Guest Blogger: John Bishop, Ministries Pastor

2009 was an amazing year for our church! I hope our journey encourages and inspires you as you prepare to see God move in big ways in 2010.

Quick confession, this list was supposed to be only the top 9, but I couldn’t leave out the great things that happened in the last 2 weeks. Just think of them as bonus highlights for ’09. Click here and here to see what God did through Kingdom Come and our Christmas Eve event. Now, on to the list:

9 – B90x
The entire staff and about 100 navy seal caliber volunteers read through the entire Bible in 90 days. Click here for a copy of the reading plan and good luck – it was intense!!

8 – Conferences – Impart & Three
We hosted two conferences in 2009 – THR3E and IMPART. Through telling our story we were able to make a significant impact for a select group of church leaders. We also loaded them down with resources that helped us out along the way.

7 – Student Takeover
We believe that the next generation is ready to be activated and released. We saw 503 people place their faith in Christ on Student Takeover weekend. We realized this weekend that Elevation Church doesn’t have a student ministry, we are a student ministry. Check out Pastor’s message to students here.

6 – Pure
On Mother’s Day, Holly Furtick preached a message on Purity and we gave mothers and daughters and opportunity to buy purity pendants as a tool to commit themselves to purity before marriage.

5 – First Permanent Campus
Elevation opened the Matthews Campus on August 22nd. Since the building opened we have welcomed 3,372 first time guests through these doors – that’s nearly 200 visitors a week!

4 – Africa and Samaritan’s Purse
We launched our international outreach plan through a strategic partnership with Samaritan’s Purse in Uganda. And we went big! We knew we couldn’t take our whole church to Africa so we brought Africa to our church. Here is the video we produced to tell the story…

3 – Baptisms on the Loading Dock
We baptized 150+ people on the loading docks of our new Matthews Facility. For us, it was the realization of a promise we had been holding onto for two years.

2 – Over $1 million given to Outreach Partners
In a year when the economy tanked, and most churches and organizations were cutting back on giving, we were able to stay faithful to our commitments and give over 1 million dollars to our outreach partners. Bad economy or not, now is not the time to play it safe, now is the time for the church to rise and be the change the world is waiting for!

1- Salvations
We had over 3,100 salvations this year!!
During our Give.Me.Faith series we saw 640 people come to faith in the 4 week series. There were over 740 salvations on Easter Sunday alone. In our Easter worship experiences we opened with this video – It was a VERY powerful day!

Guest Blogger: Chunks Corbett, Executive Pastor

Kingdom Come was more than a sermon series or a capital campaign for Elevation Church. It was a statement of one of the core values that define who we are…generous.

Pastor Steven has always lived by the following leadership philosophy–in order to see the people bleed, the leader must hemorrhage. I watched he and his wife get generous this holiday season, then our leaders went big and the church followed suit.

Our eventual goal for the December 19 and 20 offering was 1.5 million dollars to cover the cost of the land for our next campus. In this economy and in a church our age that number seemed impossible.

The top 400 leaders of Elevation (group leaders, volunteer leaders, giving leaders) got together for a leader event and committed to give the 1.5 million dollars themselves. The church followed the lead and we saw an outpouring of generosity. The total offering for that one week ended up at over $2,500,000. This was all toward a one-year financial commitment, which totaled over $5,200,000!

God has been good to Elevation and He’s done it at a time in this country when we can point to no one but God.

Elevation Church, you have led the way in generosity and because of that, thousands of people will hear about Jesus through the new Blakeney Campus and over $250,000 will be distributed to our local and international outreach partners making a difference all over the world.

May His Kingdom Come!!!

Guest Blogger: Wade Joye, Worship Pastor

How does Elevation Church celebrate Christmas? With lasers, drums lowered from the ceiling, gas explosions, the passionate worship of Jesus and one of the best gospel presentations I have ever heard by Pastor Steven. In short, it was audacious, full of energy and the name of Jesus was lifted high.

God has been so good to our church this year, and An Uptown Christmas was the perfect way to finish out 2009. With over 8,000 people in attendance in our 4 worship experiences at Belk Theater, the Holy Spirit moved in a powerful way as we saw over 390 salvation decisions. Our staff and volunteers pulled off a world-class event, and the sacrifice of their time and energy was all worth it as we saw people transformed by the power of Jesus.

It would be hard to do the event justice by describing it to you, so here are a few pics to give you a little taste of how Elevation Church does Christmas.

When John the Baptist was processing his depression and despair in Matthew 11, Jesus sent him a pretty straightforward message. In summary, Jesus reminded John of the validity of His ministry as the Christ, and commanded him to persevere. You can read the whole response in Matthew 11:1-6 . I’m sure it brought limited consolation to John, and maybe even felt a little cold or callous.

But after John’s messengers left, Jesus started talking about John to the crowd. Keep in mind, John wouldn’t have heard any of this part. Jesus starts saying all kinds of terrific things about John behind his back. He even gives him the distinction of being the greatest man ever born of a woman (Matthew 11:11). Pretty high accolades coming from the Son of God.

But these words would never reach the ears of John the Baptist. Because Jesus didn’t intend for John to hear them. When John died and entered into eternity, I wonder if he read John 11:11 and thought: Why didn’t you say so, Jesus? It would have been nice to know how much you thought of me while I was rotting in prison.

I guess Jesus wanted John to place his confidence in the character of God rather than affirmations sent by human messenger.

You may be in a similar spot today. It’s been a long time since anyone told you: Good job. I’m proud of you. You’re making a difference.

Perhaps Jesus is talking about you behind your back. He’s proud of you. He sees potential in you. He’s accomplishing far-reaching, logic defying purposes through you.

Stay faithful. Even if it doesn’t seem like God is speaking directly to you.
There will come a day when all of your labor in the Lord will be rewarded openly.

It’s not in vain.