, I was part of the first 24 members, my wife and I, who, and that, again, was back in 1979.

But we have had a lot of coming and going since then, for sure. So, that's what

I have with respect to our church. Jeff, did you want to ask me any questions? Let's first, do you guys have any questions about the history of the church, the things that have happened in the past?

What is EFCA? Oh, that's a good question. The Evangelical Free Church of America.

That basically was established in 1950. Jeff gave the old history.

That's the newer American history. So, that's a very good question. Some distinctives of our church.

Let me just throw out some values. Our church, meaning this one? Of this church, and I think it would be consistent across the country for E -Free churches.

I'll throw it to you, Rick, and just comment on them as you've seen it over the course of your time here, and just in general how we are now.

The importance of the Bible to our church. Has this always been the case?

I would say yes. Repeat the question, because you've got the microphone. That's right. The question is, has it always been the case that the

Bible is central to our teaching, and the answer is yes. If you go to other churches, sometimes you get a topical message, a message for some kind of encouragement perhaps, but it's not always based directly on the

Bible. Or they might take one verse and expand on that greatly, but as you can see,

Pastor Jeff goes pretty much in a passage verse by verse to explain it.

The important thing also is the application, and he always has that at the bottom of his sermon notes, how it can be put into practice.

Tell about the importance of prayer. A second major important part of our church is prayer.

Has that always been, and where do we see that reflected now? I think I would definitely say that prayer brought the church into existence, and it's been a continuing part of that.

Whether we've met a lot of different times for prayer, we meet for prayer in individual prayer care groups, our small groups, and we know the individual needs of people and can support them.

We also, most times weekly, whether it was on Sunday night,

Sunday morning, Friday night, Wednesday, we have had different times for prayer meetings.

We've been kind of going back and forth with that for a while, but it's always an essential part of our existence.

Authentic community. Authentic community is largely based upon our care groups,

I would say, that people can be in a small group and rather than share their concerns in a large body, get personal with, especially with discipleship.

And discipleship means certainly looking into the scripture for guidance, as well as praying together, as well as dealing with life's problems as they arise.

So we don't want it to just be Sunday morning is the only time we've ever seen each other, but we want it to be more of a family, where we see each other as much as possible and share life together.

What about evangelism, sharing the gospel with the lost? Evangelism, part of evangelical, of course, suggests spreading the word not only from the pulpit, but people individually are encouraged to share their faith in a variety of ways.

People have different personalities. They don't share it in the same way, maybe. Some of it is vocal and some of it is action, but a combination of those is usually pretty good.

And then we'll group life -transforming discipleship with the community aspect, but what about service and emphasis on serving others and being sacrificial?

Yeah, that is done as a church body sometimes, serving maybe another church as men have gone over to Philadelphia to help with Fran Paltrow's church, for example.

And Interfaith Hospitality Network is a way of reaching people who are struggling.

I don't know if you have heard of that ministry, but it's actually located in Morristown.

That's where they have their office. But one week every three months or so, we turn this into a place where people who are without jobs, without a place to live in many cases, that Interfaith Hospitality Network tries to give them job training opportunities and skills perhaps, and we just try to supply that for them.

But it's a climate that you try to develop for helping others, whether it's in your neighborhood or in this neighborhood.

Well, would you like to go over the ministries in general? You want to pass that back to me? Yeah, you can go. Let me grab this off you.

All right. I stole the microphone. All right. So we're to the section on ministries and other information in the notes you can read through later, and if you have questions the last week, that would be a good time.

Some of the main ministries that we do every Sunday morning, the worship service, but before church, we usually have an adult

Bible fellowship. And women, there's a class for women that is taught by Kimberly.

Right now, they're going through the Book of John. But the other class is for men or for women. So that's open to either.

We don't have women teaching men, but we do have women in a class taught by men.

So the reason for not having women teach men is in 1 Timothy chapter 2, verse 11 to 15.

So taking that complementarian view of how that's done. But we do have women teachers.

