God Does the Math

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Category: Editorial

Published on Friday, 19 August 2011 02:39

Written by Pastor Randy Capistrano

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“Church statisticians state that once a church has reached 80% of its seating capacity, it will begin to hinder its growth if nothing is done to create more space”

Last year, we saw our church reach the 80% seating capacity; moving for-ward it would be a problem if we were to continue having one service. It was for this reason that I brought up the need to our church family to begin praying for more space, or for a new building. I started researching options to buy, rent, or lease a larger building, but found that the cost was not only too high, but also heard the Lord say that it was not our time yet to move.

That said, I considered the only other option...work with Lion Business Park owners on a solution to our building size problem. Our intercessory team came into agreement with me on seeking God to grant us favor with Lion Business owners. The following week, I met with the manager, and found out that there might be a possibility to expand without having to move. She said that there was about 1000 square feet adjacent to our space that might be available. I got so excited, and immediately shared the hopeful news with the intercessory team. That night, everyone was fired up. We felt the Lord saying that He was going to expand the building, and give us a low rate on the rental cost. I went to sleep that night anticipating that the Lord would give me a great testimony soon.

Days passed by, even weeks, and I started to think that the manager forgot about me. I decided to follow up, and found out what I initially thought to be horrible news. She told

me that the space was no longer available, and that the current occupant had decided to use the space. How was I going to break this news to the church family? Surely, a pastor always wants to be the bearer of good news! I finally broke the news to the group, and they shared comforting words that the Lord was still in control. I thought in my mind, "Sure, I believe that, but that still doesn't solve our building problem." I bet you didn't know pastors get discouraged sometimes. Though I felt a little discouraged, I decided to press in to God's promises, and believe Him for an open door. Several weeks passed by, and though I remained quiet about the building problem, I continued praying for God to provide. In addition, it appears the Holy Spirit was working in the hearts of His intercessors, because they began praying for the building expansion again. Lo and behold, one day God decided to give me a surprise. Weeks after I received the disheartening news, the man-ager called me to let me know that she spoke with our neighbor again, and this time he said he could no longer pay for his space, and had no other choice but to give it up. Praise God! As i was jumping up and down at the idea of having 1200 square feet added to our space, reality hit me, and I began settling down as I pondered how much cost would be added to our current rate. We had already received a discount for one year when I had negotiated a lower rate due to the impact of the economy. Our lease was up for renewal, which meant we were going to revert back to our old rate, and possibly receive an increase in our monthly payment. We already had that to deal with, so I wasn't sure how much more financial burden our church could shoulder. I met with the board to discuss what I felt was the Lord's providence for our church. After lots of prayer and discussion, we came to the conclusion that we would give a ridiculous offer of having the old rate restored, but having the new addition be completely free of charge. I figured if they would agree to my ridiculous offer, then it must be from God. Warning!!! Talk to me first, before trying to do something like this on your own.

The manager was taken back upon hearing my request. She breathed in a deep sigh before stating her thought of my proposal. "So in other words, you're asking for us to give it to you for free, right?" I looked at her as embarrassed as I knew how to be, and said, "Yes." She folded her hands, and assured me that she would do her best in representing us, since we were her favorite out of all occupants under her management, but also stated that she could not make any promises to an offer like that. I agreed, walked away with a grin knowing that God was about to give us a testimony.

It wasn't more than 3 days later when I received a call back from the manager. Are you ready for this? Strap on your seatbelts. Not only did they not give us any additional rate increase to what we were paying before, but they also agreed to keep us at the same rate for 2 whole years! I was overwhelmed, ecstatic and joyful! As I ended my conversation with the manager, I set my phone down, and a grin returned back to my face. I was going to bear some news to our church family, and this time it was going to be good! God is so awesome!

Unlimited

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Category: Editorial

Published on Friday, 30 October 2009 19:35

Written by John Victor Ubana

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The tree is bearing so much fruits. The good news of God‘s greatness and glory is every-where; the church‘s expansion, our growth and successes of all the events are things to be joyful of. The web team proudly declares its share to this giant leap of faith to the next level of awesomeness with God.

Not long we have transferred our website to a new hosting (a company that maintains a website for somebody as a service). This is with the vision to enlarge and expand God‘s territories further by reaching more lost souls. What are we expecting in this new feat?

Unlimited Space

Yes, you heard it right. With our new service, we are now capable of uploading our pas-tor‘s awe-inspiring sermons for everyone to hear ―without limits. The word of God is alive and it is our job to spread it out and overload the inter-net of His glorious deed.

In no time our church members would be able to browse images and videos of the amazing events and celebrations to refresh our memories of the wonderful fellowship with our brothers and sisters in Christ. There‘s a lot to see and tell isn‘t it? Not to worry though, because we can put as much as we want.

Unlimited Bandwidth

Bandwidth is a ‘measurement of capacity’ – in simplest term, this is described as the number of people who can access the website with consideration to how much information and data is allowed to be viewed in a specific time line. For in-stance, assuming that the bible is 2 megabytes (a unit of com-puter data or storage space) and the hosting allows 20,000 megabytes per month. There-fore a user can access and read the bible 10,000 times. On our scenario, we are speaking of unlimited capacity. This implies that people can view and read as much as they want without bounds.

Unlimited Domain Name

Domain is defined as the sequence of words, phrases ,abbreviations, or characters that serves as the Internet address of a computer or net-work. In layman‘s term, it assigns a name to our website. www.riveroflifefamilychurch.com is a domain name.

Unlimited domain name entails easier access to our website. Having more names will make it easier to the online visitors to get to the page by giving them numerous options. Also, it will make our church‘s web-site easily crawled by the search engines like Google (the biggest search engine of this decade), which is on the long run will make our website a result of more web queries.

Right now, everyone can access our church‘s website by either using www.riveroflifefamilychurch.com or www.rolfcsj.com. Imagine that we can add more to this? It would really be so convenient isn‘t it?

Unlimited God

Our new hosting is specifically handpicked for our ―Unlimited God. He is uncontainable and limitless… and since God is the source of all these amazing technologies, He deserves to get the best of the best from His church. All of us are called to leap in faith and worship God in different means and mediums without boundaries.