Olive Crest United Methodist Church
7180 North 60th Street
Omaha, Nebraska 68152

Our Pastor

Rev. Debra Tompsett-Welch

Need a Daycare?

Hearts

Minds

Doors

The Spiritual Life

January 2005

A Vision for Our New Year (^.^)

By Rev. Michael Lee Burgess

The New Year is a good time to look at want we want to do this year. It is particularly important this year because this will be a critical year for God's church here were we live. So this article is a look at the New Things we are working on and ideas we can try to find excitement, enthusiasm and joy here at Olive Crest United Methodist Church.

In looking around I want to lift up the last two years of work of our Evangelism Work Groups, specifically the work of the Fire Seeds, Spirit Quest & Hospitality Task Forces under Evangelism. We realized that a joyful and abundant Christian life needs both inner work (like prayer and study) and outer work (like helping others) I looked at what our church family does well. We do a good job of ministering to people who are already here, but it is like we are the best-kept Secret Special Place in Omaha. So our Evangelism groups started focusing on how we might reach out and share this secret Good News of Olive Crest UMC. First we did what other people had tried and did mass mailings and flyers and even leafleting neighborhoods. That hadn't worked out very well and the cost mounted so that we ran out of money. So we went looking for more creative ways of inviting that didn't cost so much and we hoped would be more effective. We got training by going to the Fire Seeds Evangelism Training Events that the Omaha District was sponsoring here and in Lincoln and learned about asset based management and thinking outside the box. I also went to some Self Differentiated Leadership training events. All these suggested trying to see things from a different perspective to solve problems.

So we looked at the assets we have here at Olive Crest that perhaps we weren't fully using. We have warm people who care. We are good with Children (need to work on being good with Youth, but this is where we are now). We have great Sunday School and Vacation Bible School. We have a great Day Care that is getting even better. We have a good big church building that is not fully used all week.

Wait a minute, back up. Big Church Building that is not fully used? That is something we can capitalize one. So we started inviting different groups to come here. This way they advertise us to people we would never meet at a church that is friendly and welcoming of people that like to do what they do for fun. (Kind of a low-pressure sneaky way of getting them to find us.) We now have Brownie Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, Webelos Scouts, Scout Group leaders, and special scouting events meeting here.

That is good, but not a wide enough net. We need a larger and more diverse group to try and find people who don't have a church home, or maybe don't even know that they need one. We invited the Nuke-Con game convention to have Game Days here (they do their own advertising and we run the Lunch Counter and have always made at least $150). We started up our own Board Game Nights on Sunday evening at 7:00 p.m. The SIS Game group held their Award's Banquet here and an auction, I was the auctioneer and we raised $1,700 towards our apportionments. We were seeing God's blessing on our efforts and got more enthusiasm to try more things.

We decided to be intentionally welcoming to people who come here to Vote. We had free Coffee and Cookies in our upstairs Lounge, which became our "Hospitality Suite". Downstairs we offered a Chili Feed during Lunch and Dinner (we made around $160 from that too, but the most important thing we made was Good Will from our surrounding community). The head of the Polling/Voting Workers said she had never had such a wonderful place to work; it was like voting at home.

Next Les got hold of the IRS and we have become a VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) Site. This is where low income and Senior people can come and file their taxes electronically for free. Often low-income people are charged very large sums to file their taxes and they are the people who can least afford to spend their food money on doing so. This is a Social Justice as well as neighborhood outreach. Mr. Munsterman from the IRS said that they were in desperate need of a place up here in North Omaha that is closer to the east side. The only place close was the Benson Library and they were only open for one hour on Saturday and that was not nearly enough and UNO won't be doing it this year (some political infighting) so they are really short. He said he would even get the volunteer workers if we didn't have enough of our own people (Jodie and Sheldon Rose have volunteered to get the training). He is going to bring students from Creighton and people from A.R.P. so he will get us plenty of workers. We already had the Internet connection and the Computer Lab. The only problem is that their software needs pretty new machines and to run on Windows XP Pro. Well we don't have the money to upgrade our computers and they are too old. Sigh, we were stuck.

Well time for long shots. Rev. Michael filled out a grant proposal from the Ministry Vitalization Grants from the Nebraska Annual Conference. It was a really long shot. They only have $28,000 total for every request from all the church in Nebraska trying to expand their ministries. But we got a grant. It comes in quarterly all next year, so we are going to borrow money from the Evangelism savings account and pay it back as it comes in. God is blessing this work and that gives us enthusiasm to keep going.

Ok, we are reaching out and trying to invite in innovating ways, but when they get here will they hear the Good News in a way they can understand? This was when we formed our Spirit Quest Task Force to create a new kind of worship. We visited lots of different church from Sacred Heart Roman Catholic to Faith Westwood UMC. But when we went to the Trinity Lutheran Evening Service and spent a couple of hours talking to their pastor afterwards that we finally saw something that could work here. We started investigating video projectors, new sound systems and a computer to run the video. We had Midwest Sound and Lighting (considered the best company) come out, but we could not imagine how we could come up with $32,000.

Then I was at a District Briefing and talked to the man who ran the video resources for the Annual Conference and he recommended Mike Gilstrap (his company is the Dog and Pony Show and his brother is a UM pastor in Iowa). Mr. Gilstrap came out and spent hours with us talking to us about what we really needed and what we could do without and also what we could do ourselves to save money and he thinks we could get started with around $8,000 if we had the computer to run the projector and did our own wiring. Wiring we can do, but what about the money for multimedia optimized computer? Sigh.

Well God has blessed us before when we didn't think we could so I filled out a grant proposal and the Omaha District of the UMC came through with a grant for the powerful computer to run the Video. God is Blessing us again. But we can't find enough musicians for our late March start date and we still don't have the $8,000 for the projection equipment and improved soundboard. So what can we do? We have to have the newer music. What do we do now?

Ok, think around the problem. If we can't do what we were planning, we can make a small step in the right direction. We can start with what we have and do another form of Worship Service. Instead of the 7:00 p.m. Evening service that is purely outreach to people who would not find the morning service interesting, lets start with a blended service at 9:00 a.m. designed for young families with Children. We could have modern music from a CD player and upgrade the audio equipment as we can and add musicians as we find them. The kids could be in worship for 15 minutes and then go to Sunday School while the adults get more serious and then meet for fellowship between before our 10:30 service starts. So that is our next plan.

This is only some of the work we have been doing and the ways we have found around roadblocks but you can see how God is blessing us. God's Spirit is doing new and wonderful things here at Olive Crest, rejoice with us and please pray for this work. Without prayer we will not succeed. With God's help, miracles continue to happen.

Thank you, The Evangelism Work Group, Fire Seeds, Spirit Quest and Hospitality Task Forces, and all of you who are praying and helping fund these ministry adventures.

(p.s. If you want to help, just tell Rev. Michael. We would love to have you, especially for music. We would also need some help reconditioning computers as we get the Computer Lab cleaned up and ready for our February start date for the VITA site. If you want to try taking computers apart and putting them back together, come on Monday's and Rev. Michael, or James or Sheldon will teach you.)

May God Bless you like God is blessing our work, with unexpected acts of joy.

Your brother-in-Christ,
Reverend Michael Lee Burgess

Upcoming Events