A Celebration of Generosity

                                     

Senior Pastor, Steve Thulson

When word came – first to our Pastors, then our Elders, and finally our Congregation last Sunday morning – there were jaws dropping, tears, applause, even cheers. When a few days earlier, Ministry Assistant Jamie Durbin had opened the church mail and saw the anonymous check from a brokerage firm, she had to ask Ron Mol if she was seeing the comma and dot in the right places.

For the reduction of our mortgage debt, Centennial Covenant received a gift of $400,000!

We praise God for his gracious provision, and thank these generous friends!

This reduces our debt from $1.2 million to $800,000 which will allow far more of the ongoing generous giving from our other 175 households to be applied to direct people-to-people ministries.

Last Sunday we shared even more beautiful examples of generosity.

-          Each week, our children place coins from their allowances in a basket – gifts for Jesus and his work. Darlene and Stefany have observed, though, that some kids – from a family scraping by at the poverty-line – tend not to put in just coins, they put in dollar bills. They make sacrifices.

-          Last week we received thank-you notes from two families in the community who had been in financial crisis due to unanticipated health problems. We had been alongside them with gifts from our Benevolence Fund.

-          We have been experiencing a gradual but steady growth in ongoing financial support of our core ministries and mission, getting closer to the levels we approved last Fall!

Don’t you think these gifts are from the Spirit and please the Father every bit as much as the extraordinary donation to reduce our debt?

And then there’s the generous grace of God we celebrated last Sunday in Dale Flander’s strong teaching and stories like Donna Osborne’s. She told us how her lost hearing seems to be returning at least in part. And even greater is the powerful freedom she has experienced by God enabling her to forgive a man who kidnapped and terrorized her years ago. Dale’s reminder was to let such “highs” be windows to everything our Lord is doing all the time – even in the “lows” when his goodness is not quite as evident.

God is good. All the time. And all the time, God is good. Right?