Celebrating 2023 — Belong. Grow. Serve.

Okay, today's a celebration, as a celebration of what God has done in 2023 and it's a looking forward to what he'll do in 2024.

And there's a lot that he did last year, so we'll get right into it.

I want to read to Psalm, psalm 105, verses one through five, if you'll read that with me oh, give thanks to the Lord, call upon his name, make known his deeds among the people, sing to him, sing praises to him, tell of all of his waterless works, glory in his holy name.

Let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice.

Seek the Lord and his strength, seek his presence, continually, remember the works that he has done, his miracles and the judgments he uttered.

That's what we're here to do today.

We're here to remember what he's done this year, and so at TCC, we do everything kind of in threes it's Trinity, by the way, you know.

So it is belong, grow and serve is a big part of what we do here.

Everything kind of falls in those categories.

So we're going to talk about belonging, growing and serving and what God has done in this last year.

The first is belong.

Belong, which really has to do with the fact that we have a home, that you feel like you are in a place where you're connected to people, and I just want to tell you first of all, from the pastoral team, I want to tell you how much we love you guys, we love this church.

We are probably very biased, but we think we have an awesome church, and awesome church is made up of not just awesome vision or awesome building.

It's made up of people, it's made up of you guys, and this pastoral team loves this church body.

To me, the pastoral and the ministry needs of this the families here at TCC is such a privilege to us to be able to serve you guys as a real privilege.

This year we added an elder it was one big thing that happened John Grainer, who is out of town, but John and Laura were serving for so long.

Anyway, they were already doing pastoral things in many ways, and so it was very natural for him to become an elder.

This year Also, we added the New Deacons Scott Achele, who does so many things around the church, and four people in the church.

But we have so many people that are serving in different ministries too, and I'm just thinking of the ministries that are part of this church the prayer teams serving in the Sunday morning teams serving in the children's ministry and in the Forge youth ministry.

A lot of you have found your fit.

But if you haven't found your fit, we have a fit class on February 6th.

Little plug, okay, fit your Class is really about how to find how you fit in to the kingdom of God, how God has uniquely made you and your spiritual gifts and your personality and also your heart, passion.

What really interests you, what sets a fire under you, is to be able to the fit class is to be able to identify those things and release you in those things.

That's our heart.

So February 6th you'll hear more about that.

Of all the ministries that we have here, we had a new ministry start which is really important this year, and that was the Gathering Place, which is a young adults ministry.

We started in August, which was great, of course.

We went to two services and so two services to create an atmosphere where we can continue to grow.

We had so many baby dedications we had a bunch this morning, but I mean there was Daniel, joseph, novi, barrett, jackie and all the ones six, seven, eight, nine this morning, and there are other ones as well that maybe I'm forgetting, I don't know.

We had baptisms from age eight to age 80 something I'm not sure of what 80, 80, 80 something this year John Lawrence, gryson, phoebe, chloe, ava, rachel, charlotte Malachi, jadzia Cody and Megan Sue, henry, sarah, jennifer, wayne, and then we had 10 at Camp Gadawada that were baptized there at camp, including Peyton and Bell.

We had so many people and so many partners that were presented this year.

Just beautiful, how the Lord's added to us.

And one of the ways that we belong and connect together is in our community groups, which are just groups that offer a chance for you to engage more deeply in our church community and, whether you're drawn to similar interests or just spiritual discussions, community groups are a great way to be able to connect, and this is what we've.

We had 30 of them this last year and we're going to have new ones starting in January.

You'll hear more about that.

So many parts of one body, each joint supplying, and I want to tell you one story about how that happened just this last week, and many of you know Barry and Kim Cochran.

Barry and Kim were part of Trinity from 1990, something way back when they first moved to Knoxville and so they were part of Trinity for many years and they also left to go help a church plant in Marival, which is the area where they live in, and then they're back here as TCC partners.

And some of you know that Barry was diagnosed in June, in July, with esophageal cancer, a serious type of cancer, and this last week he had a surgery and it was a.

It was a serious surgery.

It was about eight hour surgery with two different surgeons and specialists and many just a big team.

But Barry wanted me to tell you something, so I'm going to tell you why he told me to tell you.

Okay, this is from Barry and Kim.

They're probably watching on online, but from Barry's lips.

He said from the first this was a story of being lovingly cared for by the body of Christ at TCC, as well as some others that are in their community there in in Marival.

