Servants In a Chicken Coop

I find that when God is doing a life changing work in me He does so by placing an idea in my head that I cannot refute.  Let me tell you how He has been leading in the last nine months.

Last December I was approached by the leadership of an Evangelical Free Church in the Corvallis, Oregon area to be their Interim Pastor after their Senior Pastor had retired.  This seemed to work well with the fact that I needed employment, and I wanted to do ministry after two years of being back in school.  When I arrived I found the congregation in a difficult situation, it had dwindled down to the point that it could no longer survive financially.  The Lord put it in my mind to begin a new ministry in Corvallis.  On April 1 the congregation voted to disband and sell their building using the money from the sale for future church planting work.  Suddenly I was faced with being the pastor for a group of 15 people who needed a new place to worship and a new purpose for being a congregation.

I believe that we Evangelicals have for too long ignored our responsibility to serve the communities in which God has placed us.  It was time to try a new approach to building a church community -- focus on the needs of the community rather than our own individual and corporate needs.  It was time to GET TO WORK AS SERVANTS.  With the help of the group God had given me, we chose the name Servants' Fellowship. We want to be Christ's servants working in the community to help Corvallis know that we care about this city. 

First we needed a home.  I drove around Corvallis to find an appropriate meeting place.  I wanted to find something close to the OSU campus and not far from downtown.  So I parked my car and started walking around the area.  And there it was, a restored Victorian building with a "FOR RENT" sign in the window!  The "voice" in my head said, "this is it!"  It is an historical building, the first site for poultry research at OSU -- a chicken coop!  We began meeting in the Coop in May.  

Here is our dedicated group worshiping together.  Notice how "funky" the space is!  And it has great acoustics, and lots of light.  We can have up to 49 people, so when we grow to that point we will have to find another space for Sunday worship, but I will keep this space for my office and for evening Bible Studies.

 

Now that the Lord had given us a new home, we needed to get busy with ministry in Corvallis.  Our first opportunity came by hosting a Chamber of Commerce breakfast with another Christian service organization in town, Love In the Name of Christ.  Love INC has a very small office space without any large rooms for meeting, so we teamed up together and had a great time with the Chamber folks.  Many of the people from the Chamber were very curious to see what the inside of our building looked like -- they had seen it moved to its present location and renovated, but had not seen the inside.  

This is a few of our group and the spread that we put out for the Chamber meeting.  Since that time we have taken on the responsibility for feeding 125 kids once a month for another church, South Side Christian Fellowship, as they do ministry for the poorest kids of the area.  We are also providing lunch for international students once a month, and handing out free water and snacks to people coming for the OSU football games.

Pray for us that God will give us more ideas and opportunity for service ministry to our community.  And pray that He will also bring us people who become curious by our service to know more about the Lord Jesus Christ.

Rick and Trudi

Colossians 3:1-4