"Being" The Church

I don't think I've really mentioned it here before, but I have been very impressed by the churches that have consistantly stepped up to the plate to help us out, especially when such help didn't benefit them at all.  So let me give a brief "shout out" to a few of the churches who have been really awesome to Waterfront.

Community Christian Church: Many of our people came from CCC including myself, Jim, and Greg (the 3 staff guys), and the relationship we have continued to have with them has been priceless. . .

They have supplied us with first-rate coaching since we first started talking about Waterfront . . . before Waterfront was even called Waterfront.  They have been friends and prayer supporters.  And through our relationship with them, we are able to access much of their very high quality creative content such as videos, messages, kids' programming, etc., so that we can spend more time with people rather than time in the study.  CCC has been wonderful

Calvary Community Church: One of the first churches we got to know in the Schaumburg area was Calvary.  One morning before Waterfront began, I visited Calvary and got to know Scott Eaton, the pastor of Calvary.  In fact the Sunday I met him, he invited me to the front of their sanctuary in front of their whole church, and they prayed for Waterfront in the middle of their service.  That ROCKED! Aside from simply having a great relationship with a quality church, Calvary is also allowing us to access their baptismal when we have baptisms at Waterfront.

Summit View Christian Church: Another church that has been an extraordinary help to us has been Summit View.  Since we rent a High School and have to load and unload all of our equipment into a trailer every Sunday, we needed a place to park the trailer during the week.  Summit View has been kind enough to allow us room in their parking lot to park our trailer (a great deal since it's only a few blocks from the High school where we meet).  They've also offered to let us use some of their office space when we need to.

Willow Creek Community Church: Much like CCC, many of our leaders and attenders at Waterfront have had some sort of connection to Willow.  There are people at Waterfront who used to attend Willow, some served there, some were on staff.  It could be an annoyance to some church leaders when attenders and leaders make a move to another church in the area, but Willow has been nothing but gracious.  Here's a story Jim told us a few weeks ago that I thought was pretty cool:

A few weeks ago we found out that NBC was going to come out and do a story on Waterfront.  We were definitely excited, but one detail we were nervous about was the fact that a few people at our church were former staff at Willow, and we'd never really had a conversation with any of the leadership there about that.  We were afraid that there might be hurt feelings if they were to watch the story on NBC and see some of those familiar faces at our church.  So Jim made a call to Willow and asked them to pass a message to Bill Hybels (the senior pastor at Willow) to explain the interview and our feelings about it.  Almost immediately, the receptionist called Jim back and said, "I just talked to Bill and he wanted me to tell you, "Go YOU!!!!  Don't worry about any of that other stuff.  JUST GO BE THE CHURCH!"

I love that!  I think as churches continue to cooperate with each other and love each other, we get to "be the church" better than any of us could do it alone.