He shared this with me this week and he's making a remarkable recovery.

By the way, thank you for his prayers.

It's really remarkable by every metric.

He said throughout their experience there was not a single need that went unaddressed.

They were thoroughly prayed over and loved on from the very first day the elder teams, prayer teams, groups of friends, individual TCC partners, other people who were manning the caring bridge and the 24 seven prayer link greeting team members who, when they came in the church, would just pray for them.

Our other prayer teams, media teams, everybody.

There were so many encouraging and accurate words from the prophetic team.

They were encouraging cards and texts and social media posts.

They were watching services online where they couldn't attend.

So thank you, media team, for that.

You know God's responsible for the results, but we're responsible to love and to cover them spiritually, and Barry said they were covered, so I wanna thank you guys for that Personally.

Just one story of many how the body of Christ is so beautiful and many members in one body and the members taking care of the other members, every joint supplying, as the others have a need.

One thing you may not be aware of, too, that goes on here every week during the school year, is our homeschool co-op, trinity Christian Academy.

We have 94 families in our cooperative.

Of course, they don't all attend Trinity.

Most of them are outside Trinity 94 families and so if you came here on Friday during the school year, what you would see is you would see life, activity, noise, beauty.

You would see 375 adults and kids in almost every square inch of this building.

They have classrooms everywhere in this building and just enjoying a community of like-minded people who are raising their children, schooling their children in the Lord, and it's beautiful.

And we also have an umbrella school registered with the state of Tennessee that covers homeschool families.

So, thanks to TCC and the Lord for his faithfulness and we're praying bring more families in.

We'd love to have more.

So all this is going on.

It's a place where people can belong and we really hope that you guys, that you personally feel like that you have a safe place to connect to God and connect to people here at TCC, that you belong.

Second thing is grow, tcc.

Our heart is that you grow.

Actually, the goal is that you're further along in your walk with Jesus.

Today, december 31st, then you were January 1st of this year.

That's the whole goal.

We hope that you grew in the knowledge of Jesus, the knowledge of the grace and the knowledge of Jesus.

You grew in relationship with him and relationship with other people.

That's our goal and we do a lot to try to make that happen.

Of course, our sermon series is part of that.

We did we went through two entire books of the Bible this year the Gospel of Mark.

We went through and we went through the book of Ecclesiastes with our sermon series entitled Everything is Meaningless.

I just like to say that, so that's why I say it Everything is meaningless In which we found that everything is literally not meaningless, because serving Jesus and living the life that God has made us for is not meaningless.

Right?

We also addressed a lot of challenging topics from a biblical worldview in our sermon series.

Can we Talk?

And then I think Christ was really magnified in our Christmas series and through the stories of the lives there, if you were here in our series called Reflections.

Of course we also do training.

We are committed to ongoing training of leaders and releasing leaders into ministries that reflect their heart passion.

We do that through TMAP, our Trinity Ministry Apprenticeship Program, and we do it through the Timothy team that Tyler started this year.

We also grow through our triads.

This is small groups of people who gather together and they connect with each other, they encourage each other in spiritual matters and they also learn the word of God together.

We grew this year through our Bible reading plan, which we finished today.

We read Malachi today, if you're a part of the program.

We finished the whole Old Testament.

We read the whole Old Testament this year.

If you've been with us the last two years, you've read through the entire Bible with us in the last two years, which is a great thing.

So if you were part of that, I know we had a lot of people that joined us.

If you read through our Bible reading plan or some other Bible reading plan this year, would you raise your hand?

That's great, that's fantastic, that's worth celebrating, because it's the word of God that's alive and powerful, and it's the Word of God that does things inside of our hearts.

It changes us.

So this is our heart.

How else can we grow without getting immersing ourselves in the Word of God?

And so Good news is we're starting a new Bible reading plan this year, called shape by the word.

I'll give you just a minute to scan this little QR code if you want to, and it'll take you right to this reading program.

It's the New Testament and Psalms.

In a year, you also should have gotten a message from TCC with a link in it to this.

If you hit that link, or If you scan this code, it'll take you to our group, the TCC group.

I just joined it this morning, so tomorrow we start reading the New Testament and the Psalms together, the cobalt being back up there and later on as well.

So, but we really hope that you are feeling Feeling farther along in your growth journey with Jesus this year.

So we got to go to serve, belong, grow and serve this.

This we, you know the Lord did a whole lot through this church this year.

That's all I'm saying.

