Update! The BBQ this Sunday will now be at 5:00 pm. Hope you can make it!

Congratulations to Cam MacDonald, the new Mr. Tapestry 2007, for his impressive dumbbell display on Sunday morning. Our series in Luke has been a lot of fun, and we'll continue this Sunday with Luke 4:31-44.

Coming up

• We're having a BBQ this Sunday at Thom and Lorie's for our last summer team. They're a group of college students from Athens Georgia, and they're a whole lot of fun. After a long week of volunteering and helping out around the community, this Sunday will be their only Sunday to spend with the church. The Gordon's are generously providing burgers and hot-dogs, so bring a side dish to share and come "meat" this great group of people. The fun will start right after church at 5:00 pm this Sunday. For a map to Thom and Lorie's, click here.
• Family Camp is coming up 17 August. There are no details on the website yet, but if you already know you're going, you can go ahead and sign up and we'll email you all the details later. Click here to sign up.
• VBS Follow Up is going on now. If you would like to visit one of our VBS families, bring them a gift, and invite them to connect with Tapestry, click here to contact Josh and Khara Tait and let them know.

On the web
• All the photos of us volunteering at the Tuscany Stampede Breakfast are now online. Click here to watch us serving up pancakes and having a great time. A special thanks to Lindsay Reitzel for coming out and taking all these photos. Thanks Lindsay!

• The brand new MOPS page is up. There's more to come, but you can already register for the new MOPS session. If you've been meaning to sign up and just haven't yet, click here to put your name down. Make sure to forward this page to friends and neighbors in Tuscany you think might be interested.
• This week on the ol' blog you can read about all the excitement that took place when the Pastoral Team met up with the Finance Team, and you can get to know a little more about the team of college students volunteering with Tapestry this week all the way from Athens, Georgia.

-Nick

A special thanks to Mark Taylor, the Children's Pastor at FanninTerrace Baptist Church in Midland Texas, for his sermon Sunday. Mark did a great job of breaking down the importance of the shema, the commandment found in Deuteronomy 6:4-9, explaining the important role Christian parents play in modeling and teaching faith to their children as they eat, hang out, drive around, and just do life together.


Coming up

• This Saturday, 14 July, is the Tuscany Stampede Breakfast. If you aren't signed up to help out, make sure you click here to put your name down. This is one of the best things Tapestry has done in the community. We still run into people who know us as "The people who were at the pancake breakfast." Don't forget to wear your Tapestry shirt!
• VBS is going on now, and there's still space available. Make sure to bring your kids down and tell your neighbors it's not too late to get in on the fun. Click here for more details.
• This Sunday begins a new preaching series through the Gospel of Luke. We'll be looking at the ways Jesus and others in the gospel kept our five practices: praying, hanging out, studying the scriptures, serving, and talking about Jesus. Jesus does all these things, but He doesn't always do them the way we'd expect. We'll all learn a lot as we examine Jesus' life to discover how we can model our lives after His. This week we begin with a look at how John the Baptist talked about Jesus in Luke 3:1-22 and Luke 7:18-35.
• Click here to view the Tapestry Tuscany online calendar.

On the web
To track my pastoral life and recent musings, peruse our most recent Bible study, or check in on life at Tapestry Rocky Ridge, click on over to Symbiosis, aka "The Blog." For a great place to start, check this post for a peek into the inner workings of the Pastoral Team, complete with a spy photo of the meeting!

-Nick

This is the very first of our new online newsletters where I'll give you the skinny on life at Tapestry. This is an important part of our push to bring more unity to Tapestry through increased communication, so please take the time to at least glance over this and make sure you get all the info. If I've forgotten anything that everyone should know about, please send me an email and remind me.

Coming up

• This Friday we're having an adventurous Prayer Night in Citadel. You can join Kelly and Brooke as we walk the streets of this community where they are church starting, praying for the people who live there, and for Tapestry's efforts to reach them. Meet at the Esso on the corner at Nose Hill and Country Hills at 7:00 pm. Don't forget insect repellant and sunscreen. For more info, contact Kelly.
• Tuscany Stampede Breakfast is Saturday, 14 July, and we need all the volunteers we can get to make this an even better time for our friends and neighbors. We'll be cooking, serving, setting up, and tearing down. Oh, and of course, we'll be eating. Please take a moment to register yourself and your family so that we know we can count on seeing you there. You can register here.
• Tapestry is holding Vacation Bible School at the Tuscany Club 9-13 July. Space is limited, so if you haven't registered your kids ages 4-12 yet, click here to register. Make sure to invite your friends and neighbors to sign up as well. This is a great opportunity for kids to learn the stories of Jesus, and for their parents to build a connection with the church.
• This Sunday we'll be at the Tuscany Club, and every Sunday for the rest of the summer! We've had some recent scheduling conflicts, so this is great news. Thanks to all of you who made the treks out to Arbour Lake and cozied up with us at Bob and Debbie's for our Sundays away. Apologies to everyone who came looking for us at the Tuscany Club on the Sundays we weren't there. For times and directions good through August, click here.

