Aaron Proffitt

This weekend was a momentum building weekend for Aletheia Tampa. I love when this happens. Church planting is all about momentum and it’s all about riding the wave of it when it finally happens. After a week full of canvassing, evangelism, connecting with tons of people, and getting the word out, it all culminated in a great worship gathering last night. I think we finally took our first step of progress this weekend after four weeks of settling into a new meeting location, a new night, a new time, a new sound system, a new group of people etc… Sometimes momentum can be finicky and lost for a time and that is what happened to our new church plant after a great summer of doing ministry here. We knew we would lose a little bit of that surge when we transitioned but we were willing to take that risk, especially early on, in order for us to settle into a more long term routine.

And last night, we witnessed our first wave of momentum and it was pretty sweet. We saw our largest group since the actual launch service, which saw a lot of family and friends so our numbers were a bit skewed that night. It was the first week that we had to put out more chairs. We had a ton of new people, and those that came for the first time absolutely loved what they experienced. The worship was powerful, the Bible study was tough and practical, our greeting team really connected with all of the first timers really well, our hospitality crew put out a spread that included nutella (enough said right there), and we had about 25 people come out for set-up at 3:30. The set-up and tear-down team continues to grow. It’s awesome to me that almost half of the people that came out to church last night were there at 330 lending a hand to help make the Aletheia Tampa worship experience the best it could be. We have an incredible army of volunteers and it keeps growing.

We also had some really great times of evangelism, not only this past weekend, but the entire week. Nobody accepted Christ this week (which was the first week in a while), but we had some very intense conversations with atheists, agnostics, and a variety of others. Taking people from unbelief to belief is always so rewarding. Jesus is opening hearts here in Tampa to see Him for who He is…as the one true living God!

Now, the work continues and hopefully the momentum will also. I will actually be heading to Athens, Georgia, this week to do some evangelism training with students at UGA as well as speak at a college service called the Connection. It’s funny how a year and a half ago, we thought that Athens was going to be the next location for an Aletheia. I still love that place and am looking forward to connecting with the students there and getting them fired up about doing evangelism.

All is well here in Tampa though and I can’t wait to see what God does even this next week. Keep praying that we will be able to get a new meeting place sometime soon. We are blessed to be where we are but we are thinking big and we are thinking more long term.

Here are some images from this past week and last night. We tried something new last night and it seemed to work out pretty well. We had people text questions in during the Bible study and then I had Ace and Emilio come up and answer one of them. It was a very organic and real moment in the service. I think people really loved it. I also might have put little raw video excerpt from the service last night below…