Those of you new to this site or our parish might not know that this week we’re moving. We’re moving our entire church exactly one mile north, to the corner of Timonium and York Road, where were celebrating Easter at the Maryland State Fair. We’ll be doing two Masses on Sunday morning as well as the Vigil on Saturday evening.*
Last Thursday we hosted a rally for the (get this) 600 people who will be working at the Fairgrounds next weekend. It turns out you need 600 people if you are going to do an adequate job hosting 6,000 guests, new comers and parishioners. Our ministers will be setting up (all week long), cleaning up and taking down afterwards, parking cars, greeting guests, distributing communion and taking care of kids. Many of these member ministers are serving for the first time, so this Easter will mark a significant milestone in the growth of Adult Ministry at Nativity.
Going to the Rally was a very moving experience. Seeing our church filled with people who are willing to get up out of the pew and make Easter not all about them, but about the people who aren’t even here, was awesome.
This weekend, as we celebrate Palm Sunday, we’ll have a chance to encourage everybody one more time to make an invitation to friends and family (who don’t have a church) to join us for church. There are no invitation cards left, we printed up 3,000 and they were gone last weekend (good job guys!). But you can still invite people, through our web site, or just the old fashioned way, face to face. We need your help: we’ll have 3,000 seats and we want to fill them twice, our goal is 6,000 in attendance. That means you’ve got to invite your friends and family (who don’t have a church) to be church with us next Sunday.
If your friends and family (who don’t have a church) live elsewhere, you can still invite them to join us. We’ll be live streaming both services, 9:30 & 11:30am live, on our web site, and it will be the whole Mass. Just direct your guests to the “LIVE!” poster on our home page.
We want to make an impact on our community this Easter, and help people who are far from God learn more about what God did for them, and what he can do for them. We want to help people make that move. We want to be a movement of Christ followers who help move potential Christ followers. We don’t want to be a monument on Ridgely Road. We want to be a movement in north Baltimore. That means we’ve got to move.
*(We are only doing the Vigil there for convenience. Typically no more than a few hundred people attend, and they can easily be accommodated in the church. However, it would be impossible to do the Vigil on Ridgely Road and then move to the fairgrounds Saturday night and be ready the next morning. So, we’ll do it there, even though we’ll only fill a few sections of the space, it should be an interesting experience).
