A Friend's Story

Michael and I were in a band together in Houston for a few years. Great story and I can attest he has a true servant's heart!

Here is his story

2009 Re-cap

So, what happened in the Dale family in 2009? Let's see if I can net this down:

January

- spent New Year's eve in the North GA mountains, shooting guns, celebrating with friends at a campground near Helen.
- met with Malcolm and Amy Young to talk about being a part of a new church start-up in Cherokee County.

February

- Celebrated Michael's birthday
- Agreed to be a part of Life Bible Church ( http://www.lifebiblechurch.com ). Started meeting at a clubhouse with a few other families to see where this would lead.

March

- Celebrated Teresa's Birthday
- Went camping in the mountains again
- Helped Life Bible Church select a new location in a local warehouse, perfect location!!
- Bought a new (used) F250 truck
- Went camping in Alabama in the old camper

April

- Bought new 5th wheel camper. Since the truck could pull a camper much bigger than the one we owned, well.... we just had to upgrade.
- Went camping in north Georgia, make sure everything worked, found out it DIDN'T all work, got that fixed.





May/June/July

- Not much...

August

- Returned to the mountains to celebrate the 5th anniversary of our friends campground, Creekwood . More guns, food, friends and a chance to see if the fixes to the camper actually worked!!

September

- Big trip to Ohio/Pennsylvania. Teresa and I went to visit a friend who lives outside Pittsburgh, near the Ohio state line, and to spend a week in 'new' territory.

• We stopped at a state park in Lexington, KY the first night. The next morning Teresa was not feeling very well at all so we stopped at a 'minute clinic' and found out she had pneumonia (ICK!!). She loaded up on drugs and said to continue the trip.

• We drove up to a nice campground in Rogers, OH. We stayed there for the next 5 nights, visited our friends, saw a bluegrass festival, watched the Alabama/Virginia Tech game on TV and visited towns such as Columbus, Canton, Cleveland, Ashtabula and drove a nice road along Lake Erie.
• Our return trip was thru the state of West Virginia, and is one mountainous state!! WE stopped in south Virginia at one more campground before heading home the following day.

- Late September we went to the Alabama vs. Arkansas football game. At halftime the university honored the 1979 National Championship team. It was a lot of fun to go on the field again and to see all my old teammates.

October

- I took my uncle Aubrey to the Alabama vs. South Carolina game. We had a good time and watch Mark Ingram run wild, putting him on the Heisman Trophy map. Rained like crazy before the game but the sun came out at gametime. Bama was starting to get some serious national attention by this game!


November

- My brother, Tim and his son, Tanner, met me in Tuscaloosa for the Bama/LSU game. We stayed in our camper, visited the campus and they watched the game from inside the stadium while I hung out on the quad to watch the game at a tailgate party. That was a new experience. It was great to see Tim at a ballgame again, he got us a tour of the athletic facilities that was first class! Tanner and I got to see many parts of the building including the locker room, lounge area where Tanner played ping-pong with a coach who was passing thru.

- In late November Teresa and I celebrated our 5th anniversary!!! We decided to sell our Auburn tickets and take the camper back to the mountains (surprise, surprise). This time we stayed the week of Thanksgiving @ Moccasin Creek State park, on Lake Burton. A new addition to our camping experience, and really part of roughing it, was Directv!! I was able to bring along a dish and got the system working so we could watch our favorite shows AND the Alabama/Auburn game. I know, that isn't camping but it works for us!!

December

- Attended the Alabama vs. Florida SEC Championship game here in ATL. Bama won big, headed to the National Championship game in CA (which I would up going to!!).
- We flew to Houston, TX to celebrate my parents 50th wedding anniversary!!! My siblings and I were honored to be able to get together and host a party for mom and dad, have our family portrait taken, spend time hanging out together and enjoying Christmas as a family. 50 years, amazing!!

So, 2009 was a good year and it ended, not surprisingly, with us going back to the mountains for New Year's Eve.

So far, 2010 is great and we will update our adventures and travels here.

Wow, I let Facebook take over my life

Well, it has been nearly a year and I want to get back into this blogging thing.

It is a rainy, stormy January Sunday and we have done so much in the last year that I failed to blog about, and that is sad. Among the highlights, bought a new, monster camper, traveled much in that camper, watched God move at Life Bible Church (and he continues to do so), enjoyed a special year in Alabama football, attending several games and the championship in Pasadena, new jobs and adventures for Teresa, celebrating my parents 50th wedding anniversary and many more things.