On the web

• 
  Bike Fest photos are online! The Bike Fests in Rocky Ridge and Citadel were as much fun as can be had on 2 wheels. These were a huge help to both our church starts, and they added some incredible presence to these two communities. These places were different and better for a few hours because we were there. Our people had dozens of spiritual conversations with people who never come to our churches as we ate, played, talked, and peddled with these people. Pray for us as we follow up with the people we've met, sharing the gospel and inviting them to join us in following Jesus. A very special thanks to the Bike Fest team from Heart, and to our BBQers from FBC Tifton. We couldn't have done it without their hard work and great Bike Fest supplies.
• Tapestry Tuscany has a brand new Google Calendar. You can view it on the Tapestry Tuscany page, or add it to your own Google Calendar or iCal so that you're always up to date.
• Notes from Nick is the brand new page with a catalogue of all my emails to Tapestry at large. Visit this page to find the most up to date newsletter, along with an archive of previous letters and other pertinent emails, such as my recent letter to the church on our current state of transition (click here). Of course, if you're reading this, you've probably figured that out already.

-Nick

Thank you to everyone who was able to stay after the service 17 June for the Transition Team presentation. We appreciated your feedback, and I thought the dialogue was helpful for everyone involved. This email is a summary of what we presented, and I hope that it will offer some clarity to everyone about where we are going, and how we plan to get there.

Values & Practices
I have attached the list of values and practices we presented. Please take the time to look these over, meditate on them, and try them out in your life. I think you will find them useful as we join together to walk in the way of Jesus. You might even want to commit them to memory. These should shape the purpose and practice of Tapestry for years to come.

A Road Map
The Transition Team has finished with the values and practices. We will take the summer to begin working on a covenant, statement of faith, and constitution. We don’t expect to be done with these documents before December. We plan to begin taking résumés and talking with pastoral candidates in September, before we are finished with these documents, knowing that it may take several months to settle on a candidate.

Tapestry is making steady progress in calling a new pastor. Though this may seem like a slow process, it is not unusual for churches that already have their values, practices, constitution, and covenant in place to take well more than a year in finding the right person to lead their church. Tapestry is not only formulating all these documents, but calling a pastor at the same time, and we still expect to be in a position to call a pastor by January 2008. This does not mean that we will find the right person by then; only God knows when that will happen. But it does mean that we will be ready for it to happen.

A Thought
God had always planned to give Israel a king. Moses predicted it would happen one day. The problem with Israel asking for a king in 1 Samuel 8 was not that God had other plans, but that Israel was more willing to put their faith in a king than in God. Samuel rebuked them for this, and though God provided a king, their first king was far from their best. “We want to be like the nations around us,” they said, “Our king will lead us into battle” (v20). Now, a pastor is no king, but the question for us is very much the same in this time of transition. Will we insist on a leader to bring us stability, or will we trust God? Will we be satisfied to follow Him? Will we wait for Him to provide us a new pastor, or will we insist on our own provision now? I know Tapestry well enough to believe that we all want to wait for God. I know people well enough to know that, just like Israel, the harder things get as they now stand, the more we are going to want to insist on a quick solution. This doesn’t mean that we wait idly by for God to magically work everything out. It means that we have enough faith and patience to go through the process the right way, even when it’s hard, and to trust God to work things out in His timing. It means active waiting, with us doing everything we can to prepare for the moment of God’s provision. If you have no particular role to play, your active prayers and open eyes will still be a great asset to the church. Please ask God to provide, and to help us know when He has put the right person in our path. Please keep your eyes out for pastoral candidates you can request a résumé from and recommend to the Transition Team.

For More Info
Feel free to contact me about anything concerning this process of transition. I will be happy to answer your questions as well as I am able, and to share any concerns you have with the rest of the Transition Team. May God bless us with wisdom and patience as we seek to follow Him above all others.

-Nick