North Brooklyn Vineyard

Leap of Faith: Praying for your 6?

admin — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:56:55 +0000

Our community faith experiment through (during Lent) starts Wed, February 17 & will be 40 days of putting ourselves out there & asking God to do things in our lives.

Download the Leap of Faith User’s Manual (PDF) for detailed info on how this works.

Be sure to report in on any prayers that God answers, or other cool things that happen via our Facebook page or emailing info@northbrooklynvineyard.org.

Download the full daily Bible Study here:

Full Bible Study (all 40 days) (PDF)
Full Bible Study (all 40 days) (DOC)

Or download each week:

Week 1 (PDF)
Week 1 (DOC)

Week 2 (PDF)
Week 2 (DOC)

Week 3 (PDF)
Week 3 (DOC)

Week 4 (PDF)
Week 4 (DOC)

Ready to take a Leap of Faith together?

admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:30:30 +0000

Call it a corporate jump into the deep end of God’s pool. Leap Of Faith is a faith experiment that we here in the North Brooklyn Vineyard will be undertaking throughout the six weeks leading up to Easter.

These 40 days are Lent, the traditional time the Church prepares for Good Friday. What better way to jump-start our faith, hope and joy, that a very tough year has managed to wear down, than to experience God’s amazing love again.

Our theme will be Growing In The Love and will include daily exercises that we’ll engage in individually and together as a unified community in hopes of going deeper into God’s love and seeing it work in unexpected ways in our lives, the lives of those we care about, and in our church as a whole.

Read the full Community Update here >

Can we make sense of the Haiti disaster?

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:44:06 +0000

It never fails. Everytime there’s a crisis or disaster and there’s need for wise and compassionate sensibility, some prominent Christian leader says something stupid? (What’s the biblical term for “jackass”?) I guess it’s the human religious affliction of having to have an answer for everything that makes them so vulnerable to foot-in-mouth disease.

New service format starting in Feb

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:19:48 +0000

Beginning Sunday, February 7th, we will be changing our service format at both the morning service and the Trash Bar service. We’re turning things around. We’ll no longer be starting with 30 minutes of worship, followed by coffee break, announcements, sermon, prayer ministry and closing. Instead we’ll start with one song, have some brief announcements, then the sermon, and finish up with worship and prayer ministry. There will be no change in our starting and ending time.

Why are we doing this? For serveral reasons. The biggest being that we’ve observed that on most Sundays most of us are not ready to dive into worship. So there’s a lot of just sitting and observing, especially for the people that are new and don’t understand worship. As a result many of you have been showing up later and later in time for the main event – the sermon. In many cases, the best, and most meaningful times of worship have been at the end of the service, after we’ve been encouraged by God’s Word and have been given good reason to sing and express things like gratitude towards the Lord.

We didn’t come to this decision overnight. For months now we’ve discussed this among our leaders and at our Core meetings and it’s been suggested that putting worship near the end of our service, while we offer prayer ministry made a lot of sense. We also checked with other Vineyard churches that have gone to this type of format and they’ve reported been getting very good results. So we’re making the change.

How will this effect you? It wil take some time getting used to but I think it will bring a better flow to our gatherings as well as make our services more “outsider friendly”. It will also break the bad habit of lateness. With this new format if you show up late you’ll miss the sermon. Some of you will have to make some healthy adjustments which won’t be so bad.

We’ll give it a four month trial run and then evaluate how things are going in May.

“Angels, Lambs, Ladybugs & Fireflies” Christmas 2009

admin — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:43:11 +0000

Our kids did a fantastic job at our Christmas Extravaganza Sunday Dec 13!

Welcome to our new site!

admin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:33:09 +0000

While still a work in progress, we’ve finally arrived at the new site.

Big thanks go out to Kenny P, Tony Colon from StarlightStudio for the design help & modifying our logo to better suite us , Sikitexture & Morgan Design for the help with our logo all those years ago.

Photos here are a result of Jon Adrie Hoekstra, Jon Wooten, Erica Petrowski, Millay Vann, James Allen Walker.

We have additional features, tweaks & changes coming in the near future but wanted to get this out to you sooner rather than later. Your feedback, as always, is appreciated.

Community Update: When God had a skin face…

admin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:10:57 +0000

A mother was putting her child, who was afraid of the dark to bed. “There’s nothing to be afraid of in the dark, and besides the angels are near you”, she said. The child replied, “Mom, I don’t want angels, I want a skin face.”
Sometimes pep talks and promises aren’t enought to get us through. We need something more real to grab hold of. Christmas is about that something more. It’s about God coming to us with a skin face. The apostle Paul put it this way, “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.”

Jesus is the face of God come to us in the flesh. But how can an all powerful, eternal God download himself into a human life and yet not be down-sized? This is something that will remain a wonderful mystery to me as long as I live. A ‘mystery’ because it’s impossible to figure out and ‘wonderful’ because i don’t really care how he did it.

The skin face of Jesus brings God close to me. Makes God accessible and approachable. God becoming a human being with the skin face of Jesus comforts me when I’m unsure of myself or frightened by the darkness and uncertainties of life, or when I’ve failed and I’m ashamed of myself. I’m comforted because when I see the skin face of Jesus, I get past the mystery and connect with the love that is there for me, close by even in the darkness. When I see the skin face of Jesus Christmas really becomes Christmas.

‘Experimental Tithing’ blog

admin — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:13:52 +0000

Our friend has started a blog to chart how her experience with generous giving.

Check it out at onepennythought.blogspot.com.