I want to get back into this right away, I think a lot will happen in 2010 that I don't want to miss out recording for history's sake. There may only be 2 people reading this but hey, I like to write.

What we have discovered, Part II

The story below led Teresa and I to finally land at a big church down in Marietta called Johnson Ferry (JFBC). Good people, solid teaching and full of 'grown ups'. We attended there about a year and enjoyed it, was a perfect place at the perfect time. We started feeling the call last fall to find a church local to our neighborhood as JFBC was over 25 miles away.

We started looking, again, at churches in Cherokee county and became disappointed, wondering if it was US that was the challenge? Nothing we found seemed to say 'this is it' in any manner. Come Christmas time we were really frustrated. Now, there were two couples back at the 'old' church we attended that both Teresa and I respected, liked and thought highly of, both on staff at the time. One couple left the church when we did, moved away and have since found a great peace in their lives after much turmoil. The second couple stayed at the church and we could not believe they were still there, so disappointing.

I December 2008 I decided to contact the second couple mentioned above as I discovered they too left the church not long after we did. I sent an e-mail to reconnect and had a good conversation with him (Malcolm). It was just nice to catch up, catch up a little and find them, amazingly, in the same boat as we were. It was also interesting that he mentioned several other people (not from the old church) who were in the same boat as well.

That got me to thinking and with my brothers encouragement I sent a simple note to Malcolm saying "If you feel led to start a church we would like to be a part of it". Well, Malcolm called me the NEXT DAY and said they have been praying and seeking what to do about starting a new church and our note was perfectly (God) timed. We met, they shared the vision, mission and purpose of a church and we thought it was spot on!

So, Life Bible Church was 'born'. We met a few times as a group of people to get to know each other and last weekend had our first semi-official 'service'. This church was not created to 'entertain' people, to put on a show or designed to be 'seeker sensitive', meaning be entertaining to reach people. It is, as the name state, a Bible church. We will study, teach and share the Bible.

This week we actually signed a lease on some space in town and will start meeting in ONE SPOT for the next year at least. That is great, no school, theater, city hall, civic center. A real building!!

I pray that this is the start of something good, faithful and true to what a church is/should be.

What we have discovered searching for a church home

When Teresa and I moved to Woodstock, GA we found (on the internet) a local church that met in a theater up the freeway from us. Before we moved to town we actually went to lunch (@ Williamson Brothers BBQ, yum!) with the senior pastor and another guy on staff (Malcolm). We really thought the church had a good vision to reach people, especially those NOT from a traditional church background.

Some of the things we liked about what we saw:

- Upbeat music, great musicians with high energy.
- lots of people greeting you at the door, a good buzz
- met in a movie theater and seemed to be growing
- diverse people, all ages, races and backgrounds represented
- seemed to have their act together on Sunday mornings

We started attending not soon after moving to Georgia and decided we would get plugged-in right away. We both volunteered to be greeters and passed out flyers at the door each Sunday, helped new people find their way around and generally wanted to make people feel welcome. A little while later we were asked to help lead what they called a 'home team'. This is a Bible study group comprised of people from the church, which met weekly.

All was well, or so we thought, for several months. About 8 months into the process our eyes were opened wide, we discerned serious problems with the leadership (confirmed them) and direction of the church, decided it was time to move on, told the pastor so (and why) and left. Looking back it was the right thing to do as God used that to teach us (and continues to do so today).

Since then Teresa and I have learned so much about the purpose, function, leadership and importance of a church. We have visited so many little churches around us, started by so called "church planters" over the past year and are amazed at how exactly the same they all are. This has led us to study, research, pray about and pay attention to the state of today's 'christian' church.

Cherokee County (and the entire southeast region) is covered in new churches. They meet in every school, theater and civic center available.

Here are some of the qualities of a 'new', real, hip and relevant church started by a planter today, based on our observations.

- say NOTHING matters but reaching people for Jesus

Using this first statement justify the following:

• be as offensive to other Christians as possible, it is cool to show how stupid Christians are. I personally was told from day one that "I didn't get it, that I wouldn't make it". That much was true, a source of some level of 'pride' now, for lack of a better word!!

