2009 For Steve Blumer

It’s good to look back and try to remember exactly what one actually did in a year span.

• had a crazy and successful free parent night out hosted by FC Students in Feb. Many non-church couples took advantage. Teens stayed afterwards for an overnighter, I did not make through the whole night.
• Took a nice and relaxing trip to Texas to visit some family including my brother in law who works for the Plano campus of Fellowship Church (Grapevine), and my brother and his family before they left for Africa.  While there we drove up to visit a college friend who works for Lifechurch.tv.  That is an amazing church and meet some really cool people including Craig himself, the senior pastor.
• headed up our church’s first ever “Servolution” followed by a 5000 egg hunt with a give away of 2 Wii consoles for our community. Zero non-church families attended the final event, but did have over 120 kids ages 1-11, a new record for FCHolden and dozens of people from our Life Groups found some good causes to serve at.
• My brother and his family flew over and are living in Africa for as long as they can.  They are meeting the people and developing relationships and learning the language.  How cool is that?  I get to connect with him on a regular basis thanks to some amazing modern technology.
• Moved into an apartment at Fellowship Church with my wife and two boys and became the full-time paid Executive Pastor there. Worked lots of side jobs including some roofing, mowing, cutting and hauling wood, and painting before then.
• My family stopped doing foster care in all the change during this time.  We did it for two years and had some dozen kids through our homes.  It was a wild ride and I learned a lot about myself with 2-3 year olds as well as how these kids are already trained from the messness they already experienced.  We celebrated our 1 yr anniversary of adopting one of those boys, Michael, who turned two this year.
• My wife took lots and lots of pictures of everything else I’m forgetting to remember right now with the new Sony A350 Digital SLR I bought here last Christmas.  She’s getting really good at taking pictures.
• I got ordained on Oct. 31 and celebrated on Nov. 1′s Sunday Morning Service.  6 men were a part of the process as well as one special woman, Pam, who was watching and supporting me the whole time.  Received a cool video from my brother and my youth pastor of 15 years ago.  I got to reconnect with my youth pastor on a phone call which I hadn’t talked with him since those many years ago.
• My wife started working again and I get to stay home and watch our youngest while she works.  I’ve had to be more creative on working different hours of the day and night to get the job done, but blessed to have that opportunity to do so.
• I preached a couple of times this past year.  Didn’t see any masses of people come to know Christ because of it, but I enjoy teaching and preaching and learning how I need to living at a Christ-follower.
• On Christmas day, my wife and our boys and my wife’s mother and her husband visited an elderly home here in town and gave them some things we bought with our money as well as what people gave us for this cause.  We asked family to only get the boys two Christmas gifts and give any further money they might have given them to this cause.  We visited those who were not going to get visitors on Christmas Day.  It was a good 1 1/2 hours to spend time seeing them and our boys did great.  Definitely a tradition of giving back on Christmas Day that I want to keep going.
• There’s so many things I can think of when it comes to Fellowship Church Holden because that has been my focus, my attention, my desire this year.  Gained strong leadership in all areas, strong leadership pushing my leadership, more volunteers, lost a few volunteers (some really dedicated and great assets, still apart of FC, just in a different role), tried new things, new team trying to get acquainted with me, and working hard on making some concrete plans for the next several years utilizing whatever tools and people who are ready to reach the nearly 600,000 non-churched in Worcester County.

So there’s a short memory list for now.  If you want to tell me what I missed please leave a comment.