Thursday, February 17, 2005
SEEING GOD AT WORK IN OUR CHURCH
We are seeing God working within our church in several specific ways. It is a very exciting and thrilling time to be a part of our church. As a congregation, we are trying to learn some lessons. In the next few journal entries I want to talk about what God is doing. To put it all into one entry would be much too long.
God is working to bring about a building addition to our present facility. The building was adequate for a smaller church family. But now we are larger and need more room. God really blessed us with the special one day offering of $40,500+ last October. That caused us to realize how much He is blessing us and that it is His will that we add on to the present building.
We have a signed contract to purchase land adjacent to our present property. The survey has been completed and when it is officially filed we’ll pay the balance of the purchase price. Then we can begin preparing the land for building. We are actually purchasing 4.4 acres of ground—a bit more than we had thought. We are grateful for the extra bit of ground.
Last week we had a great turnout of our ministry teams to meet with our building consultant and the architect. This was an opportunity for the ministry teams to examine their ministry’s mission and cast some vision for the future. This will allow the architect to design a Master Plan. We are looking at beginning the actual building Phase I by this fall. It is all pretty exciting.
A building program often produces excitement and challenges; enthusiasm and stress. But there are also opportunities for spiritual and numerical growth as it stretches our faith in vision-casting and financial stewardship. Unfortunately, it has the potential to also produce an excessive amount of inward focus. A congregation can get so focused on building or adding to the building that they lose their world-vision focus for the lost. Too often their emphasis turns excessively inward rather than outward, on reaching the lost both at “at home” and “abroad”. But God has brought several wonderful opportunities to Countryside to assure that we don’t lose our focus of why we really exist. I will have more to say about those in my next entry,
But a building program also brings a great opportunity to get off “dead center” and to get on with the work of the Lord. That is one of the many great things happening in our church.
Jim
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