• be as offensive to other churches as possible, other churches are stupid too you know

• home teams must be more social in nature, do not study the Bible, talk about the sermon from last week. Do not stray or you will be cut off.
  

• use crude and vulgar language on your blog, twitter, in the service and in your publications and events. This is designed to show the non-believer that you are cool too and that it doesn't matter how you act or what you say if you are a believer. Some of the best words and phrases (these are NOT made up, I have them all available for reference), and I apologize for this, are 'suck', 'freaking', 'ass', 'balls to the wall', "I'm going to punch him in the throat", "I'll come kick their @##", and make jokes with crude sexual references constantly, talk about how 'hot' your wife is and hint about your sexual prowess.
  

• Bible study is to be done on your own time, topic sermons are the way to go

• going deep is a joke, people don't want to study deeper in the Word

• the leadership of the church is accountable only to God, they started the church so they are the only ones that should know what is happening behind the scenes.

• every third sermon series has to be about the history of the church.

• every second sermon series has to be about sex, post pictures of couples under cover in bed, kissing, pictures of people's backside, etc. Send flyers out to the community and laugh when someone calls back saying the flyers are rather offensive.

• be obsessed with secular music and television, telling everyone about it and how you make your day by filling your head and life with the stuff
  

• Go to every church planters conference available, hang out with your 'pastor' buddies all the time
  

• Talk about how cool your church planter friends (pastors) are and how cool you are, remember YOU are the only one that knows what God wants from your church/ministry.

• Remove anyone who ask questions, then make fun of them.
  

• If someone leaves the church tell everyone remaining to ignore them, do not contact them, they never existed and it is THEIR problem. Even if that person was on staff, they are persona non grata, useless to you.
  

• show pride in having the police called to your church, having the neighbors upset with you and threaten to beat them up, or send someone from the church to do so

• twitter every thought you have, the more vulgar the better (remember, that makes you 'real')

I could go on... but I will not. It is hard writing this without coming across as EXACTLY what I am speaking about. I do not say these 'planters' are stupid. However, I do believe many are misguided and dangerous to the faith.

This was therapeutic, I'll have more to say about what else we have discovered - THAT IS POSITIVE, AMAZING, HEARTWARMING AND A REAL BLESSING.

Well, Teresa and I did it. The SUV, Pathfinder, that we owned was OK for towing our little camper on back roads and such but once you hit the freeway it really struggled and the MPG was terrible (8 or less). We decided to get a Ford F250 so we can pull our trailer AND when we upgrade it would handle that one too.

We looked around at several trucks and met a nice guy named Stephen at Mall of Georgia Ford who showed us a nice F250 but it was too expensive. We explained to him (and a couple other dealers) exactly what we were looking for. We wanted a 2004-2006 F250, Super Cab, 6.0 litre turbo diesel, auto, leather, as many options as possible in the cab (auto temp control, power everything) and NOT WHITE in color and a specific price range. (side note, it amazes me how dealers push "monthly payments" when I specifically said PRICE!!!!). They don't really like informed buyers I think.

Stephen went out and they bought a nice 2006 model and called us. We looked at it this week, negotiated for many hours and I returned last night to pick it up. Teresa said a sad goodbye to the SUV, it was super nice but too weak for us.

Our plan is to keep this for many, many, many years. Can't wait to get out and pull something in it. It feels like it could pull our house off it's foundation!! Amazingly enough, however, it gets the same or BETTER gas mileage than the SUV and towing should be no problem at all for it.

Thankfully we have our little Mazda for every day driving.

Should have sold the tickets?

Teresa and I had tickets to the SEC Football Championship game here in ATL last Saturday. Alabama was taking on the Florida Gators for a chance to play for the National Championship in Miami in January. However, it was not meant to be!

We arrived at the Georgia Dome about 4 hours before kick-off and checked out all of the fan 'stuff' around the area and settled in to our seats, ate a hot dog and waited for the game. While the game was great, losing is not!!

All around the stadium people were wanting to buy tickets. I heard during the week that tickets were going for $350-$400 each in the section we were sitting in. Having bought them for $70 each that would be a tidy profit!!?? We decided against it and looking back perhaps we should have!?

NAAA, no way.

ROLL TIDE anyway. Beat Utah in the Sugar Bowl (that's weird... beat UTAH?)