You know, we have a precepts class on Monday nights taught by Cindy Randall, and she goes through just verse by verse very carefully through the text.

There's about probably 12 women involved in that. And there's other community groups, which we mentioned already.

I think we have six of them now. The times and dates change a little bit. So if you want to get involved with the community group,

I can bring you up -to -date information where you might want to go. There are different women's ministries.

There's a retreat. There's a Christmas tea. There's just informal get -togethers that women can get involved in.

And men, I heard some of the wives joking yesterday that we should rename this

January Manuary because we had the movie night, the men's football game, which is tonight.

By the way, if you want to go to that, Lewis, it's tonight at Michael Stockland's house. And we also have the men's retreat all this month.

So it's officially Manuary. We also meet at Cracker Barrel first Monday of every month, 6 a .m.

Lewis, if you ever wanted to join that. That's only for the soldiers right there. Before the rooster crows.

Sometimes we'll do work projects. A big way that there's really a constant need for service is in the children and youth ministries.

The teens, they need mentors. They need people to come alongside them and pray with them, be a friend to them.

So pray about that if you might want to get involved with youth or children. On Sunday mornings while I'm preaching, there's always two classes going on right across the hall from here for the younger kids and the older kids.

And they go through what's called the Bible project. It is from Genesis to Revelation.

They just walk through it, but it's at a kid level, you know, for whatever age they are, something appropriate.

Today, they're in the book of Daniel. And Stan will be teaching about the fiery furnace,

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and Daniel being thrown to the lions. So they're just going right through the Scriptures just like we do, only it's in about a two -year cycle they do the whole kind of overview.

Then it starts back over, no, three years, and then it starts back over again. We're big into apologetics, so we'll do different apologetics conferences and have different speakers.

And anything else you'd like to say about missions? You've already kind of covered that we have the missionaries that we do.

Just stressing again that we believe in the Great Commission to go and make disciples of all nations, and that's why you see so many missionaries coming from such a small church.

In fact, I came to this church as a missionary first. I should tell that story, how I became the pastor.

So here again is the emphasis on prayer, where Rick and the guys were praying every week that the

Lord would bring a pastor. There's a gap here from 2014 to 2016 where there was no pastor.

So different people would speak, they would fill the pulpit. And meanwhile, I'm a missionary in Philadelphia, but we've moved our family to Mount Laurel, and I'm driving over there to do the ministries and evangelism and stuff.

So one day I go for a run in the neighborhood, and I'm just running along. I run past this church, and I slap the sign, because just for fun, you know, and then

I start praying for the church. And then I get home, and I'm standing in front of John Laskin's house, who's an elder of the church, and I start to pray for the church again.

Meanwhile, remember, they're praying for a pastor. As I'm praying, I get a text message into my phone that says,

Would you ever be interested in preaching at the Evangelical Free Church in Mount Laurel?

That's for pulpit supply. Yeah, pulpit supply, yeah. It was a friend of mine named

Steve, and he had talked to Stan from the church, and they were open to me coming in.

I didn't know this was happening behind the scenes, and while I'm praying, I get the text message. So I say,

I better say yes to this, because I'm praying for that church this very second. So it's just like, wow, you know.

So that was when I came in the fall of 2015. I kind of just filled the pulpit, and then they asked me to come back in January to, it was almost like an audition, right, kind of to try out.

It was my tryout. So I preached through Titus in January of 2016, and then I loved the church.

I felt, like, perfectly at home right away, and I had been praying about a transition right then, and they invited me to come be the pastor, so by God's grace.

Oh, look at this. So he was taking notes. I preached in Psalm 22 that day. The date was what,

Rick? 8 -23 -2015. Wow. Yeah. So that was just the Lord's doing.

God answered both prayers. Yeah. He was praying for a pastor and you for the church. Yeah, exactly. He just brought it all together.

So I feel like he's been in it. In the last three, four years that I've been here, we've seen

God's hand of blessing. A lot of people have come to faith, a lot of baptisms. The church has grown in terms of membership.

