Pastor’s Ponderings

If you’ve driven past our new site recently you may have been amazed, as I have, with how much construction has progressed over the past few weeks. Walls have gone up and exterior panels installed. The building now has most of a roof in place. And, perhaps most encouraging, work is well along on the relocation of New Cut Road.

At this point we are less than 7 months from the time we anticipate holding our first service in the new facility. While there are still many things about which we’re uncertain, I thought it might be helpful to review a few of the things we do know. First, construction is on schedule. This means we expect the building to be essentially finished in April. We’ll then have a month or so to complete finishing touches and furnishing before holding our first worship service.

We expect to worship for the first time in the new facility on Mother’s Day, May 11, 2008. There will be three morning services, at 8:00, 9:15, and 10:55 (continuing our current schedule). Then, since May 11 is also Pentecost in 2008, we will be holding a Confirmation Service that afternoon. Just imagine the thrill of confirming a group of young people on the first day in our new facility! What a great day that will be.

I want to remind you that we will be holding worship services in the multi-purpose room that will accommodate many other types of activities throughout the week. We are making every effort, both in design and in furnishing and decorating the space, to assure that the multi-purpose room provides a worshipful setting. And we’ll be needing teams of people to set up chairs for worship and then take them down each week.

The multi-purpose room will be able to accommodate 600+ people for worship, nearly twice the capacity of our current sanctuary, and to seat approximately 300 at tables for meals or other events. More than three times the number of parking spaces will be available after this first phase of construction, with more slated for future phases.

The building we expect to move into in May represents phase 1 of what will likely be a 4-phase construction project. The Phase 1 building includes the multi-purpose room, kitchen, child care facilities, a large narthex (larger than our current sanctuary) for gathering and other activities, as well as storage on the upper level. The lower level of the building includes classrooms for children, youth, and adults. Several of the rooms are very large (roughly the size of our current fellowship hall), and can be used as one large space or subdivided into several smaller rooms as needed.

This first phase building includes approximately 33,000 square feet of space. This compares to about 27,000 square feet provided by all three of our current buildings combined. However, in the first phase building there will not be space for the Glen Mar Pre School or for staff offices. These will continue to be housed at our current site at least through the summer of 2009.

Phase two is represented by a 2-story education building with pre-school and early elementary classrooms, an enlarged child-care suite (the phase 1 child care area becomes the music suite in phase 2), as well as offices for all staff. This building contains roughly 20,000 square feet of additional space, making the total of phases 1 and 2 twice the size of our current facilities.

My personal goal is to do everything possible to enable us to begin construction of Phase 2 soon after phase 1 is completed. This depends, though, on a very successful capital campaign in the Spring of 2008. We will need to generate pledges and gifts of at least $3 million in order to be able to begin construction of the phase 2 education building in 2008. This would enable us to occupy phase 2 during the summer of 2009 and totally vacate the Glen Mar Road facility at that time (which would enable us to stop paying rent of $20,000 per month).

While this goal may seem ambitious, I am confident that God will provide for this next step in the same way God has so abundantly provided for our needs at each step along the way. The reason I’m so confident is that I know we are not regarding the new facility as simply a place where we can be more comfortable and spread out a bit more. Rather, our new facility is an instrument for greater ministry–both to our members and to the surrounding community. Many ministries will become possible when we move to the new facility that have not been possible with the limitations of our current site.

In other words, this is God’s building, for God’s mission in the world through us. And that is why I believe God will provide, through us, whatever is needed to enable phases 1 and 2 to be completed by the summer of 2009. Which is, perhaps not coincidentally, when–as you know–I expect to retire.

So, as we look ahead to May of 2008 and beyond, we have much to be excited about, much to celebrate. At the same time, we have many challenges to meet. By God’s grace, for God’s mission in the world, I believe God will provide.

This entry was posted on October 19, 2007 at 5:26 am and is filed under Pastors Ponderings, New Cut Road Building Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.