Welcome back to the ASU students!

     All summer the date of August 17 has been standing out in my mind. Why? It's freshmen move in day at Appalachian State University here in Boone, home of the mountaineers. Why would I be looking forward to this day? I anticipate it will be at least a hundred degrees, even in Boone on that day, and the town will be flooded with five times the normal amount of traffic, and campus will be full of lots of new students and new parents dropping off their kids for the first time. I look forward to this day because I have never seen such hospitality on freshmen move in day as I did last year here at ASU. Several folks from our church and I went over to the campus to help freshmen move their things into the dorm that day. What was so great, was the awesome hospitality of other students who had already moved in, or upper class men, who came to work for the whole day helping students haul in their things for the very first time. It was a time to share the love of Christ with service and talk to lots of young people and invite them to church.
     I share a picture today with you of the ASU football stadium as a hint of a great season to come. Fall is close at hand with cooler weather, and yes, the start of football season. Anticipation of a great new season is in the air and in the paper with record preseason sales! Best wishes to the leader of the team, DeAndre Presley, who is the quarterback for the ASU Football team. Having had the opportunity to meet with DeAndre, I know that he has great potential on the football field, and off the field as a strong leader and witness for Christ. Our church is literally in hearing distance of the football stadium. Living in the parsonage here at Deerfield, on game day, I can stand outside on my front porch and hear the band practicing before the game, just how awesome is that? I am looking forward to the return of the students, the arrival of new students and the opportunity to share the love of Christ with tons of young people that God has arranged to be right at our back door.
       In the mean time, we want to give the Lord praise for the opportunity to return the gift of hospitality to the First Presbyterian Church while they are rebuilding from a small fire a few weeks ago that delayed their being able to start worship in their new facility about a mile down the road from us. Deerfield is truly gifted in the area of hospitality, and in our time of need, we surely received it, and now we are more than glad to be able to pass it on to our neighbors. To any new ASU student coming to Boone in the next couple of weeks, please forward this article to them and tell them, there is a United Methodist Congregation praying for them already and looking for the opportunity to serve them while they are living here in Boone. When it comes to making you feel at home, Deerfield is on the ball!  The phone number to Deerfield UMC is 828-264-7130. Call us for more information about our services and upcoming Bible studies.

Deerfield UMC has welcomed BBQ Guests

     Dr. Jim Goff from Deerfield UMC has an interesting family connection to the John Boy and Billy radio show. He found out that his third cousin is Carl the Cook who does the Grilling Sauce for John Boy and Billy. Jim's brother, Bunky, plays the banjo for the jingles on the radio and Hound is the jingle writer, musician and singer. They have an interesting way of promoting NC BBQ, and their style is called the gospel according to BBQ. So last night, the Hastings from our church, invited this whole crowd of guests who were to be on the local AM radio show this morning to come over for a meal and to make some music. From a BBQ loving United Methodist, country preacher, this was literally a night of "hog heaven."
     I went over to the radio show to share a book with them this morning after their broadcast with Dr. Jim Goff and Jim Hastings on their weekly radio show, and made a couple of pictures to share with you. We have invited them to come back to Deerfield UMC to cook some BBQ and make some music, and maybe we can have a BBQ revival. For the community of Boone, we can look for BBQ to fill our stomachs and Jesus Christ to fill our hearts. The door of hospitality continues to open wide for the gospel. In that short conversation after their show at the radio station this morning, John Roten from WATA invited me to come and preach for the call to worship for the rest of the week, and I accepted. So BBQ may have been the appetizer, but the good news of Jesus Christ is our everyday main course meal, and for that, we give the Lord praise. Thanks be to God for new friends, for open doors, good food and the love of Christ that continues to bind people together from all walks of life. Jesus sets a feast for us in heaven, and daily patiently waits for us to come to the table and feast with him. I hope your day is so good, you can say you are in "hog heaven" by whatever door of friendship that opens up to you to share a good word for Jesus Christ.
  

Deerfield UMC hopes to reach out to children

     Deerfield UMC just completed a week of a fabulous VBS using puppets and skits and music to reach the kids from our church and community. Our hope is to use this as a building block to start a weekday afterschool discipleship ministry with children one day a week during the school year. We are working out the details and hope to get that off the ground after school is back in session this fall. More details to come on this. During VBS, where might you see and experience God? I experienced God when I was sitting on the floor listening to a story and a child who needed a hug would come and climb into my lap and snuggle up to me while the story was being read. I saw God when a little one had pudding all over her face and down to her elbows and needed someone to help her get cleaned up and that was provided with a tender touch. I saw God when grown ups danced and sang with the children and we all laughed together around the story of Christ. I saw God using grown ups to make sandwiches to feed hungry children and enjoyed the conversation around the meal each night. Posting a fun picture of our event and we look forward to working more with the children to teach them more about how much Jesus loves them.
     I am almost done reading a great book called, "Heaven is for Real" by  Todd Burpo. I started it last night and could not put it down until I could not hold my eyes open. It has been a great read that I commend to you about a child's experience of Jesus Christ being made real in his life.

