Well we just had our third Easter Service in the Randall 15 IMAX theater and our very first two service day.  It was awesome!  I mean the worship was good, the teaching was good (or so I was told), but what made it so amazing to me was all the people who really stepped up and made it work.

We had people at the Theater at 5:15am……….that’s right, 5:15am, talk about your stubs.  We had people come out of the woodwork to take care of coffee, greeting, kids, communion and the list goes on and on and on.  Then many of those same crazy/amazing people stuck around to clean it all up!  WOW!  We have the coolest and most inspiring group of people I have ever been around.

Anyway, we got a lot of great reports and the reason is all of you who made it happen, thanks.

Thanks for creating a welcoming environment for me and my family to come and experience the miracle of Easter.

Jerry

Father,

Thanks for allowing me the privilege of serving such a great faith community.

Jerry

This really isn’t an “ode” since thats a poem to someone that is usually recited and that would be weird and creepy, but I do have something that I feel really needs said…

To Eddie & Kristi and Jim & Jessie:

Thanks.  Thanks more than I can say.  Thanks doesn’t even begin to touch it, in fact it almost diminishes what is actually in my heart to say to each of you.  You are so much more to me than a staff, or partners or co-workers, you are my fuel, my inspiration, my challenge, my companions and on and on and on……Thanks for your creativity, your willingness to fight with me (even when I’m right), the absolute passion that you approach everything with, and your understanding when I am difficult, down, or lets be honest, moody.

Some of you Wellers may not know that I worked for nearly 4 years to get these two families here.  I looked over the entire church landscape and these are the men and women I choice to invest my life with.

Thanks for coming along side of us and making us who God intended.

To Johnny & Beth and Charlie & Sharen:

Thank you.  Thank you for believing in me and this vision long before I convinced Ed or Jim to finally come.  Thanks for being there when we were literally the only ones here.  You were our original investers, the author of our name, the worker and organizer of every outreach, the band, the office, the financial secretary, the accountant, the IT dept. and on and on and on….Your faithfulness, friendship and generosity not only bore the weight of this community but literally kept Carrie and my head above water and our hearts filled with hope.  Without any of you there would be no Well.  Thank You.

Some of you may not know that Johnny and Beth uprooted their family and left everything and everyone they knew to come up here from Arkansas to help us plant this church.  And that I prayed for an entire year DAILY after meeting Charlie and Sharen for them to come and be part of the church.  P.S. Sharen was easy, surprisingly Charlie was the holdout!  Sorry Charlie.

To Len & (getto) Bec

Thanks for the laughs, thanks for the challenge, thanks for your ability to work and sacrifice for a community that needs your gifts, thanks for your creativity, thanks for your honest questions and your demand for excellence.  Thanks for coming last and never letting it deter you but staying with it and pushing into God and our community.  Thanks for allowing me to be part of your growth, thanks for all the time you and your family gives to see that this community is healthy.

Many of you may not know that Len is the ……most frugal man in the world, but it is his keen insight that has helped us grow and provided for the needs of so many families in financial need, and that it has been Bec’s vision that has done more to affect the physical character and identity of our church than anyone else.  They are also responsible for such outreaches as the Swedish Days Parade, that have helped us gain favor in the community.  Len is also Dutch….I have nothing else to say about that.

To Carrie and my Kids:

Thanks for believing in me even when I wasn’t so sure myself.  Thanks for seeing something in me and in my dream that caused you to give me confidence to try the ridiculous.  Thanks for all the late nights, dinners without me, missed trips, broken promises, and so many other things you gave me grace on even when I didn’t deserve it.  You are my strength, my heart, my song, my laughter and my life.  I wouldn’t even want to try without each of you.

Carrie has been the woman of my dreams since I met her when we were 16 years old.  It took the Lord doing a huge work in my life and 5 years to finally catch her eye, but I got her.

To my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,

Thanks for the best group of friends and family anyone could ever ask for.  Thanks for a dream that forced me to learn to depend on you for everything.  Thanks for, what has to be, the best faith community in the world.  Thanks for your faithfulness and your direction.  Thanks for never giving up on me.

Many of you may not know, I am actually Jesus’ favorite!

Well we just finished our second Annual Spiritual Encounter Retreat and it was amazing.  We met Thursday Night, all day Friday, Friday Night, Saturday until nearly 1pm, came back and had service on Sunday morning and then HWM (High Water Mark) Sunday night.  Wew!  But man was it worth it.  Here are just some of the comments we have heard,

“The weekend was great and I woke up yesterday morning, for the first time in YEARS, not feeling like a wounded soldier… more later. ”

“Thanks for everything you have been doing for the retreat, leadership, hwm, … the past few days have been quite full!  Everything has been great.”

“Thanks for an awesome, Godly experience.  The weekend was amazing!”

But that isn’t all, lately my inbox has been flooded with notes like this about what the Lord is doing in general through out our Faith Community,

“Thank you so much for a consistently warm reception.  On our first visit, you mentioned that “The Well is different,” and you’re right.  The Well is wonderful!  The teaching, the worship and the family structure are awesome.  From the moment we walked in The Well’s place of worship, we could feel the love of God, unlike any place we have ever been.”

