Through the month of August our focus in worship will be prayer, specifically, the Prayer for Antioch.
We have been offering this prayer each Sunday for several months now and God has been responding to the faithfulness
of His people. Our summer has indeed been a very blessed one with more activities and opportunities for worship and
service than most of us could keep up with. There will always be things we need to work on to improve and make better.
All of us can make a list of areas our church can improve. That is the nature of any group of human being. Because
we are not per-fect our church will not be perfect, unless God does something for us that we cannot do for ourselves.
There is a good spirit of support and participation at Antioch and I believe we are on the cusp of a spiritual breakthrough. 
It is a break-through however, that God must bring. So we pray.

August has five Sundays. I am planning to preach four ser-mons based on the Antioch Prayer and rooted in Scripture.
It is my prayer that these sermons will help us understand better who we are as the chil-dren of God in this place.
I also hope these sermons will help us to rely on God’s grace for the now and the future. The fourth sermon will
 focus on the last line of the prayer which ends with these words; “With grateful hearts for your amazing grace,
we wait. . .” The thought has occurred to me that we need to ex-plore just what it is that we are waiting for and
how we are waiting for it.

It is likely that we will find we are waiting for something different. Our priorities for our church will not
always be the same. Some things that are important to one person may not be as important to another.
That brings me to the last Sunday in August. On our last Sunday focusing on prayer I want us to give serious and
prayerful thought to those things we wait for God to bring to us and I want us to explore how we are waiting for
 God. Do we have expectant hearts and ready minds to embrace the call God may bring to us? Are we willing to take
the actions and make the commitments God may call us to make?

I am not sure what form that closing service will take but I hope it will be interactive and challenging and I hope
we will all find ourselves in one mind and one spirit as we resolve to follow God’s direction for our church.
I am excited about the coming days and our worship together. May God bless and guide all our efforts.

Randy