Wow, it's been a while!

This will be the first of many blogs about our recent trip to West Virginia. This first one will be an introduction to what we experienced.

We arrived in Fayetteville, West Virginia Saturday with great hopes of just winning person after person to Christ. We were on fire and ready to ignite a town that we knew was only 20% churched. We had a well-prepared team of many first time mission trippers just sitting on go to share the Gospel. After settling in to New River Baptist Church, figuring out how to arrange 24 people on air mattress while keeping boys separated from girls and not destroying everything, we woke up to a church service with the congregation Sunday morning.

The congregation consisted of a group of 7 people, including the pastor, pastor's wife, and pastor's mother. Pastor George at first sight is an unusual character who prompted me to want to call him Captain for some reason. (He looks like a sea captain without the tattoos.) He was very friendly, but we really didn't get a true sense of who he is until the week went on.

We judged this congregation immediately as being dead, wondering what in the world the pastor was doing to have a church not growing. What we would eventually learn was an eye-opener. The next thing that we found was that the apartment complex we were working with had been largely reached with the Good News already.

Long story short, our hopes were temporarily dashed. Although the kids were still fired up to get going, the adult leaders were beginning to wonder what we were doing there. We didn't know, but God sure did.