
This last weekend was one of those weekends that I will remember for a long time. The weekend was filled with smiles, fear, tears, joy, and a little bit of stress thrown in for good measure.
This last weekend we celebrated baptisms, the first act of obedience for a new Christ follower, and some powerful things happened at the Bettendorf campus. We had 7
scheduled baptisms but we baptized 13 people over the course of the weekend. We heard testimonies about rebellion, addiction, joy, freedom and love. We heard about how others influenced these people’s lives: parents, grandparents, and GO! Kid teachers. I held shaking hands as these people shared in front of their church family their personal testimonies of failures, their struggles, their fears but saw tears of joy in hundreds of people in the crowd as we heard of the power of God in their lives and their courage to follow Jesus. I witnessed, firsthand the glow of these faces as they rose from the water. I held the hand of parents as they helped baptize their child with tears running down their faces, a child that they have prayed for and modeled Christ in their own lives for years. I watched as three grown men baptized a young man they mentored and prayed with at many weekend Statik events, a young man that contemplated suicide until he found God and these men that sacrificed their time and energy at Statik. I personally was blessed by the opportunity to baptize my sister-in-law and my niece- these two were not scheduled and I found myself holding back tears as they stepped up the stairs of the baptismal. There was a common theme in each of these stories – people! People that sacrificed their time to invest in others, their own kids, in GO! Kids, in Statik, in small groups. People that stepped out of their comfort zone to share their life with someone else. This is what Christ’s Church is all about!