10th Anniversary Sunday (2001)
Tom Shrader marks East Valley Bible Church's 10th anniversary by recounting the church's founding convictions rooted in Acts 2:42, its commitment to Reformed doctrine including God's election and the preservation of the saints, and its resistance to the seeker-sensitive movement. He highlights the church plant in Tempe, the launch of a new website, and upcoming campus construction as evidence of God's blessing over a decade. Looking forward, he calls the congregation to stay doctrinally grounded, mainstream missions, train men for ministry, continue planting churches, and finish the campus debt-free for the next generation.
“God saved us for a reason, and he put us here for a purpose. And East Valley Bible Church is a tool he's using till he comes again.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: EVBC Anniversary Sunday - 2001
Recorded: 2001 at East Valley Bible Church
Duration: 1 hr 19 min
Themes: church anniversary, faithfulness, vision, missions, church planting, doctrine, God's blessing, legacy, church member, pastor, long-time believer, new to the church, ministry leader, parent raising next generation, missions-minded Christian, elder
Scripture: Acts 2:42
Theological Themes: ecclesiology, church structure, reformed doctrine, election, perseverance of the saints, biblical worship, great commission, Acts 2:42
Full Transcript
Celebrating Ten Years
The first Sunday in November each year, we stop and celebrate, remembering what God has done here at East Valley Bible Church. This year carries a special significance, as we mark our 10th anniversary. Yesterday, November 3rd, technically marked the date — in 1991 we held our very first service together. We celebrated with a picnic, and for the first time in four years we were all together in one place. It was a wonderful day to see the diversity and size of this church.
Why East Valley Bible Church Exists
When we began, we did not want to simply start a church that was doing what every other church was already doing. That seemed pointless. There had to be something distinctive and unique about it. Acts chapter 2, verse 42 became really our basis — that church grew through prayer, fellowship, the apostles' teaching, and the breaking of bread. Those became the elements we saw as essential for us.
From a preferential standpoint, we looked around and saw churches with great teaching but fairly average worship and little concern for much else. We saw other places with great worship and great facilities where the teaching simply was not there. We wanted to combine those two things, and by God's grace, on November 3rd we began that work. We did not really know what we were doing, but it became clear to me very quickly that we were doing something unique — though it should not have been unique at all. What we were doing seemed to me to be what every church ought to be doing.
Holding to Historical Doctrine
I am no historian and not particularly bright, but I could see two things happening in the broader church. First, I could see the rise of the seeker-sensitive movement, where churches were reaching out to lost people — which is fine — but changing their worship, their message, and everything else in order to reach them. Second, I could see the church moving away from the historical doctrines we adhere to and cling to.
It was moving away from the teaching of the depravity of man, God's move in our hearts, His electing us, the extent of the atonement, and the fact that we are preserved by the Holy Spirit — that God saved us. Those messages are not preached very often anymore. That has really been a distinctive of East Valley Bible Church. We know who we are, we know what we are about, and we know what we are not, and that makes things much easier for us.
We are not trying to please everyone. We recognize that there are certain people for whom this should never be their church home, because they do not fit with us and they do not appreciate the way we do what we do — and we are not about to change that. That may sound harsh on the surface, but it is actually a very loving thing to do.
Planting New Churches
One thing that became obvious early on was that God was going to bless us with people who had a passion for serving in ministry. Church planting became important to me, even though I knew nothing about it, and God began to bring us the right people. Walter Crutchfield was really the first of those. It was in April of this year that we were able to launch East Valley Bible Church Tempe, and Walter has already grown that congregation to the point of holding two services. I asked him to share a brief update on what is happening there.
In April of this year, Walter had the privilege of taking a team of people from East Valley Bible Church — along with a number of others committed to the church plant, including elders, deacons, and an initial group of roughly 75 to 100 leaders — and beginning East Valley Bible Church Tempe.