It was amazing and I wanted to share some of it with you.

Serving really is has to do with making impact for the gospel here and also outside these walls, in our community, in the nation and in the nations.

So we'll start with our 20 23 hands and feet offering.

We do an offering every year.

It's a concentrated missions giving offering.

It's above and beyond our missions giving that we give as a church.

We have a percentage of our income that we give automatically to missions.

We'll talk about that in a few minutes too.

But hands and feet offering is a chance for us all to to pray or to serve or to give.

And and in our 20 23 offering, many of you committed to serve in Ministries on Sunday and off also to serve in our serve day.

So of course, our, our service in our Sunday services doubled because we have two services now, so you guys stepped up and really filled the slots there.

There are other slots that could be filled.

If you are not yet serving and you'd love to, you can talk to one of us and we'll be glad to connect you to a place where you can serve.

But we have over 50 people serving each week in rotating schedules, but so whenever you come to church on Sunday, you have to understand that there are 50 people behind the scenes that are making this thing happen every week, and If most of you are part of that and thank you, and if you're not, you can be a part of that too, so let us know.

Also, we had what we called serve day.

Our 20 23 serve day was huge, was a day when we actually wanted to get beyond the walls and get into our community, do something practical in different ways, and so here's what we did a lot of different things.

We did a construction project at God's place ministries, which is a ministry that works with people who are coming out of prison and and who are coming out of addiction.

We did a project with our daycare right next to us the kids first daycare.

That been our neighbors for all these years and we have really good relationship with them.

We did a community cleanup at Shumpert Park.

We did free oil changes for the singles and the widows and we did a free yard sale as well.

We built a blessings box at our entrance out here, and anytime you come to church or leave the church you can bring something and you can put it in that box to share with the community.

We also did some projects at the central high school one of the local high schools here and we worked with Knoxville dream center as well.

We did a lot on our serve day, and the good news is that we're actually going to be doing two serve days in 2024 One in autumn and one in the spring and you guys will hear more about that later on.

So thank you for you guys who served that day.

Also part of our 2023 hands and feet offering was our work with a local ministry called Street Hope, and TCC is working together with the Melissa movement, which is a fund that was created in honor of my late wife, melissa, who was a spiritual mother to Manny.

The Melissa movement helps to resource and enable older women to train younger women in many different contexts, and we're partnering with Street Hope here in Knoxville to resource the spiritual mothering of teenage girls that they serve, who have been rescued from sex trafficking.

And I've met with Street Hope staff many times this year.

They're doing wonderful work.

And the girls at the house at Garland Oaks they're, they're receiving hope there, they have identity, they have a future, they have a fresh start, these girls who've gone through such terrible experiences.

So there's hope there and it's beautiful.

And we had a goal of raising $2,000 From you guys, which would be matched by $2,000 from the Melissa movement.

So we would give $4,000, but actually we gave $5,000.

So that was a real blessing.

Thank you for you guys.

You're giving for that.

Thank you for that.

In other local news, the Ellis family are in absolute wonder.

I call them a wonder because I wonder how they do it, because they do stuff all the time and the output of missions, of local missions that happen.

Of course they work also in the nation and in the nations, but right here they are really our missionaries to Knoxville and we're privileged to serve them.

We're actually privileged that this year, in 2024, we're going to be able to up their support, their monthly support as well, and be able to support them more.

They run YWAM Knoxville.

They run the YWAM Knoxville Support them more.

They run YWAM Knoxville.

They are also incorporated with.

That is CMO Children's Ministry, outreach Children's Ministry here in Knoxville.

They partner with TCC.

They partner with Kiko, which is Knoxville inner city kids outreach.

They partner with Hopewell Church and Galilee Bible Camp in Bryceville Elementary School and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Knox County and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Anderson County.

They do camps and VBSs and mission trips and sidewalks in these schools and Bible release time in public schools and they did 800 stockings of love.

Last week, like two weeks ago, they gave out 800 stockings and you guys were a part of that.

So they're amazing and it's a joy to be able to work together with them and their family.

And if you want to be more involved in local ministry here, man, we can connect you definitely through the LSS.

Tcc also works with Hope Resource Center.

Hope is Knoxville's only holistic reproductive women's health care center and it provides cost free services by licensed medical professionals and they help people, a lot of women who are in crisis situations.

We also partner with Compassion Coalition, which is a faith based nonprofit here in Knoxville.