Deerfield has exciting day with Yankee Baseball

     Last week, Deerfield UMC hosted Bobby Richardson, a former player with the New York Yankees who still holds the record for playing in 30 consecutive world series games. It was such a great time to open the doors to the community as Bobby and his wife Betsy came to share their story of their life of faith together, a lot of information about Yankees baseball, and he also participated in a radio interview with me on the morning he was going to be speaking at our church. What was the most exciting thing to me about the event was that the opportunity fell into our lap. If we can learn how to say yes, when God opens the doors for us to open the doors to our community, I wonder how that will change the face of the United Methodist Church. That night we received an offering in a collection basket to be divided between the mission work that his daughter is doing in Africa, and our Relay for Life Event. We are so blessed that the community did come out for the event, and they did give to two very worthy causes.
     Last Friday Watauga County celebrated their county wide Relay for Life Event. I planned to attend the event and told our Relay Team that I would help in any way I could. So they signed me up for a big role in speaking to lead the ceremony that night, and I was grateful for the opportunity. As I walked laps around the track at Watauga High School, I saw the names on lumanaria of those we were honoring and those we were remembering. It struck me that so many of the names I read are people that I now serve at Deerfield UMC. I gave the Lord praise that he brought them healing and has allowed me the opportunity to get to know these people and to serve them. My life is so much richer because of each one of them. Relay was a spiritual event to ask God's help to bring a cure for cancer and a spiritual event to work together for a common cause, and to pause with thanksgiving for those who were there to walk the track because God had brought them healing. It was spiritual and moved my heart to participate.
     During the last week, we celebrated Vacation Bible School using the theme: "I love to Tell the Story." Using puppets and skits and fun songs, we used the scripture from the book of Acts to tell the kids in our church and community the story of how much Jesus loves them. It is our hope that we will be able to launch a new children's ministry this fall when school is in session using the puppets and skits and music to reach the kids in our church and community for an ongoing time of discipleship. At the end of each night, our music teacher, Pat Lanno would lead us in the song, "We're going to Chicago," and we would sing and dance and laugh and have a great time to close out each evening. Thanks so much to all the workers who have put in extra hours over the summer to help with the Bobby Richardson event, Relay for Life and Vacation Bible School. We could not do what we do without people working hard to make these opportunities possible. God has blessed us so richly with these opportunities to bind our church family together with a common purpose as we have worked on each project.
     We still have two projects to work on before the end of the summer. We want to build a playground for the children of our church and our community and a water garden. So we still have some fun things to do together and we will have something to show for our labor at the end of each day. Please contact Deerfield UMC if you would like to come and join us for the work we are doing in the name of Christ here in Boone NC.

Relay for Life Coffee House a Great Success

     Sunday evening at Deerfield UMC, Boone came alive with a common purpose, to help raise money to find a cure for cancer. The Deerfield UMC Relay for Life Dream Team came up with the idea of our church hosting a coffee house to invite the community to come in and join us for a time of music and a meal and fellowship to help raise money for Relay. So what a success the event was! Blessings beyond our expectations. For those here who are cancer survivors and for their families, I know this event held great meaning. And for those who have lost loved ones, it was a chance to remember that we carry on the fight to find a cure. For our listening enjoyment, we had 10 musical groups come and share with us, and even Kermit the frog came by for a song and made a special guest appearance. He will also be our preacher for conference Sunday, which is Pentecost Sunday,  if you would like to come to Deerfield on that day, you are invited and you may be surprised that Kermit can make the transformation into a really great preacher.
     The event was attended by about 150 people from the church and the community. We did raise about $2000.00 from that specific event that day towards our whole relay goal. We stand at about $5400.00 collected towards our goal of $7500.00 so we could use even more financial support on this mission. We want to say thanks to everyone who gave so willingly of their time and talents to make the event a success not just in raising money, but also to make it a spiritual event. The Holy Spirit was with us, and we give the Lord praise. Earlier Sunday morning in worship, we had studied from John 14 where the scripture teaches about heaven and how Christ has gone to prepare a place for us, a place with many rooms. During the children's message, I invited the children to dream about what would be in their room in heaven if they got to go to heaven today and tell God just what they wanted. I asked them what color would they paint their room, and the answers came: blue, purple, green, yellow and pink. I asked them if they would put a refrigerator in their room in heaven and they all laughed. Later on in the sermon for the grown ups, I shared my concern and my hope for the future of the United Methodist Church as a whole.  We need to focus on becoming a church of the future. We have to figure out how to reach young people and help them understand that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, now while they are eager to learn. Then after the sermon, when it was time to take up the offering, a little girl, I am guessing maybe 6 years old, insisted to her mom that she help her mom take up the offering. So she came up the aile with her mom and the other young woman taking up the offering and helped along the way. The little girl had been to children's church and had not heard what I had just said about our need to reach the young people, and how we had to call on God to show us how to do this great work. In John 14:14, where the scripture teaches that if we ask for anything in the name of Christ, he will do it for us. The words had just come out of my mouth that we are asking God to help us reach the young people and teach them to know the ways of Christ, and in just moments, a little one comes forth and offers to serve. It was a Holy Spirit filled moment, that spilled into a Holy Spirit filled day. We know for sure that God hears our prayers, and God will provide us with hope for the future, in great events like Relay for Life, worthy causes to find a cure for cancer, and on regular Sunday mornings in worship. God will give us the courage and leadership that we seek to help our church step into our future with hope. Praise be to the one who is the way, the truth and the life.