If everybody here joins, including the three people that don't have to take the class again, we're going to hit 100 because we have 10 coming in and we have 91 members.

So we're going to have 100 members, which is great. And then, of course, there's more people that come that aren't members.

So the Lord is doing a great work, and I'm just excited to be a part of it. I want to be here for a long time, and I want to be partnering with you guys in the ministry.

If you read the email that Jeff distributed this week about the parking problem, we had all of the spaces filled last week so that people have to go across the street.

And that's a great problem to have. Yeah. Yes. It is.

I'll tell you that. Yeah. Let me tell you guys a little bit about how we're structured as a church. Okay, this is an important part.

These two sheets here, elders, deacons, and then this organizational chart.

So a big important word to help understand kind of who we are is congregationalism.

Has anybody ever heard of congregationalism before? Is that a totally new concept? Well, it comes from congregation.

It comes from congregation, right. It's a group of people. Yeah, we are a congregation.

Congregation, it's a long word, all ism. You know what Greg means?

Greg. A flock. Gregus. Greg means a flock. Yeah, like people flocking together, congregation.

Oh, okay. Oh, interesting. See, we're all learning here today. That's because we got Rick with us.

So congregationalism is basically the idea of a bottom -up church run from the congregation.

Not like in Catholicism is the exact opposite. In Catholicism, you have what on the very top?

Who's ahead? Yeah, he's the Pope. Under him, you have cardinals, and there's bishops, and all the way down to the little guy in the pew.

The priest is over him. It's very hierarchical. Congregationalism is saying that everybody who has the

Holy Spirit is part of governing the church. And the highest rule in the church is not somebody in Minneapolis.

It's definitely not the Pope. It's the church itself. The congregation runs its own church.

It's an independent Bible church, essentially. So now does that mean that we don't have any leadership or authority in the church?

No. There's biblical precedent for elders and deacons as well. But ultimately, the final and highest authority in the church is the church itself.

So in other words, let's say that Pastor Jeff just goes off the rails. Something goes wrong in my head, and all of a sudden

I'm denying the Trinity. I'm denying the virgin birth. I will never do this, by the way.

But guess what you can do as a congregation? Kick me into the curb. I'm not the highest authority in the church.

The congregation is. And I would want you to do that, right? But it would come as a vote.

As the entire church vote, yes. Yeah, not one individual or something like that. It would be a congregational decision.

So the congregation makes the decisions on all of the major things like you have a church budget in here, how we spend our money, the salaries of the people who, you know, the worship leader and the administrator and me and the youth pastor.

That's all set by the congregation, okay? It's run by the congregation. Are we going to build something?

Are we going to buy a new lawnmower? That was the discussion last year. Well, if we're going to spend $5 ,000 for a riding lawnmower, which is actually cheaper than, you know, hiring a service, and do it ourselves, well, that's a decision to make as a congregation, the big spending kind of item.

So budget hiring and firing. If we want to hire another staff person, it's not just going to be me.

I'll propose that, and we'll lead as elders. Rick is one of the elders. We would lead the church, but we're not going to kind of rule with a heavy hand.

Does that make sense? So it's a bottom -up congregational structure. So that's very important to us.

So you can kind of see it in this sheet here. The key for this working is that Christ is the head.

He is the head of His church, and we're submitted to Him. Now, the congregation is led by elders, and deacons have a role.

So look how the elder and deacon roles split out. Can you notice a trend in who's in charge of what?

Well, the elders are in charge of the spiritual life of the church, the worship, the prayer, the missions decisions, the community groups, and outreach, and visiting, and doing marital counseling, and the problems that arise in people's lives.

These are spiritual issues, and the elders have oversight of that, and the deacons are doing things like the budgeting, and the lawn, and the maintenance, and the building of grounds, and things of that nature.

So we get that from Acts chapter 6, where the deacons were called in the first place to deal with the problem of the

Hebraic Jews and the Gentile Christians.

