Celebrate Recovery vs. Regular Programming

Well, we have had somewhat of a dilemma the past few months trying to figure out how in the world to do what we feel we need to do with a lack of people to accomplish it all. For those of you unfamiliar, Celebrate Recovery is a Christianized 12 step program that makes no apologies for naming Jesus the Higher Power and the steps are focused on the Beatitudes. We've seen number of our people go through this program at CR's in our area. Transportation is always difficult as most of our folks don't have transportation, so it became necessary to begin to think about having a Celebrate Recovery run out of Penn Avenue Church of the Nazarene. We began to have conversations about the night we should do it. It's best to find a night that is open throughout the rest of the city so people could come if they can't come on another night. We were leaning toward Sunday night, for a number of reasons. #1--This is a regularly scheduled night when our people are already at church. As usual, Sunday nights tend to be the least attended service of the week as people generally stay home and rest. Penn Ave has two groups of people. We have "the street people" (as they are so affectionately called and I mean this) and we have the regulars who have stayed throughout the years. Initially the argument was made that the best night was Saturday as it would fill a desperate need for something positive in our community. This made sense to me but I began to wonder how we were going to get everything accomplished remotely successfully if we asked our people to be at church, Saturday night (really starting about three in the afternoon and going until ten) Sunday morning and Sunday night. #2--This is a good night in the community to do this. In our community, it would be a good night every night.

We've run into a bit of a stalemate, but not because anybody has a divisive spirit. Some very legitimate questions have come up. I ask that you pray for us as we begin to nail down some decisions tonight at board meeting.