Thanks to our set-up crew!

We spent most of our first year as a church meeting at the Senior Center, and since we were renting we had to set up and tear down our worship space every week! Since I was always there to witness the event, I wanted to publicly thank some really faithful servants for their work every Sunday.

Our main chair setter uppers were Thomas Christian, Jeff Keikkala and Steve Rotarius (and of course others helped along the way). They were as consistent as sunrises. I can even remember a couple times when Thomas was too sick to come to church, but still came bright and early to make sure the set-up got done and then went back home to bed. Wow! Thanks, guys. I also saw Josh Kanable helping a lot with tear-down after church, and there were a few ladies who did lots of lunch time vacuuming, including Jennifer Keikkala, Linda Anderson, Joann Dorn and Rebecca Bertolini.

Thomas and Trisha Christian were kind enough to set up our nursery every week, and Rebecca and Ashley trucked their Children's Ministry stuff from home and set it up every Sunday.

The whole Rotarius family was faithful to not only bring the equipment trailer every week, but also to unload it in the morning and load it up again in the afternoon (and most of them wore high heels as they did it)!

The "New Hope Band" was good enough to come early to set up their equipment every week, and I especially appreciate Dustin and Beth driving from Salem every Sunday to set up the drums and help with other preparations.

I appreciate Steve Myers for lots of reasons, but I want to thank him, too, for being there every week to get the sound system set up every Sunday. He and I were always the first ones on the scene at 7:30, unloading our matching white minivans full of sound/band equipment when Ruth opened the doors. In a way I'll miss that--there was something inwardly encouraging about meeting him there every week (though we're both quite happy we don't have to get up so early now)!

The fact is, all these folks and many more are a constant encouragement in the way they have pitched in to make our worship gatherings work. Naturally, there will still be cleaning, chair-moving, etc. to do in our new building every week, and I am confident that these folks and others will continue to be faithful. But as we close this first chapter of our Sunday meetings, I just want to say Thanks, everybody, for helping to make our nomadic first year work so smoothly. We all appreciate your service to the Lord and His church!

(This list of servants is certainly not exhaustive, and it's likely I've forgotten to include some people. If you can think of someone who deserves some recognition for their Senior-Center-set-up-and-tear-down work, help me out by posting a comment to thank them for us!)