God's Work at East Valley Bible Church Tempe
It has been exciting to watch what God has done this year. We know the responsibility of bearing the East Valley Bible name, but also the joy that comes with it. In the last six months, we have watched God build a congregation of about 500 people. We have watched God raise up young men and women who have a heart's desire to pursue the truth and to pursue the kingdom wherever God calls them, whether in business, in the university setting, or in Tempe itself.
We have seen God use individuals — young men and women who might typically be out of the loop of leadership in some places — step up and take responsibility for the church, for their families, and for evangelizing, realizing the world we minister in. Whether it is community ministry, working with the homeless, tutoring in the school system, or the university Bible study that now has between 300 and 400 students, we have watched God do a great thing. We are excited about the privilege of getting other teams ready to go and plant churches. We have a number of young men who we believe will be ready to do that in the future, and we consider it a tremendous privilege to be a part of East Valley Bible Church.
On the occasion of this 10th anniversary, representing East Valley Bible Church Tempe, I would like to say thank you to Tom and to the elders and to the people of this church. We would pray that in the next 10 years, Lord willing, at the 20th anniversary, we would look out at 10, 20, maybe 100 churches — not just in this valley, but all over this world for the glory of God.
The Elder Team
Walter's phone number is on the back of the bulletin every week, and if you are interested in that ministry, you need to get more information about it. There is a group of men — the elder team — whose names are on the back of your bulletin, and I want to bring them up front so that you can see them. These are the men charged with the responsibility of leading the church, and that is a very awesome task.
Some of what they handle is exactly what you would imagine and is relatively straightforward. We look at certain doctrinal truths and those decisions are fairly clear. But then comes the wisdom to apply them to life — the charge of figuring out, yes, people grow best in a small group setting, but what does that look like? How does it begin to work itself out? How do we put flesh on it?
These are men who, apart from their time on the elder board, spend hours and hours of thought and prayer on how they can be used by God in this church. They have a task that carries enormous responsibility, and they take it very seriously. You rarely see them on this platform, but you see them all over campus all the time. Some are retired, some are working, and they are spending between 20 and 30 hours a week fulfilling their responsibility as elders here at the church.
As the sheer size of this church increases, the responsibility increases and the challenges increase. Through all of this, their emphasis is not on numerical growth but on spiritual growth. They are truly charged with the spiritual welfare of you and of your family, and I would ask you to continue to keep this group of men in your prayers as we look to the future.
The New Church Website
A couple of years ago it became clear to me that I had been the one who predicted the computer was just a phase we would all pass through. I revisited that, and I think I might have been wrong — and that hurt. But what I did come to understand, once I got into it myself and started exploring, is that the World Wide Web was something significant. While there is a great downside to it, there is a great upside as well.
We put together a website a few years ago, but what we kept seeing told us more was needed. A great example: last month, in the getting-plugged-in class for people new to the church, I asked how they had found East Valley Bible Church. Four of them said they found us over the internet — not through a friend, not by driving by, but over the internet. So about six months ago we brought Josh Cass on staff. He covers a number of areas, but his primary responsibility in these first six months has been to put together a new website.
We want to pull the site up for you today and let you see it and navigate through it. The team was uncomfortable putting this up in this setting, because it is not going to look exactly as it will on your own computer screen, so some of it is hard to read. Our point is not to show you exactly what it will look like on your screen, but to show you what this site can do. We expect you to make use of this site, because communicating with you is important and the website is an important tool for that.
This is phase one of the website — the skeleton. We will now build on it. There are additions, improvements, and things we still want to address. Across the top you will see four key areas: Ministries, My EVBC, Elders and Staff, and Find Media. In the Ministries area, you click and you will see a list of the ministries here at the church, and you can stop at any one of them. Student Ministries looks a little different from the others — there is a great deal going on there, with all sorts of different options available.
The MyEVBC Portal
One of the unique features of the new website is MyEVBC. We realize that a lot of people have large families that are part of the church. What would be ideal for the typical family is to be able to get online and determine not only what they are doing that week, but also what their kids and their spouse are doing. That is the first step of MyEVBC.