I am so blessed and so thankful to be a part of such an amazing church.  I pray God will continue to pour out His blessing on you all.

Your loving friend,

Jerry

We are in the middle of our series, Miracles, and my hope for you this Lent season is that you will connect with God at the deepest level of your fears, regrets, hopes and dreams.  This is the season for death and resurrection.  Let’s finally put to death all the things that have held us down, wounds, hurts, past failures, and allow God, The Great God of Wonders to breath a fresh breath of life over us.  Let’s stop living our “small, quiet lives of desperation” and live huge, God sized, God shaped lives, Miraculous lives, lives of wonder.

May God bless you and keep you,

Grace and Peace,

Jerry

Hey everyone,

We have finally heard back out a couple trip opportunities to Haiti.  Right now they have two medical teams planned, March 20-28 and April 24-May 2.  The cost of the trip is $1000.  If you are a nurse, emt, paramedic, and above all Doc, we need your help.  Please look at your schedule and see if there is any way you could carve out the needed time and let me know.

For those of you who want to help but don’t fall into these catagories, consider helping someone else go by making a contribution.  At the same time we are sending the medical team we are sending a couple more cargo containers with supplies including medical supplies.

If you would like to give please make you checks payable to: The Well, PO Box 134, Geneva IL 60134.  Make sure we have your contact info so we can send you a contribution letter for your taxes at the end of the year.  All the money that comes in will go to help with the trip and supplies.  We will not be keeping any of it in house.

Please remember that while the images may have disappeared from your TV the need is still great and urgent.

Grace and Peace,

Jerry

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, between the new offices, the Encounter Retreat, Lent/Easter, and our regular weekly responsibilities I have been swamped and exhausted.  I have literally been on the phone all morning with support teams from microsoft and AT&T, so you can imagine what kind of day this has been so far.  But my mind keeps going back to last night.

Last night my oldest daughter, Taylor had her winter choir concert.  It was cold, and dark, the room was packed and we sat on hard folding chairs, but the minute Taylor’s choir stepped onto the risers none of that seemed to matter.  I sat up, proud and couldn’t help but laugh a little I was so happy while she sang.  It filled my heart to delight in my child.  And for a little while nothing else mattered.  I was caught up in the sheer joy I feel for her.

Maybe today I will think about that.  It is always easy to get so caught up in all the other stuff, but the truth is God is looking at me and I think maybe he is laughing with delight in me.  Maybe today rather than thinking of all the stuff that has to be done and probably won’t get done, I will stop, get caught up and consider that God has placed himself where He can see me and delights in me.

Just a thought, now back to work….

Father,

Thank You.

Jerry

Freedom, it is an interesting word.  I think it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.  Unfortunately it is not a word that is often associated with the Church, and yet Christ came to make us free.  Why, how, has the Church lost it’s sense of this I wonder.  Too much of the time when people come into our faith and Missional Communities hoping to experience God or at least catch a glimps of Him what they see is our organization, our over structured, overly corporate, put on version of God, and they see right through it.

What if we stopped?  Just stopped all the non-sense, the pretense and the presumption.  What would happen if we admitted we don’t have God to give.  He isn’t a lollipop hidden in my pocket wrapped in my bend understanding faith.  But I am on a journey towards God, towards Hope, Faith and Love.  And I have this sense that He has joined me on my broken, painful journey, and that He is the one who started me on this trip and He is the one beckoning me to on.  What if I realized and allowed this idea, that I am free to dominate my life.  Free to hope, love, believe, not just for myself or in myself but for and in those around me.

What if I wasn’t the one responsible for it, but just responsible for my response to him, Christ, God.  What if I lived FREE.

Do you think that kind of life would translate into something that others would see and sense God in me?  Would it make an impact on their lives?  Would it create in me the kind of space that God loves to inhabit?  I hope it will, because that is where I want to live.

Father,

Forgive me when I start touching and messing with your thing too much.  When I think it is my responsibility to get it done, or get someone there.  When I forget that it really is about living a whole life with you and just inviting other to take this journey with me.  Let me live in your freedom today.  Free of guilt, weight, pressure.  Free to love, be loved, give, receive, mess up and correct.  And grant me the grace to give freedom to all those around me.

I am sorry for not getting this right so much of the time.

Your broken son,

Jerry

Well I am excited to report that we are growing!  We continue to add new families every week to The Well, which has a lot of you asking where are we going to put them all?  With that in mind I would like to propose to ideas for the immediate future and a couple long term opportunities.

Sort Term, I would like all of us to consider moving to the middle of our rows in service to help make room for people coming in behind us to sit.  This will allow for an easier process of finding seats for families who come once the lights are lowered.

Secondly, we are considering what it will look like if and when we have to go to two services.  As a test of this we are planning on doing two services this year for Easter.  The first one will be at 8am and the second will start at 9:45am.  This is going to be a stretch for a community that loves hanging out together as much as we do.  So we want everyone who can to plan on lingering after the first service and coming in early for the second service so we can all hang out together during that in-between-service time.  Also we are going to continue to offer the place to be after second service and hope that even those coming to first service will come grab lunch with everyone else.  Obviously there won’t be a place to be for Easter, but as we move forward this is how we are thinking.