It's basically a group of churches, organizations and businesses, and they are committed to moving beyond the walls into the city to become the compassionate presence of Jesus To points of pain and brokenness in our community.

So we work with them as well.

On a national level, we had missions teams that went to Buffalo this year A lot of you were part of that, partnering with the Buffalo Dream Center.

That's something that we do every year and is beautiful.

Some of them went and came back.

Some of them went and stayed up there.

I just went back to stay there.

So we've been working together with them for a few years.

So we got to switch over into international missions, because this is huge.

Tcc partners have personally touched five continents this year, parts of five continents, and when I say partners, I mean we have literally been on the ground in these places and so regions and countries such as Altair Republic, which is part of Russia, colombia, cuba, france, honduras, israel, kenya, poland, Russia, scotland, tanzania, republic of Cuba, ukraine and the United States.

We were in some very hot spots on the earth this year, bringing the gospel there and bringing some hope there.

Our affiliated partners have also reached Cambodia, haiti, afghanistan, India, sri Lanka, liberia.

A lot of places, a lot of places.

But I'll just tell you about one Hands and feet 2023,.

We had a goal of raising some money for a project in Tanzania For the ongoing development of a Christian community that will serve the people of the Maasai village in Kuri, tanzania.

It's a village of about 4,000 herdsmen and their families, very arid valley, very harsh climate and lifestyle, extreme poverty, animists, spiritists, no real connection with the gospel.

Until relatively recently, and for several years we've been partnering together with Gospel Herald Ministries to help with a church plant there in the center of that village, and so Pastor Matthias and his wife Beatrice here.

They left their life in the city and they moved to Curia and they served there as pastors and missionaries and we're working with them.

In the last two years we've helped to dig a well, we've helped with medical missions, pastors conferences, women's conferences.

We've purchased property for the sake of agriculture to establish sustainable farming practices there, ministry of the Children's Home.

We've helped with construction of a church building and we've helped to start micro businesses there.

And Capstone Ministries as provided as partners together with Thrive Ministries.

Thrive is the ministry that I founded that works through Trinity and this is one of the pastors conferences that we did there in the Kilimanjaro area and there were 500 discipleship booklets that were translated into Swahili and were printed and distributed and we trained these pastors to be able to train other people in the gospel.

That's in Curia, in Arusha, in Merangu, all around the Kilimanjaro area.

So that's a huge part of what's happening with the Hands and Feet Project.

One other thing that we did there is the Melissa Movement, also partnered together with Trinity, for the mentoring of these new converts among the women of the Maasai.

So Beatrice, the pastor's wife, had to travel one hour, walk one hour to milk cows at a farm and back an hour several days a week to help supplement their income.

And so what we did was, through Melissa Movement, we have been supplementing her income monthly so that she wouldn't have to milk that now she can focus on working with these women who are coming to Jesus and being a spiritual mother to them.

So two years ago we were there.

We had a women's conference.

The ladies who went with us Patty and Goldie, the ladies who went with us had a women's conference.

There were 12 women at this conference in this tiny little church, and then this last year, september, we went.

There were 40 women there at this conference and it's just beautiful because they're learning Jesus.

Not all of them know the Lord yet, but they're all hearing the gospel now and many of them have come to Christ and there's a community.

So there's a community there.

There's a church there where people can not only come and get water from the ground, they can get living water from Jesus, and they can not only come and get grain from the corn and the rice mills, which we helped to fund this year, but also they can get the bread of life and this is making a huge difference in this community.

So it's a long-term project and we're partnering with them to.

Things take longer than you think there, but our heart is not to just go and bless people and leave and never come back.

Our heart is to go and see what the need is and how can we help meet that need and build relationships and see change over lasting change over a period of time.

So our goal was to raise $6,000 for that trip.

Last year we raised more than that and then through another special gift, someone gave $7,000 for those milling machines for processing corn and rice, which is actually.

They have been installed and they'll be operational very soon, and they are.

It's gonna change that village.

It's gonna completely change that village.

So thank you TCC partners for that and thank you Lord for that opportunity.

In Ukraine, tcc is partnered together this year with Thrive Ministries and our pastor friends in Ukraine to distribute aid to war victims there, and these people have done extraordinary things and please understand that this war goes on, even if it's not reported much in our news cycles, and also please understand that, whatever your opinion is geopolitically about this war, these are people that are hurting and they're in desperate need and it's an opportunity for the gospel to come in the crossroads of their need and their desperation.

