The past twenty-one days have been an incredible Jesus experience.
On July 25, we kicked it off by leaving for our Element mission trip to Costa Rica. Our high schoolers caught the fire of God as we served our Tico friends in San Jose.
We came back on July 31st into the middle of 10 days of churchwide prayer and fasting, with a mind-blowing prayer service of 1000 people!
On Tuesday, August 5th, Carrie started back to work with a new staff position at Celebration! AWESOME!!
The fast ended on Wednesday, August 6th with Hillsong London in concert. What an incredible time worshipping God with our Brothers and Sisters from the other side of the pond!
After another powerful set of weekend services, we launched into Rush Week. Rush Week consists of four days of youth ministry combining all of our local campuses. We averaged about 300 students each night! We saw our Youth go to a whole notha level with God.
We baptized over 60 students and saw so many more committing themselves to live loud as Christians. Our weekly Element meetings will never be the same!
After Rush we went straight into Flex, where over 800 men gathered to get stoked on being men of God! Pastor Joe Champion from Celebration Church in Texas brought the heat! The theme of the weekend seemed to be that what God does with us in the prayer closet will drive our public ministry to our friends and family. After the word on Saturday, we split into two groups and tackled some ministry projects in downtown Jax and King St. in St. Augustine.
Did I mention that, in the middle of all this, whole limbs just stone-cold started FALLING out of our 60-foot-tall sycamore and we had to get it removed?
Just wrapped up another great weekend of ministry where Pastor Stovall preached and bunches of people gave their lives to Jesus.
Today, the 3 weeks concluded with a bang: we sent Hannah and Rana off to school! Rana is in school for the first time, K4. She's loving it, and so are we: we are officially "empty nesters" on Monday mornings. We went on a breakfast date!!
Praise God for high-output seasons like these where we get to witness so much life change at once!