Guest Blogger: Wade Joye, Worship Pastor

One thing we like to do at Elevation is celebrate. God has been way too good to us not to pause and give Him glory for all that we have seen Him do. So last Thursday, we threw a huge party as we looked back on our 4th year as a church. And there was a lot to get excited about. In year 4 of ministry…

• We have seen over 3600 people make decisions to follow Jesus!
• We opened our first permanent campus.
• We launched our first global outreach initiative in Uganda.
• We saw radical generosity as Elevators stepped up big time in our Kingdom Come campaign.

The list goes on and on. Suffice it to say, God has been good to us.

And we had a double reason to celebrate as Pastor Steven’s 30th birthday is this week as well. So we pulled out all the stops and had a few surprise appearances. Israel Houghton, Grammy award winning recording artist and worship pastor at Lakewood Church, showed up and led a stripped down worship set on acoustic and piano. As if that wasn’t enough, Pastor Craig Groeschel, lead pastor of Lifechurch.tv and founder of the One Prayer movement, preached one of the most prophetic and anointed messages I have ever heard about the future of this ministry. The whole night was a powerful time of worship and lifting up the name of Jesus.

Celebrating what God has done gives us the faith to dream even bigger about what He wants to do in the future. Pausing to reflect should propel us forward with renewed vision and greater intensity. Elevation, let’s move ahead into year 5 knowing that the best is truly yet to come!

Guest Blogger: Larry Hubatka, Creative Pastor

Grab your calendar and circle these days. On second thought, just circle the next 30 days. You’ll want to remember them.

This weekend we’re starting New Thru 30, a series taking our entire church through the New Testament in 30 days. And when I say “taking” I really mean, “we’re all reading through it together.”

The New Testament in 30 days… It’s going to be great. And in honor of our 30-day journey, we’re experimenting with new worship experience times as well. In fact, we’ll be offering a Sunday morning worship experience every 30 minutes across our 3 locations. Saturday and Sunday nights will remain the same starting at 6:00pm. But, Sunday morning will look like this…

Matthews Campus
Saturday night – 6:00pm, Sunday morning- 9:45am, 11:15am and 6:00pm

Providence High School Campus
Sunday morning – 9:15am, 10:45am and 12:15pm

Uptown Campus at McGlohon Theater
Sunday morning – 10:15am and 11:45am

There you have it. A new series. The New Testament. New worship experience times.

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!