Long Term, many of you have asked if we are looking for our own place, a building all our own.  The answer is we are prayerfully looking into the possibility or considering this.  Notice how tentative I am about this subject, here’s why:

1. I don’t want us to take on a debt and have it control how we are able to minister to our communities.  I don’t want you in debt and I don’t want our community in debt.

2. We place high priority on being in the Market Place.  We love being right where all the people are, it is a huge part of our DNA that we don’t want to change.  So looking for market place alternatives is huge for us.

3. We don’t want to get ahead of God.  When we felt it was time to move into a more public venue and really launch our Faith Community God opened a door in such a way that it was obvious to everyone at the time, that He was doing it.  Having started in the spirit, I don’t want us to try to finish in our own strength.  (Sorry, I stole that one from the Bible.)

So here is the deal, growing is great, and creates a whole new set of opportunities for God to do something amazing in our through our community.  Please join us in prayer and we try to understand what He is doing through all this and make sure we are following His leading.

Father,

Seriously, help us understand what you would have us do next, so that we may continue to walk in your blessing and grow your kingdom in the Tri-Cities and Fox River Valley.

Your Servant,

Jerry

This past Saturday night Carrie and I went and visited a church in Aurora that we had heard a lot of great things about.  They were doing a series on James.  The passage they focused on was James 4:13-16,

13 Look here, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.” 14 How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow? Your life is like the morning fog—it’s here a little while, then it’s gone. 15 What you ought to say is, “If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that.” 16 Otherwise you are boasting about your own plans, and all such boasting is evil.

And that is true, we make plans, but sometimes God has different plans.

Last night we came together to share some of the victories from 2009 and share some vision for what we sense God doing in 2010, but God had different plans.  Instead during a time of worship we invited people who wanted prayer because of fears they had been carrying, and only God could have predicted the response.  We spent the rest of the night loving on each other and being loved on by our Heavenly Father.  It was really incredible.

Here is just one of the stories I have heard today,

“I just wanted to thank you so much for your words of prayer and encouragement that you spoke to me last night.

You spoke to my heart about much of what I have been struggling with for the past several months and past few years even!!!

I know so well that God is faithful and my complete trust is in Him but recently I have just been feeling so tired and run down – kind of like I’m being run over by truck and pick myself up and say- “is it over yet God?” but another truck is right behind it!!  Your words gave me the comfort that I needed to keep picking myself up – keep trusting, keep believing – remain faithful.

I left last night with a sense of peace that I haven’t felt in a LONG time.  God is coming through for us like He ALWAYS does – I have so much thankfulness in my heart!!

I also have to share with you that last night as I was crying – my daughter started crying too.  I told her that I was OK and that she didn’t have to worry about me.  She said she knew that and  she said “I’m just crying because of all the love I feel in this room”!!  That was awesome that even my 10 year old felt the love pouring out from the people but also from the Holy Spirit – WOW!!

WOW is right.

Thanks Father, for having different plans.

Surprised again,

Jerry

This past Saturday night Carrie and I went and visited a church in Aurora that we had heard a lot of great things about.  They were doing a series on James.  The passage they focused on was James 4:13-16,

¹³ Look here, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.” ¹⁴ How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow? Your life is like the morning fog—it’s here a little while, then it’s gone. ¹⁵ What you ought to say is, “If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that.” ¹⁶ Otherwise you are boasting about your own plans, and all such boasting is evil.

And that is true, we make plans, but sometimes God has different plans.

Last night we came together to share some of the victories from 2009 and share some vision for what we sense God doing in 2010, but God had different plans.  Instead during a time of worship we invited people who wanted prayer because of fears they had been carrying, and only God could have predicted the response.  We spent the rest of the night loving on each other and being loved on by our Heavenly Father.  It was really incredible.

Here is just one of the stories I have heard today,

“I just wanted to thank you so much for your words of prayer and encouragement that you spoke to me last night.

You spoke to my heart about much of what I have been struggling with for the past several months and past few years even!!!

I know so well that God is faithful and my complete trust is in Him but recently I have just been feeling so tired and run down – kind of like I’m being run over by truck and pick myself up and say- “is it over yet God?” but another truck is right behind it!!  Your words gave me the comfort that I needed to keep picking myself up – keep trusting, keep believing – remain faithful.

I left last night with a sense of peace that I haven’t felt in a LONG time.  God is coming through for us like He ALWAYS does – I have so much thankfulness in my heart!!

I also have to share with you that last night as I was crying – my daughter started crying too.  I told her that I was OK and that she didn’t have to worry about me.  She said she knew that and  she said “I’m just crying because of all the love I feel in this room”!!  That was awesome that even my 10 year old felt the love pouring out from the people but also from the Holy Spirit – WOW!!

WOW is right.

Thanks Father, for having different plans.

Surprised again,

Jerry