To walk through an example, we used Lorraine Scorza's account to demonstrate how it works. The first person you see when logging in is Justin Scorza, her son. You can see that one of the groups he is in is Student Ministries High School, that he meets weekly on Sunday at 1 o'clock p.m., and that his leader is Greg Scoria. From there, you can click directly to email his discipleship leader, and you can also see other events he is involved in at that time.
From the same login, you can also see Lorraine's own information, her husband or wife, and additional family members further down the page. An important detail is that everything displayed is pulled in real-time from our church database, which means changes are instantaneous. This also means you can now go online and update your personal information directly into the database. If you move or change phone numbers, you can enter that information and it will be immediately reflected in our member directory.
That is the foundation of what MyEVBC is. We will be adding additional features in phases two and three to give you a greater ability to tailor the information you see specifically to what you do at East Valley Bible. For those of you with families, it should be a great help to log on and automatically see activities update and change as they are entered into the database, tracking family activities that are important to you with one click.
Elders, Staff, and Finding Media
The Elders and Staff section is exactly what you would expect. It is a list that allows you to email any of the elders or staff directly. You can click on individual names and see a photo along with their information. Eventually, there will be a recorded conversation with each of these people so you can learn a little about them as well.
Find Media is another section of the site, and while it includes access to message tapes, it is much more than that. The Media Library is something new, and it is likely something many churches will begin doing. East Valley offers a lot of different types of media, including messages online, but also study guides for small groups and other resources. Browsing the list, you will find message notes, newsletters, files, photos, photo albums, and more — all searchable online.
As a quick example, searching for study guides using the keyword "John" brings up all the lessons available on First John. Clicking on one of those results provides a document link that allows you to view the lesson and print it out for your group. Tom's messages are also included, and soon all of the pastors' and speakers' messages will be available as well. You can search by keyword, by speaker name, or by a specific date if you know when a particular message was given.
For each message in the search results, you can choose to listen in either MP3 or RealAudio format, or you can view and print the message notes. In addition to the messages, there are approximately 200 study guides generated specifically for small groups — and there are tools available to you that we have only begun to explore.
Website Resources and Navigation
Most of you don't even know they're there. Our staff has written very helpful tools you can use in your own study. For example, if you wanted to start a small group at your office and knew you had limited time to prepare, you could use the resources already available. There are 200 study guides online right now, and there is a lot of information there.
The church directory is another useful feature. You can search by name — for example, searching "Pelen" brings up the Pelens we have listed, including their email. Over to the right, for those who have listed it, you can also see their occupation. You can search the directory in creative ways — type in "real estate," for instance, and it will present a page of people in our congregation involved in that field. We don't endorse anybody, but you understand the point: this is what they do.
Our whole point in showing you all of this is for you to get onto that site and start navigating your way through it. Email Josh with anything you see that could be improved. There is also a visitor information section — everything a first-time guest needs is right there, from directions to the campus to service times. The Shop EVVC section is not quite totally ready, but you will soon be able to go online and buy any of the books we carry in the bookstore. We are working through finalizing the details of how we will present them to you.
Common destinations — the pages that get the most hits — will be prominently listed so you can get to them quickly. We want you to be aware of this, because it is a significant change, and we hope you will use it. That is a great way for us to communicate with you. Josh has done a magnificent job putting it all together.
Numerical Growth Since Opening
Let me take you back and talk to you about building. Many of you know we are in the process of building, and there have been a lot of changes over the years. If you let your eye fall across the numbers from our move-in date through that first year and a half, you can see growth from 600 to 2,500. We have just continually grown.
I was very selective in how I presented this data, taking it month to month, because you can manipulate this information very easily. Notice what I did not do — I did not include September 2001, because those numbers were skewed. I could have really impressed you with them, because that was when we had those two weeks where many non-believers came in thinking they needed it. It just blows me away that people say, "We just need God," only in times like that. You need God each and every day, and lost people, unless the Spirit opens their eyes, are never going to see it.
