Terry signed the papers this week -- the church building is sold.
Several years ago I led the attraction team at our church. Our focus was to attract more people to our church. This was new for me. We'd always been active in leading people to Christ without concern over whether they came to our church or joined another. But our church was getting smaller and smaller every year -- unless this trend stopped -- well, the conclusion is rather obvious.
We had a thriving AWANA program, an active womens ministries, good Bible studies and small groups, a fabulous youth ministry, and care ministries. The Sunday morning childrens ministries were great. The worship and the sermon were great. We were doing a lot of wonderful ministry but our church attendance on Sunday morning continued to decline. Actually, it had been declining for 40 years -- every year we'd lose about 8 more people than newcomers who came that year.
So the attraction team got our website up and made sure our advertising was good; we walked the neighborhood and talked to folks. We prayed. We had special events to encourage people to invite their friends, we spent several months using the curriculum from Willow Creek to train the whole church on Becoming Contagious Christians. We started a great youth volleyball league and had about 60 families participating. As always, new people came and were assimilated into our church which was really great; but some died, others moved away or stopped coming, and the decline continued.
We began asking what we could do to help our church survive? We could get a new sign, paint the building, update the building. We could be intentional about letting community groups use our facility and invite them to join us on Sundays. We could start an afterschool care program. We talked with experts who help churches in decline and learned that once a church is down to 75 members, you drop below critical mass. There aren't enough people or funds and every year you find you have to cut back the ministries and are less able to attract new people. We needed to do something while we still had the ability.
Did it make sense to spend $250,000 to update our building, in hopes of growing to 200-300 people, when we only had 40 parking spaces?
Then the Lord brought a new question before us: How can we use everything we are and everything we have to do the most that we can for the kingdom of God? Kevin began preaching the parables and we began listening to the words of Jesus and praying. Jesus values the lost, the poor, the people who never come to church, and the hurting in our communities. Jesus values having his followers take risks--don't bury your wealth, invest it. Jesus values boldness, living out our faith. Jesus values growth and new life. We realized that our greatest financial asset was our building -- and if we had $4 million in the bank, we wouldn't put it all into our building.
We decided to sell the building, invest half of the funds in reaching people with the gospel through starting new churches in the Bay Area, save half for a new building some day, and give a 10% for compassion and justice ministries locally and globally. Bold, risky, inline with the values of Jesus. We're all in, sold out, fully invested in kingdom work, fully dependent on the Lord to use us to be salt and light in the world. The journey has been breath-taking, totally transforming all of us from being focused on survival to being focused on mission. We are passionate followers of Christ, giving up something that was important to us in order to give it to God and have him use it for eternity.
This week we signed the papers. The building is sold. We are so excited to see what God will do.
We took a walk out to the point to see if we could see where the fire was. From the top we couldn't see it. We thought it would be fun to see the sandy beach on the other side so we walked down to Gillin's Beach. After several hours in the sun, we enjoyed sitting in the shade by this pond.
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