The gospel is coming in very practical ways and it's meeting the needs there.

It is beautiful what's happening there.

Phil Adams and I traveled there in June to care for the ones who've been doing the hard work the pastors and also military chaplains.

This is a picture of Philip training pastors there in crisis and trauma counseling.

Our goal last year in hands and feet was to raise $4,000 to send them for aid.

We raised more than that and also the church gave an extra $2,000 on top of that, so and these people are doing wonderful things with that money.

So, speaking of Philip Adams, I'll just tell you about our other missionaries that are overseas that we support.

Philip and Jennifer Adams we've been supporting for many, many years.

They are planting churches and serving leaders nationally in France and other parts of Europe as well, and also in Afghanistan and also in Haiti.

They're a little bit of everywhere.

Our friends Bartek and Daria Piszczbyła in Poznan, poland Many of you know Bartek and Daria, but you can't pronounce their last name and I can't either, and I was with them this year as well, and they're doing wonderfully along with their young son.

They're working with this church plant in Poznan, which we have helped from the beginning to start, and they're also working with Evangelical Poland, which is a national organization which unifies evangelical ministries for the sake of the gospel going further in Poland.

So that's fantastic.

We also partner with Evangelism of Earth.

That's Steve Phaedos Ministries, and if you've been here long enough, you know that Steve used to be senior pastor of this church and he has been doing evangelistic crusades and pastures conferences for close to 40 years I guess, maybe more than that, I don't know a long, long time.

He still does one every month in a different country, mostly in Latin America, and that ministry is an impact ministry.

They come in not only preaching the gospel but really giving a vision for the leaders, for a fear of the Lord and for purity and ministry in the leaders.

It's really a great ministry and we're happy to be able to support them.

Of course, we support the Victoria Watoto Fund, alois Leonard, one of the TCC partners, who grew up there in Kenya.

We're partnering with them with their children's feeding program and also the school there in Bete, kenya, and a couple of new things we get to do this coming year.

We were helping to support Brad Martel, one of our TCC partners here, who works for the Center for Bioethical Reform, cbr, and they exist to change public opinion and ultimately change public policy concerning abortion.

They have a very strong presence on college campuses and we're glad to be able to be a part of that.

We're also supporting Faithful Promise Ministries, which is Patty Clemens' ministry.

Patty is such an amazing servant of people and she just is consistent through the years and she serves widows, she serves singles, she serves anybody who's in the margins.

She's a great ministry and we're glad to be able to also support that.

Okay, so I'll tell you about what we call our SENT ones.

These are three ministries that are based out of TCC that are doing apostolic work in our nation and internationally as well.

First is Yuri and Olga Drozian with Siberian missions.

Yuri and Olga are just great, great people.

They were here first service.

They're just first of all.

That's the best picture I've ever seen for a missionary.

I mean, the fields are ripe into harvest and they're standing in the field.

It's just come on, I want somebody to Photoshop me into that.

That's great, but that's actually what they do.

They're in there, in where the fields are ripe into harvest.

I was able to go with them.

Well, they were going with, they went with me.

We went together to Africa, to Kenya, this year, and it is a joy to work with these guys because they are perfect travel partners.

They are low maintenance, they are high output, they're spiritually keen and aware, they're prayers and they have a heart for the people.

It's like exactly who you want to go on a trip with and they're so good.

So we were in Kenya together and then we I went to Tanzania and they went to Russia and they spent several weeks Actually two months, I think in Russia, in the Altai, in Russia proper, and then these other federations, their regions in Russia Altai Republic and the Tuva Republic.

Altai is a very hard place to reach.

You can see this or some of the leaders that they were sitting around the table encouraging and training.

It's a hard place to reach because of the mountains, but they've found people there who have a real heart to go into those places, to penetrate into those mountains, those remote areas with the gospel.

That's great.

There's another picture, I think, of the church meeting there in the Altai region.

Then also they were in Israel.

I think this next picture is also there, up on top of a mountain praying over the city in Altai.

This is part of what they do they just cover the cities in prayer and they intercede over those cities.

This is in Israel.

I believe this is Olga doing a dance, an Israeli dance, with the sisters there.

That's awesome.

They were in Israel and they were there just before the war started.

In fact, their journey was cut short because the war started.

They had to come home.

They did get out, thankfully, but it was a very effective time.

We have partners that we work through through Yuri and Olga in Israel.

