It's a beautiful April Sunday! You, your spouse and your two young children drive up to the Golden West site of Grace Lutheran Church in your 2012 fusion-drive Bel Air minivan (the tailfins are back!)

There is plenty of room to park for the 10:30 AM service. Your kids can hardly wait to get out of the van and see their friends, and they run for the large plaza patio where the households from your home church (you all met on the Alpha course) have been waiting for you to go into the sanctuary together and sit in your "usual place."

The worship center looks like new for a 27-year-old room, especially with the extension of the hardwood floors and classic wooden altar and pulpit from 2006. You remember how you got married here in this room a few years ago because of Pastor Joe's pre-marriage outreach ministry which first attracted you to church life.

No sign of the grandparents yet, although they usually meet you for Starbuck's Coffee (served by Grace Youth) on the patio before the late service starts worship. Classical music plays lightly across the sunny patio through thimble-sized Bose speakers hidden in the trees as you saunter in together for the multi-generational "KidSong" time led by the Children's Pastor who dyed her hair yet another color this month....

After the songs, she leads them out to Kid City USA in the new KidsChurch/Pre-school building which wraps around the spacious patio (your children have been bugging you to go to "KCUSA" all week!) and your spouse goes up to gather with her friends in the choir loft for the call to worship. This week, worship is organ-, brass- and choir-led. Nature scenes stream across the large plasma screens during the singing of two classic hymns and one new one written last spring by Emma who is our youngest organist. The Grace School band is away at a concert at a sister church in Sacramento. We befriended them through our UPG (Unreached People Group) missions effort.

Speaking of the school, their low-competition, high-participation (everyone gets to play) sports have been super popular for young families tired of the "grind" of the OC kids' sports rat race.

Back to the worship service!

Evan, who is traveling on aerospace business in Boston, checks his watch so he can catch the streaming video (available on the Grace website in real time or archive) of the service on his laptop, recording the part where his teen daughter is one of the miked worship leaders so he can watch it over and over on the plane ride home.

The second Sunday of the month is always about missions, and right before the offering, we have a real time video greeting from Kassahun up on the plasma screens. Kassahun is our local pastor-in-training at our UPG site in Africa (he was one of the first converts from among his people a couple years ago) and is showing us exactly the project our second offering will go to. He has to get up in the middle of the night to make the transmission, but his smile is contagious!

Bible teaching is always the highlight (we are known all over OC for being the prevailing Bible Church), and during the high touch ministry time following the services one of the dozen or so bright-vested elders comes up and asks how your brother is doing after his surgery (she prayed with you personally last week over his situation). Your dad is an elder too, and he scans the departing crowd for first time visitors to welcome personally over a cup of coffee and a Krispy Kreme donut. A group of three elders is praying after the service with a young mom at the altar rail who is giving her life to the Lord for the first time. There is little need for form-filing or databases anymore since the relational friendship bonds are so personal--just like in the early days of the New Testament church. The well-trained admin staff is more efficient than it was ten years ago.

The crowd of about 300 leaves plenty of room for parking and for new people in the sanctuary.  When any service gets to large, we simply start a new venue so we can keep things personal because 150 left your late service community last fall to form a new Grace worship venue* that meets in the Bella Terra Mall conference center and focuses on reaching bi-lingual Latinos who are most comfortable in English but want to retain some of their Spanish language songs and social flavor. The launch of the new venue was a festival with all the Grace venues coming together to celebrate! Over 2,000 were present for the venue kickoff and fiesta party. Alabar al Senor!

After worship, the Grandparents are paying for lunch from the Grace Diner Grill stand on the patio with your home group. Lots of hugging (they say it goes back over 30 years) and laughter. Kids are already making plans for a sleepover next weekend with friends.

As you enjoy your family on the patio, the patio and sanctuary start to fill for a third time as the Spanish Language service of Iglesia de Gracia gets started.  Come to think of it, many of the faces in the English-language service at 10:30 were Latino...

This home church group just returned from a short term mission trip to our UPG in Africa over Christmas break. Our long term missionaries there (mostly Grace empty nesters with great skills) send us an all-new streaming video of their work every Monday.

Giving has gone into the "God zone" as we line our finances up with the Lord's plan for sharing our abundance. Much of the tithing is a given automatic (many use electronic transfer to ensure "first fruits" giving) part of the household budget. 40% of our budget goes to special offerings during the year for opportunities to add Kingdom Expansion value that the Lord brings before us in His time and on His calendar. Today your whole household brings a check for the special missionary offering that you decided on and prayed over at the dinner table last week.

Speaking of Kingdom Expansion, Grace has a partnership with the denomination to take over church sites where the congregation has failed and to plant new venues on these sites. We are becoming a congregation with regional impact and have "gone public," especially through media, cable and webcasting.

Grace has become a leadership church in our denomination with over 2,000 in worship (combined attendance with all the sites and times), although none of the venues have over 400 people. All very human sized; everyone matters at Grace.  Many of them are "Cafe Venues" around down where the sermon is streamed in.

Our "YourTime" self-study packages stream out over MediaPace bundles on the internet and bring Christ-centered teaching out to learners everywhere. They are synchronized with all our worship service teachings. Phrases like "fantastic" and "so there then" tend to pepper our speech in the teachings and on the patio. And a lot of people laugh like Joe J. You do these studies whenever you have time. No one has felt rushed or too busy at Grace for years.

Programming and meetings have been reduced to a minimum and have been replaced by a great small groups culture which does most of the volunteer work of the congregation. Each home group has a task or mission it completes together as a group and takes responsibility for. "Ministry, not meetings" has become a slogan at the church.

You drive past the "always-happening" Front Porch of Cafe Grace. Since it's the Sabbath, you have no scheduled plans for the day except to rest up, make dinner together, and hang out with friends.

God is good at Grace Lutheran Church.
All the time!

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A "venue" is a simple provisional label (we'll most likely come up with a better name) for a self contained congregation/community of up to 400 or so people (to keep it personal.) Several venues (there can eventually be many) make up the totality of the congregation. We have three venues already on Sunday but they are too squeezed together to be able to breathe and have room. A venue will worship together and make ministry decisions together. The people in each venue set the tone for worship for their service. Quarterly town hall meetings for each venue (followed by a fun lunch) ensure keeping in touch with the people. All such communities need to attempt to reach new young families (our primary mission target) with their particular style and culture. Every venue has its own children's ministry. Appointed elders (based on their spiritual gifts) specific to each community/venue use these gifts to do prayer ministry, welcoming, intercession, inclusion, and shepherding on a personal, no-paper, no bureaucracy basis. They refer the most serious situations to the pastors directly. When venues get too big to be personal and human sized, they multiply. The venue, along with the small group, are key building blocks of the congregation. Ministry (prayer, worship, personal touch) is decentralized into venues. Operations, on the other hand (finance, human resources, building and grounds, etc.) and Global Missions, are centralized to reduce cost.