Update #5 3/28/16

Greetings from Living Water Church of the Nazarene!  Thank you for your continued support and prayer.  I pray that you had a wonderful Easter celebration – Christ is Risen!  It has been several weeks since our last update, and a lot has happened, but I will try to keep this brief.

 We begin meeting this Sunday!

 Our mother church celebrated “sending Sunday” along with Easter this week, and we will begin meeting on our own next Sunday evening at 5pm.  We are expecting our church plant team and a few others to join us for the Easter season, and then we’ll try to invite the rest of the world beginning at Pentecost (May 15^th).  I think I can speak for our whole team when I say that it was incredibly difficult to say goodbye to our respective churches.  I don’t think I can possibly express how grateful I am for the opportunity to serve at Southeast Church of the Nazarene for the last five years.  It still hasn’t quite sunk in that my time there is over.  We could not possibly have a better mother church to support and guide us as we move forward into this new work in East Village.

 Meeting Space

 After a long search, we have finally found a solid place to meet for our Sunday services!  Crossfit San Diego, at 841 14^th St, San Diego, CA 92101 is allowing us to use their space for just $200 per month.  This is a great location for us.  It is basically a large, mostly empty warehouse at street level with a large, roll-up door as an entrance.  They even have storage space for us!  It is in the center of East Village, right downstairs from the San Diego Derby Dolls (a large roller-derby league).  We will have the space on Sunday afternoons/evenings, and we’re planning to begin our services at 5pm.

Sound Equipment, Chairs, Etc…

With our first Sunday meeting coming up this week, we are beginning to gather the equipment and things we will need for our services.  Renew Church of the Nazarene, a recently planted church in Oceanside, has generously given us a bunch of sound equipment.  Southeast has extra chairs for us that originally came from Mt. Carmel Church of the Nazarene.  PLNU is giving us a projector.  John Mark Rodeheaver has offered us his drums.  We are benefiting greatly from the generosity and faithfulness of the Nazarene community!  If you have something that you think might be helpful to our work, please let me know!

Fundraiser postponed

 We previously announced a fundraiser we planned to hold on April 24^th, but we’ve decided to postpone that event until a later time (possibly this summer).  There were a number of factors involved in the decision, but ultimately, we decided that instead of planning a large event in the middle of planting a church, we could better spend our time on other things.  We do still need financial support, however, and you can easily contribute to the work that God is doing in East Village here.

More…

There are plenty of other things happening amongst us.  We baptized four people on Easter Sunday morning at Southeast, including John Seligman from our church plant team.  We added another Living Water member last week with the birth of our second son, Samuel Marcus Nafis (born March 21^st, 8lbs 7oz).  In our plant team meetings, we are studying what it means to worship and planning our Sunday evening services.  This week, we will be focusing on music.  Please continue to pray for us and the many things that still need to happen as we begin meeting on our own.  We trust that God is already working ahead of us in East Village, and we are looking forward to being pulled into that work as we start services and continue to plan for the future.