As we have given aid to people in Ukraine who are war-torn areas, we also are making available the opportunity to give.

If you give, you can just designate to Israel and we can give directly to the pastors there and they can distribute it directly to needs.

This is just helping meet the needs of people who are pretty desperate there.

Of course we have Neil Silverberg and Neil, as you know most of you know he was also one of the senior pastors at Trinity for many years.

He's been a part of us for a long time.

He's part of the Ezra Project and he does a lot of work in churches in the states and some overseas as well, training pastors and leaders, doing oversight of churches and ministering in churches.

He averages about twice a month going out.

Just came back from earlier this year from Cuba and this is his conference in Cuba.

There's another picture of the brother who oversees the network of churches there.

This is Pastor Jorge.

His ministry in Cuba has been really significant and they're going back again in February, which is great.

He also had ministry that's opening up because of the book that he wrote about Jewish Roots Movement.

It's really about the gospel but it's applying it to the Jewish Roots Movement.

There's some ministry opening up in Messianic congregations.

He just came back from Fort Lauderdale, I think, with Rick and Karen Greenberg.

This book is opening doors for him there.

Lastly, I'll tell you about Thrive Ministries, which is the ministry that I have founded.

There's so many beautiful things that God has done this year with Thrive.

Hundreds of church leaders, mostly in local settings, who have been challenged to focus on Christ, to recalibrate their personal lives to Christ, to reveal Christ in their sermons and in their ministries.

Dozens of conferences and forums and podcasts and broadcasts and meetings around tables in homes focused on multiplying and releasing healthy leaders.

Thousands of discipleship booklets translated and distributed.

Forty worship leaders and songwriters trained and now writing and producing and publishing songs in Poland, in Polish, from a Polish soul.

That's beautiful.

It's beautiful.

Thousands of dollars in aid to Ukraine people.

One young Maasai musician sponsored for music school.

This is Hosea.

Hosea is a young Maasai, he's about 19 years old and we were just singing these songs in these little churches and it takes me a while to catch on, but I caught on the fact this is not Swahili, this is actually Maasai.

Who's writing these songs in Maasai?

Because there's not much material written in Maasai, and so I found out it was this young man, hosea, and he's a real follower of Jesus.

He's writing great songs, and so we have started sponsoring him for music school or setting him on a path to be able to record these original worship songs in the Maasai language.

This is groundbreaking, it's really groundbreaking, it's beautiful and it's a joy to be able to do this.

Also, my book on worship was translated into Spanish and is being distributed in some parts of speaking Spanish speaking parts.

And then, of course, I wrote a book about grief as well, and there are doors opening to be able to minister to people in different contexts about finding hope and healing through the Psalms of Lament.

So you guys are a huge part.

I want to thank you not only for what you've done to help thrive, but what you've done to help all of these ministries All of our sent ones, by the way Yurena, olga and Neil and Thrive Ministries as well.

You can, if you want to, although Trinity supports us as well.

If you want to support any of these ministries, you're able to do that online at TCCNoxcom.

You just designated to Thrive or Neil, silverberg or Siberian missions.

Ok, so that was a lot last year, right?

God's done a lot through us.

Just a quick look forward OK, into 2024.

We go every year in the fall.

The pastor team goes to a prayer, a little prayer weekend and we have a prayer and planning retreat.

Just Lord, what are you saying to TCC?

What are the directions you want us to go and how do you want us to do it in October?

So we went this year and we got three words, we felt, from the Lord, and the three words are encounter, prepare and jubilee, and you're going to hear more about those over the next few weeks.

I'm not going to tell you about any of that, but those are the three words, except I want to just remind you that this is the jubilee year for Trinity Community Church.

This is our 50th year, isn't that right, jack?

You were there year one, weren't you?

A few of us were here, a few of you were here in year one 50 years of ministry in Knoxville and Trinity.

It's Trinity Chapel at the time and then it became Trinity Community Church.

So we are planning celebrations throughout the year to mark what God has done through Trinity's ministry in the last 50 years.

That's great, ok, the other thing big thing for this year, of course I've already mentioned it is the Bible reading plan.

We're going to put that slide back up again.

If you didn't scan it Once, you do, or you can just you can check the message you should have gotten from the church.

We're going to start this tomorrow, so we'd love for everybody to go along this journey together.

Let's read through the Psalms and the New Testament in the year, and one thing that you will notice if you go to the website is that you'll see that our website has been updated.

