The Stroudsburg Church is on the move. They have the highest attendance in the Conference and the second highest tithe. Recently they have remodeled the bathrooms used both by the Church School during the week and by the Church family on Sabbath. For years an overhaul in the bathrooms was needed. The walls and the drains have now been re-done.
Soon, it is contemplated, energy efficient windows will be installed in the school classrooms. The bulletin board just off the foyer of the Church, had a good promotional though for the church school.
I had the privilege of sitting in Jim Yansen’s Sabbath School class. Jim has encouraged his class to work toward several local mission projects. One of those, was to pray for young adults to be invited to the Sabbath School class and attend church. Right now this class has 2 young adults taking baptismal lessons. Jim has also challenged a young adult Caucasian member to specifically invite his friends and other Caucasians, since the Stroudsburg Church family, which used to be mostly Caucasian, is now 80-90 percent made up of those of British West Indian descent.
On this Sabbath, there were 2 young adult Caucasians present in class, one young man had been invited by this initiative, and it was his first Sabbath in attendance!
Although I had only planned to sit in the congregation, I was invited to join the worship leaders and provide the welcome, the call to worship and the benediction.
During the announcement time, I shared with the congregation about our commitment to lead youth and young adults into Share Him evangelism. One family already inquired if their daughter could participate, and one adult lady agreed to pray about coming alone on the Guatemala trip Share Him evangelism trip this summer, as both a speaker and a chaperone for the young ladies.
Pastor James Clark, who is normally present, had committed to attend the youth Sabbath worship service in Easton, which were entirely presented by the youth.
After church, I joined with Thomas Pitts, the head elder and Pastor Bernard Charles, who is the building committee chairman, and reviewed the artist’s conception for a possible new church and activity center.
The steel buildings being considered are estimated to cost near $4.5 million. The building committee chairman, who had led out on building a similar project, shared with me that he believed it could be finished for $3.7 million, utilizing the many craftsman in the church who are involved in the construction business as a living.
Following several conversations with church members after the Stroudsburg Church service, I made my way to the Easton SDA Church.
Here a complete Sabbath Youth Day was being led out by Javier Mendez, the local youth leader. 3 other youth groups from other Conferences had been invited and come for the day. In the morning, the youth provided the entire worship service, including the preaching. I arrived a little before the 3 p.m. afternoon service. The church was full-packed all day!
Kris Eckenroth, PA Conference Youth Director was able to join the youth at Easton in the afternoon also, and he has been working with the Easton church in its youth ministry.
Kris and Javier have also developed a close working relationship with the PA Conference COOL camp summer ministry. Javier leads one of the summer teams which goes to PA Conference Churches or Schools and conducts a summer day camp for at least 1 week. Many, if not most of the kids coming to the summer day camp are non-Adventist and quite a few of those are un-churched. Javier works with our Adventist COOL Camp youth workers, and provides intentional leadership and spiritual development each day for the youth who are leading out, in addition to giving them direction in reaching summer day campers for Christ.
Afterwards I spoke at length with Paul Richards and his wife Kesha.
They both work in sales for Verizon and are in the top 10% of their 1,300 employees for sales. However, they are being pressured to work on Sabbath. We spoke for some time about possible actions they could take. I pointed them to Walter Carson at the Columbia Union and also offered to go to Scranton to meet personally with upper management on their behalf.
Please keep these fine Adventist members in your prayers.
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