Hollywood Jesus Update from Westside

I received a fun message from Dave Cox, the senior pastor at Westside Family Church, with an update on what’s happening with the Hollywood Jesus series that I featured in my cool-church-of-the-week post. Here’s the update from Dave:

The series has been great. We did one week each on movies, music and literature. Used a lot of [Granger's] stuff. We changed up the music more than the movies one. Our folks actually "got" the music message better. They liked the movies one but understood better what we were doing and why after the music week. 

Our band did a montage of music by Evanescence, U2, and Joan Osborne. We took cuts/clips from Kanye West, Audioslave, Sting, Tim McGraw, Kansas, and Michelle Branch. Then we closed with this awesome song by Jewell called "Absence of Fear." Very positive impact. All in all, worth the risk.

Thanks for the kind words. Westside is a work in progress for sure. We’re learning from those of you out there on the edge and trying to figure out how to take what we learn and put into our environment. God continues to pour large amounts of grace out on us, which blows my mind. When I visit with others about what’s happening here, we always take a look at I Cor. 3:6 to make sure everyone knows who gets the credit for the growth. 

We launched service #8 in February on Saturday night and have filled up all the prime time seats that were vacated when we created it. We’re now averaging between 3500-3700. That’s our new lid until we can launch an additional service or venue. Construction is going slow on our new campus. We won’t be in until this time next year, but I guess that will be here before we know it.

Dave said some other nice stuff that I’ve deleted to spare you from having to read how swell he thinks we are at Granger. We obviously have some people schnookered. (Old people use the word "schnookered." I’m getting old, aren’t I?)

Guys like Dave are my heroes. Eight services in one weekend? That’s craziness. I’m grateful that he’s doing it, though, because it’s helping people meet Jesus in Kansas.

Thanks for the update, Dave!