The Vegas Project

Most of the people who are moving to Vegas to help start Verve are already here.  However, there are still about three families who are yet to come, and who need to sell and buy houses.  Please pray that God will totally be a part of this process and help these families to quickly sell their homes, and to find just the right houses to be used for furthering God’s vision in Las Vegas.

If you haven’t yet, check out Verve’s kicking web site at:  www.vivalaverve.org.

In today’s world, websites serve as the front porch for a church. Very rarely will anyone go to a church that they first haven’t checked out their web site. You almost get to the church through their web site.  So please pray that our website is a very effective front porch, that it captures people’s attention and leads them to want to learn and experience more.

One of our goals is to have thousands of “touches” with people who work on and live around the Strip in the months before our “Grand Opening.”  We want to establish our credibility through serving and meeting needs.  We want to show the gospel before we begin preaching it.  Our Launch Team will be doing all kinds of community service, but we won’t have enough on our Launch Team to reach this goal on our own.  We are therefore hoping to have churches from around the country send teams of people for a few days to do “servant evangelism” projects.  It might be handing out cold bottles of water on a hot day, or doing a free car wash, or who knows.  Please pray that we get many mission teams involved and that they are very effective in touching people with God’s love.

Tonight there is a city planning commission meeting where they will decide if we can get a zoning variance allowing us to have a church in the warehouse space we’re hoping to lease.

It should go well. Probably the biggest issue is the amount of parking spaces.

Please pray that it goes great and we get the okay.

Thanks!

There are eight comedy clubs in Las Vegas that have open mic nights. We are trying to come up with a lot of ways to plug ourselves into the community and build relationships. We have a staff member (Vince Antonucci) who thinks he’s funny and who has taken a stand-up comedy class in order to be able to explore reaching out into this venue. We then had another guy who moved to Vegas to be a part of starting Verve (David Tobey) who joined Vince in doing stand-up.

We also think it might be an opportunity to subtlely promote our church to the audiences. Please pray that Vince continues to build good relationships with his fellow classmates, gets the time to write some stand-up routines, and then has the guts to perform them.  Pray that it’s an effective way to meet people and maybe help them end up on our Launch Team or in our church.

We have a bunch of people moving to Vegas to be on staff or to be volunteer leaders in the church. Most have homes they need to sell before moving. Some have done so, but there are still a few people who need to do this. Please pray that they will be able to sell their homes quickly and at good prices.

Part of our plan for connecting and discipling people are Guerrilla Groups.  These groups will be somewhat like typical small groups, but with more of an outward focus and a huge community service element.  Please pray that our groups are incredibly effective in connecting and discipling the people God gives us, and in serving Las Vegas.

Las Vegas has a lot of Latino people.  We want them to feel comfortable in our church.  One of the things that helps people feel comfortable is when they see someone like them.  We would love to have a Latino man or woman to lead worship or play guitar in a band.  Please pray that God provides!

The University of Nevada at Las Vegas has about 27,000 students and is located about three miles from the location where we’re hoping to meet on Sundays. College is such an important time – a time when many kids who grew up in church lose their faith – a time when young people are making decisions about who they are and what their lives will be about. We would love to connect with students at UNLV and have many of them attend our church. Please pray for that. Also, there’s a college ministry I (Vince) am associated with, and I am praying that they will establish a campus ministry at UNLV, and that we’ll be able to help them.

We have several musicians already on our Launch Team, but still aren’t quite where we need to be to do what we want to do music wise.  This is especially true because we plan to have services on Sunday morning AND Tuesday evenings.

Please pray that God provides more people for our bands.  It looks like we’ll especially be needing drummers and bass guitarists…