68th Church Anniversary Recap

This past weekend, our church celebrated 68 years of God’s faithfulness to our ministry. We started on Friday night with a comedy show with some of the best comedians in the area (Sista Merry, Tyree Moorehead, Cizzle C, Six Foota Simm, Aaron Edwards, Sis Canteloupe, and Barry Brewer). We laughed from start to finish. Our judges were my big brother and sister Bishop Kenneth and Shervonne Wells and my friend pastor Reginald Payne. Tracy did a wonderful job decorating the sanctuary and the membership stepped up to serve all of our guest. The jokes were hilarious. Thank you to everyone who attended and participated we really appreciate it.

Saturday was cleanup….a lot of work but we got it done to prepare for Sunday morning worship. Aysia had her 1st track meet at Artesia High School. She did a good job in the high jump and long jump.

Sunday I took a break from our series in Philippians and preached Psalms 67 – “Blessed To Reach The World”.

Sermon Theme: This Psalms is evangelistic in nature and the natural response towards the blessing of salvation is “Let the peoples praise Him, let all the peoples praise Him” – v. 3

This Psalms provides four (4) reasons why we’re blessed to reach the world.

i. God’s Favor is upon us – v. 1
ii. God’s Ways are for us – v. 2a
iii. God’s Salvation is available to all of us – v. 2b
iv. God’s Praise is to be declared forever – v. 3-6

I pray all in attendance were blessed by the message!

The afternoon service went great. Tracy led worship and did a great job! Our guest churches were Pastor Michael Albert and Mt Aaron Church along with Pastor Todd Barnett and my nephew Pastor Louis Monroe and the Word of God Baptist Church. Pastor Monroe preached from Psalms 23 “What God Does when Life Hurts” but before he preached his father big Louis played “Blessed Assurance” on the organ and killed us. That man is a true church musician of which we don’t have many of these days. It was good seeing a friend I haven’t seen in years, Matt Falkner, who plays for Word of God. I started remembering our days at Mt Sinai and almost got on the drums to bring back old times but I held my peace.

My mother and aunty, “The Mothers of Judah Dance Ministry”, surprised the heck out of us with their mixing of the Cha-Cha and line dancing to gospel music. It was different and fresh to see seniors get their groove on. But I’m sure they were hurting by the end of the night…lol Great Job! We did a special tribute for a dear member, Sis Georgia Loud, who recently became ill. We just wanted to say thank you to her for all of her service over the years to the First Goodwill Church. Emotions ran high has Tracy and Sadie began talking about her and what she means to them. It’s been hard as a pastor and for the church to see her and her husband sick but has been gracious to the both of them and for that I thank God.

Last Wednesday, we as a church committed to fasting and prayer from 6 to 6 for the sole purpose of asking God to restore the joy of our salvation for effective ministry and mission advancement. I felt the help of fasting this past Sunday as I preached and decided to fast every Wednesday until Resurrection Sunday (Easter Sunday).

Overall the weekend was good!