You might also look at the numbers and think there was not much growth from April to October in a given period. You have to remember that three or four hundred people left during that time to go to another church in the midst of that. Here is what a typical Sunday looks like. I chose this particular Sunday deliberately — it was the first Sunday after we moved to Saturday night with the students — and you can see how we spread out the service times on Sunday, which is exactly what we wanted to do. We were running as many as 320 to 330 kids at 9:30, which was simply a zoo, and we are back to 219. My whole point is that we are getting ready to build some buildings, and I want you to understand there is a legitimate need for it.
The Building Project
I want to emphasize that November 12th is the time to come and look at all of this. That is when we will invite you in and spend time walking you through it. So right now I am just trying to whet your appetite.
The existing buildings are what we are currently in. We have wrapped those buildings with classroom space — about 22,000 square feet of classroom space. North of that is an office building with about 7,000 square feet of office space, and north of that is the conference center, which is a flat-floor space. We have reached a point where ministry is being impeded by the building. Women's ministry is a great example — you put them around tables in a flat-floor space and things are flying all over, because that is just how relational they are. It is natural. But they cannot fit in Room 100. So the conference center will house that.
All of that is about 99% designed. We are into the city and working through the development process. We think we will start construction in April and be done by Christmas. None of that, however, provides any relief for the worship center itself.
The worship center seats about 2,400. Within it, the youngest children — birth through three or four months — will be positioned down in front, so you can place your child right there without worry. The main entrance will be to the left of that, and a full bookstore and coffee shop will occupy that area as well.
The New Campus
November 12th is really the day. Coming in out of the existing parking lot, the bookstore is on the left as you move through the campus. The next view shows the bookstore café area. Standing in the worship center looking out, you can see the conference center and the office building. There is the new education wing, and looking back from that wing toward the worship center gives you a sense of the full layout.
We did a computer-generated fly-through to orient you. Coming right out of your car onto the site, you emerge on the south end moving forward. The bookstore is to the left, the new classroom building is to the right, and then you make a turn toward the front of the worship center. You can see a canopied area of about 7,000 square feet — roughly the size of this room — all under canopies, all shaded. That is where we will do all the signups, and coffee will be available there. It will be a terrific area for people to gather.
On the left is the main entrance into the worship center. Every place you see palm trees, those are identification markers that will guide you to a drop-off area and help with your orientation on campus. To the left is the conference center, and to the right is the office building. Swinging back around, the classrooms for children are on the left. We will cover all of this in depth on the 12th, but that gives you a sense of it — and looking back, on the right is the new worship center. November 12th at 7 o'clock, you need to be here. We are very excited about it.
No Pledge Drive, No Campaign
I want to go through some things about the future, and I want to make certain we have this right. Some of you are new to the church and may be thinking, "I can't believe this — I left the last church over a building program, and now we're in another one, and this will be awful." It will not be awful. People are already asking: when is the banquet? When are the pledge cards? What Sunday will the thermometer come out?
We do not do that. I will tell you why other churches do it, and you need to listen closely — they do it because it works. But we think it violates the way we handle things. So there is no pledge drive, there is no campaign, and there is no thermometer. There is, however, a huge need, and we are trusting God to fill it. We will try to find ways to keep you informed without letting the building campaign consume everything that is important beyond it.
Staying Focused on What We Do Well
Here is the first thing I want you to see about where my heart is for the future: staying focused on the things we are already doing. We are doing some things here extraordinarily well, and I do not want us to lose sight of that. The core beliefs that we have, in a mild way, suffered for and sacrificed for — they will not change.
Mainstreaming Missions
Here is the second thing: mainstream missions. For ten years, missions has been part of the church, but never a real part of the church. That is our fault. It always seems to be off to the side — something separate — and every once in a while it bops in, we go out and eat interesting food in the courtyard, and then we say we are done with that for a year. It has never truly been woven into the life of the church.