The widows were not being cared for equally, so they brought in deacons to help distribute the food to make sure that all of the widows were cared for.

So that kind of role was a deacon role, and that freed up the elders to focus on the preaching and teaching of the

Word, and prayer, and the spiritual life of the church. So that's kind of the distinction that we have between elders and deacons.

So the elders are leading within the church. This is synonymous with pastor, or overseer.

An elder is a pastor, overseer. And a deacon, the word diakonos means, anybody know? What's a deacon?

It's a servant. Diakonos means servant. So it's actually one who thoroughly kicks up dust.

Diakonos, that's one who's kicking up dust as they go. Somebody who's active and busy to serve others.

That's kind of the picture of a deacon. Phoebe in Romans 16 .1

was a servant. I don't know if she had the office, but she was a diakonos of the church. She was a servant out kicking up dust, serving as she went.

Yeah, so a deacon and an elder, different functions. In Acts chapter 20, you see that the elder, the pastor, and the overseer refers to the same office in the church.

So we do have those offices. So who are the elders? Right now, it's

Rick, myself, Eric Meyer, the guy who does the announcements, and Michael Stockland, the worship leader.

Now, he's not an elder because he's a worship leader. He's an elder because he was voted in by the congregation last year to be an elder.

It just so happens that he's both. He's worship leader, but he had to become an elder by the church vote.

So every year, the church votes on who the elders and deacons will be. There's a term.

It doesn't change every year, so like a three -year cycle. So, Rick, you're coming off this year, right? Because he's finishing three years, so we'll need one new replacement to come in, and that was already voted for, and now it's being tallied and being announced.

Deacons have two -year terms, but they can serve two consecutive, so maximum of four.

But they have to be re -elected after two. And from deacon, you can become an elder? It's not a necessary stepping stone, but that is the precedent.

Usually, someone will be a deacon before becoming an elder, but that's not a biblical mandate. We don't see that as a stricture, but that does tend to be what happens.

Somebody would become a deacon first. But Michael Stockland is an elder now, and he was not a deacon, but he has been serving as director of music for all this time, and so having seen that service, it's perfectly acceptable to have him as an elder.

Okay, any questions about the organizational structure? Because churches are different in that way.

Some churches are very hierarchical where the pastor is the CEO, and everything is run by the pastor.

That's not our model. Ours is a plurality of elders. So actually, Rick and Eric and Michael and I are all equals.

Now, there does tend to be a leadership within where the senior pastor kind of leads within the body of elders, but it's not a structural hierarchy.

So they can put me in check if I need to be put in check. But usually, we make decisions unanimously. It's always a conversation and prayer, and then we tend to come to a common mind on the decisions of the church.

Likewise, when we have board meetings, the elders meet separately for 45 minutes or so, go over some of their issues while the deacons are going over the buildings and ground and monies and so forth, and then we come together for another hour and a half or so.

Any questions about structure? We'll get into the rest of it next week and leave time for questions that you guys have.

But that's basically it for today. Any questions? It looks good to me according to the

Bible. Yeah, we tried it. The key foundation stone of the

Evangelical Free Church was where stands it written? They didn't want to be run by the state.

They said, where stands it written? And if people had traditions and it didn't line up with the Scripture, they said, show me in the

Bible, where stands it written? That was the motto back in the 1700s, 1800s, well, 1800s.

And then to this day, it's still what marks us as a church. It's the Scripture that teaches us how to do things.

So we do the best. Does that mean we're perfect? No, we still need to learn. And if there's something that's not biblical that we find, it's the

Bible, not our tradition that takes the helm there. So let's pray. Father, thank you so much for this class.

Thank you for the history of what you've done. For that small group of believers who came together back in 1979 and said, let's plan a church.

And here we sit on land that you gave us, in a building that you built for us.

You provided everything that we need. And Lord, that you have just continued to raise up this body of believers.

Thank you for the new living stones that are being fit together in this spiritual house that you're building.

Thank you that we are one in Christ Jesus, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is