Letter from Our Pastor

Dear Buck Run Church:

Summer’s here, and I’m for that! Our Vacation Bible School has been in full swing this week and our middle schoolers have been at camp. Pastor Zack and Scott have been at Cedarmore, Dr. Noss and I have been at the Southern Baptist Convention, while Pastors Adam and Chris have been holding down the fort in Frankfort. Summer is a busy time, to say the least, and it’s about to get busier.

If you haven’t met both of our new staff members yet, you need to do that right away. Chris Parrish is an incredibly capable preacher with pastoral experience and a great heart for God. Chris and Hannah have bought a home in Elkhorn Terrace and are making Frankfort their home. They and their daughter, Elizabeth, are a marvelous addition to our church and pastoral families.

Scott and Katherine Riessen are working with our students and already doing a great job. Along with their little boy, Warner, they bring a wealth of training, heart, passion, and experience to round out our pastoral staff. I could not be more pleased nor more grateful for how God led us to them and confirmed in our hearts that they were right for Buck Run.

On Sunday evening, June 28, we are going to begin training for our expanded Community Groups. This new ministry emphasis is going to give us an opportunity to connect with each other AND with others in our lives and communities. We are looking for people to lead community groups. We are going to give all the leaders a minute-by-minute agenda and the training to make it work. No one will have to make it up or figure it out alone, but you must have a willing heart, an open home, and a friendly spirit.

Community Groups really reflect who Buck Run is. This is a friendly, caring, connecting, serving, loving church. Those connections have been limited, however, because we have had to divide into two services and go to Sunday School with the same people. Additionally, because Sunday School classes are tasked with doing so many things—fellowship, prayer, ministry to one another, and Bible study—something always seems to get left out or shorted. By separating these things, we will give them ample time as well as have a non-threatening way to include neighbors and friends.

Tanya and I are going to be heavily involved in getting the Community Groups ministry going, so when we begin training on June 28, Dr. Wesley Noss will be leading a Bible study at the church campus for those who enjoy that. Wesley and Joan have been a tremendous blessing to Buck Run. Not many pastors get to enjoy the benefits of such an experienced ministry couple, so I count my blessings and thank God that He has led them to Buck Run for this season.

We are so wonderfully blessed, aren’t we? I do not want to be anywhere else than right here where God is so obviously at work. Let us be obedient, filled with grace, in love with the Lord Jesus, focused on the lost, and saturated with the gospel! God is at work!

Clinging to Christ who clings to me,

 

HershaelWYork digital signature black