Welcome to the Cote d'Azur (The "Blue Coast")in Southern France.
The team of three families here from Christian Associates is starting a church called Crossroads International Church. They invited me to spend two days with them in October planning their church website.
The team lives near the beach on the Mediterranean. We took a walk down the boardwalk after I arrived on Tuesday evening.
I stayed with Todd and Kari Urbanowicz.
...and got to spend some time with their 5 boys as well. The Urbanowicz family moved to France last year, and the boys are already speaking French fluently at school.
I also got to meet and work with Max and Valorie, a French couple who are very involved at Crossroads. They explained things to me about French culture as we planned the website.
Here's Max and Patrick. Patrick is the team leader at Crossroads. His wife Mary is a novelist and writer friend of mine. She's sitting next to the Urbanowiczes on the team photo above.
Justus and Samantha are the newest members of the Crossroads team. They've very talented people, and they've got another little one on the way!
Justin and Jen Powell (Jenn is on the next photo) are members of Vintage Church in Paris, also a Christian Asssociates church. They came down while I was there to help the Crossroads team film a video about the church.
So what actually is a Website Powwow? It's the name I'm using for the two days I spend with each church doing some initial planning for their website. We spend lots of hours articulating who we want to reach with the website and how we're going to do it. Then I take that information back to Spain and actually develop the site.
Here the team is gathering information about the website based on a list of fictional characters they developed to represent the people who will use their site. As you can see, we had a lot of fun and got a lot of work done.
Thursday evening I also got to visit the small group Bible study at Crossroads. At this point, this group is the church. By Easter the team hopes to start holding services.
We had dinner together, sang some songs, prayed, and discussed a chapter from John. It felt very much like Acts. It's exciting to think what this church will look like even one year from now.