We have a brand new website Now.

Our website was amazing before.

It was really great, really effective.

It just went from here to here, guys, and you can get any kind of information you want pretty much about what's going on at Trinity here on this website.

So this is the new website.

You can go there.

Tcc Knox dot com it's still the same site, just been.

It's just been made better, so it's very easy to navigate.

It's fantastic, and so a lot of people find Trinity through the website.

That's been a great great addition for this coming year and super exciting to me.

We have a new podcast coming out from from Trinity and it's called the known podcast, and I've got a quick little video here so you'll know what it's about.

Hey, hi, hello.

We are Brooke, hannah and Mackenzie and surprise, surprise, we are starting a podcast.

Woo, january 1st has never looked sweeter and we could not be more excited for you all to have this in your hands and be able to listen to it.

This is something that we have been planning and prepping since the spring of 2023.

So a lot of intentionality and prep work has really gone into this.

Our goal for this podcast is that you will walk away from each episode with a desire to invite Holy Spirit in your day to day life, that you would increase your knowledge of scripture, deep in your connection with the Father and ultimately find your identity rooted in absolute truth.

That is the word of God, right?

So we want this to feel like a cozy sit down conversation with your girls.

So grab a cup of coffee, a cup of tea, or just put it on the radio while you're driving down the road, and join us on January 1st and every Monday after, as we discover what it means to know God, know ourselves and make Him known.

See you soon, bye, bye.

That's really exciting to me.

I tell you why it's exciting to me because I've heard a couple of them already and these girls have something to say.

They really do.

There's an anointing on what they're saying and it's beautiful because it really gives hope.

It really gives hope, so it's great.

The podcast, it's going to be great.

It starts tomorrow so you can scan the code there and go there or wherever you get you listen to podcasts.

You can find it Okay.

Lastly, I'll say thank you for your faithfulness in your giving this year.

This church not including this week.

We took in $598,646 this year and that's pretty amazing for a church this size.

But what's even more amazing is the way that that money was distributed and went like this there's a little chart there, a little graph 43% went to operations, 40% went to equipping and 17% went to missions, which is huge.

We have this goal.

For a long time We've been giving 10% to missions and that's a lot.

We're tithing everything that comes in out to missions and this last year we said what if we stretched it?

What if we made a goal of 15% to missions?

And that became our goal and it ended up being actually 17% this year, which is really fantastic and you can hear today of all the things that have happened here and abroad through that.

So it helps us in every way to belong, to feel at home, to feel safe, to grow, to be better in our walk with Jesus next year than we are now and to serve as you give.

So we're really grateful for that.

If you want more information about how our giving, our finances work that we're an open book you're welcome to talk to any of us and we can connect you and get that information to you.

But we just know that most people don't really want the minutiae and this is so we thought pie chart everybody likes pie.

That's great.

Let's do it.

Perfect.

Okay, this is great.

Okay, I want to pray if you'll stand up.

Thank you for making it through this whole thing here with us.

There's so much.

Father, we thank you, we give you glory for all of this.

Lord.

Only this can only happen because of you.

That's the only reason.

Lord is you and it's really the only purpose we have is you, lord, from you and through you and to you are all things.

To you be the glory forever.

So, Lord, we end the way we started today, we give thanks to the Lord and we call upon His name and we want to make known His deeds among the people.

Lord, we've sung to you, lord, we've sung praises to you.

We've told of your wonderful works.

Lord, we glory in your holy name.

So, lord, we want to seek you.

As the psalmist said, lord, to seek you, to seek your strength, to seek your presence continually.

We pray that this coming year would be even more.

We pray for more and more in 24.

This is what we're praying.

Thank you for what 23 was, but we pray for more, god, deeper walks with you, deeper understanding of your word, deeper communication among each other and commitment to relationships or deeper service and mission.

God, thank you, and we will remember the wonderful works that you've done, god, and the miracles you've done.

We give you praise, pray your blessing.

Now, lord, it's your hands and we're entering into another one.

I pray your blessing on this body and all of us, lord, and the families that are represented here, god, that you would bless them and keep them.

You would cause your face to shine upon everyone and lift up your countenance to them, god, and be gracious to them, and that you would protect, that you would grant safety and health on all these households, lord and Lord, give them peace in the name of Jesus, amen, amen.

I love you guys so much and if you have any needs, prayer needs, please come up.

We'd love to pray for you, and God bless you.