Beginning December 1st, Mike Posh and Lynn Posh and their family are coming on staff, and their entire focus is to mainstream missions. I want missions to be a part of every department of the church. It seems reasonable to me that if there are 100 small group leaders, God is probably calling one or two or three — or ten — of them to be involved in full-time missions. That is where our missionaries ought to come from.
Many of you are retired. You hit 50 or 55, and God has blessed you with strength and income. Why are we spending three thousand dollars a month sending out 20-year-olds when you have already raised your money and are living on it here? We could send you somewhere where you can live on half of that and be used in a mighty way. But nobody ever challenges you with that vision, and we never talk about it. Missions is a big part of what this future needs to look like.
Identifying and Training Men
Here is the third thing: identify and train men. God continues to bring us men whom He is preparing for ministry, and one of the awesome responsibilities we have as a body is to identify them and train them.
Continuing to Plant Churches
The fourth goal is to continue to plant churches. There are churches around who have pulpits that are empty, and we have people that we will train and that God will probably bring into other churches. That is hard work. It is tough because you are not just fighting the normal struggles — on top of those, you face perhaps a philosophy that is radically different from what we believe or how we would do things. Even so, we want to plant churches.
Completing the Campus
The fifth and final goal is very personal for me: I want to complete the campus and get it paid for. I think all the time about dying. I think about my life and how it is going to end, and it is simply obvious to me that when you set aside my family, the consuming thing in my life is this church. I think about this church all day, every day, and I think about what this church can be.
I look at what it was. I look at those humble beginnings, and I look at how, although there have been temptations, we have never really varied from those first beliefs, that first philosophy. I may have said it before in this hour, and I have certainly said it in all the others: we are a very unique place — and we should not be. This should be the norm. This should be the way people do things.
I am not saying anyone has to do it this way, but there are things that make this place what it is. God is blessing this place for a reason. I want to spend the balance of my life getting this campus completed and getting rid of the debt, because we will accumulate debt along the way. I want to eliminate that debt so that when the man who comes after me arrives, and he is going to want to change things, he does not have to be encumbered by buildings and debt in order to make those changes.
I am not talking about changes in doctrine. I am talking about something I think about all the time: how do we keep this place young? I look at the churches around the valley, many of them, and I see they are filled with older people — and I am becoming an older person myself. How does a church stay young? Whether you like the answer or not, part of it is having young people in leadership and young people making decisions.
Passing the Church to the Next Generation
I look forward to leading my generation to finish this campus, to build it, and to give it to the next generation to do what God has called them to do. We have not done that very well when you look around the broader church. It does not happen very often, and that is an awesome responsibility.
A Call to Be Part of Something Significant
Let me close with this. God has placed you here for a reason, and you are in a very unique place. This is a terrific church — not perfect, but it is a good church. He has you here for a reason. Something drew you here. I would say it was the Holy Spirit, and humanly something drew you here as well. I hope it is the sense that you can be an important part of something truly significant that God is using. Will you be? That is what we ask. That is what we pray for. That is what we hope.
Why do we do all this? I was lying in bed the other night, and I woke up thinking about a number of things, and I thought: why do we go through this? Because it is hard. Because there is something bigger than us. Because God saved us for a reason and He put us here for a purpose. East Valley Bible Church is a tool He is using until He comes again.
There is a time, an end to our life, where we will either die or He will come again to gather His church — He the Bridegroom, we the bride — to go and to be with Him forever.
Closing Prayer
Father, thank You. Thank You for Your Son, Jesus. Thank You for His life and for His death. Thank You for the salvation that we find in Him and Him alone. God, we look forward to the day, not too long from now, when we will be with You forever. God, I pray that as we look over the balance of our lives, we can see how You have worked and see what You have done.
God, we thank You. We thank You for choosing us. We thank You for saving us. We thank You for bringing us into Your kingdom. We thank You for all the work You have done in our lives. We come not to repay You, God, but in response and in thanksgiving for what You have done. God, we come and we present our bodies to You as a living sacrifice. God, let us live in light of eternity. Let us live today and each day with an understanding that not too long from now, You will call Your church home. God, let that be our thought. Amen.