Deep Thought: As the evening sun faded from a salmon color to a sort of flint gray, I thought back to the salmon I caught that morning, and how gray he was, and how I named him Flint.

The other day I thought back to when we worked in a ministry in Central FL, Darlene and I were very instrumental in starting some ministries in the community that are still operating today.  These ministries came about after seeing needs in the community.

In 1995, I became the full-time kids pastor at East Coast Christian Center. As we ministered to kids in the area where we were, we noticed a lot of need. A man in our church who had 3 daughters in the youth ministry purchased an old city bus for the the youth ministry. After awhile, the youth ministry got too big to use it anymore and it sat at his house. One of his neighbors, who attended another local church, approached him about picking up kids from the local housing projects and bringing them to their church. The neighbor asked if he would be interested in doing so. Alan, the man who owned the bus, jumped at the chance. He started a bus ministry and began bringing kids from the housing projects to this church.

About 6 weeks passed. One Sunday morning after making his route and pulling up to this church, the Senior Pastor was waiting out front for the bus to arrive. He informed Alan that they could no longer handle these kids and that he needed to take them home. Alan, not one to back down on a commitment to children who it seems have had everybody else in their lives abandon them, thought, “I know, I will take them to my church.”

It was my first day of kids church and Alan arrived unannounced with 45 kids from the housing projects. It was the longest 2 hours of my life. It became the start of  a huge discipline problem in our kids church. I knew I did not want to send them home and put myself and the church on the long list of people who made commitments to them only to quit after it got hard. But what were we going to do?

Tomorrow, I will tell you what we did because I have to go eat Flint now.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 10:33 am and is filed under Pastor Eric. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.