Congregational Meeting

And let me underscore, as we begin here, that the purpose of the meeting is really solely informational. I'm not going to take any votes tonight or any such thing. We're just, we're really here to share with you our hearts as elders and let you know where we are, give you as much of an update as we possibly can, and then entertain any feedback that we can. And if you don't get to ask your question, or if you're not even sure what your question is, at this point, that gold sheet is for you to just go ahead and write out what's on your heart, and something you want us to answer, or a suggestion perhaps, or a comment that you might have. We just want to hear from you, and you're the people that care enough to be here. I selected the gold just because it's symbolic, you know. Okay. I really have four parts to share tonight, and I'm only going to do a part of this, and it isn't going to be long in terms of the amount of input, but I think there'll be some things that you'll be interested in knowing about. Let me, first of all, share with you where we are, for those of you who are interested. Now, we do try to publish some financial reports along the way, but particularly in terms of Prelude to a Promise, just to give you an exact accounting as to where we are and what this is going to enable us to do. I want to start there, and then we'll get into the really exciting possibilities that are ahead of us. The first question I want to ask is, how many people are here that were not here when the church started? Okay. I would expect that. How many are new within the last two years? Let me see your hand. Okay. Now, that's a very fascinating statistic, because that's at least a third, almost 40 percent of people look like to me, that have come recently, and basically your testimony, an illustration, if you will, as to why what we're talking about is important. And I'm going to say this a couple times tonight, but the whole reason to deal with this issue of expansion is because the Lord commanded us to care for all that He would send. And He said the more we care, the more He'll send. It was just going to be His principle. And so from the beginning, we have set ourselves to provide care, and that's really what this whole issue of expansion is about. And I pray tonight that you'll have a fresh infusion of that same spirit as we look at these things. If you have kids, how many know kids are fun? Okay. From time to time. How many know kids are not cheap? Not every hand, every amen. Okay. The reality of the matter is, George, that's exactly the same thing that we found here. People are fun most of the time, and they are not cheap. And, you know, dealing with them the best we know how has not been an inexpensive proposition by any means to do it well. First thing I'd like you to see, and most of these statistics should be fairly familiar to you, are the prelude income figures, total numbers from 1988, 89, and 90. Go ahead. We have them on this side. Okay. Let's put them all up there. There we go. That's the amount of giving that you have, through your sacrificial contributions, made toward Prelude to a Promise. $584,290, and a little over, it's been about 15 months or so, I guess, since we've taken that step of faith. And, you know, a lot of folks have told me since Prelude that they've kind of come to see why we did it. You know, at first there was a lot, you know, not a lot, but there's some people just didn't like it and all. And I have to say to you, I think God's proven to us that it has been a means whereby some of us have been able to exercise faith and discipline, and it's been great for us to learn to do that. But this has enabled us to do a lot of things that we couldn't have done. And I have found my own spirit rejoicing that we were able to expand down here and make more room for the children and so on, to add the office space up above that we needed, the parking, the landscaping, all that we had to do related to acquiring the property, which was substantial, came out of Prelude. And if you'll take the rest of the sheet off, this is the rest of the list. Now, we had $31,000 of costs over the last year related to this. We had all the rest of the things are self-explanatory, I think. Planning and legal is related, all related to the property. That's how much it cost us to go through all those things to get to the point of getting that zoning done, all right? And in the meantime, we've been able to knock $127,000 off of the principal on this building, and our balance here is in the neighborhood of $400,000 at the present time. Checking away at that. Now, if you want these figures, we'll make them available to you. These aren't secret. This is just where we're at. Now, at the same time, I'm sure you're interested in knowing where the property is. Let me ask Pastor Scott to come up and share. The process of acquiring this property has been interesting, and we've seen the Lord open a lot of doors, and we've seen the Lord just have some doors hold for us, and we're at a place now we're just about to consummate the deal, and Scott's going to tell you what we're doing. Scott? I don't really have a lot to share other than I'll try to bring that. Well, most of you have heard along the way the stories of, is that better? We just lost this group over here and won this group. Can I go back where it was? Let's bring it back a little bit more. Thanks. Okay, you've all seen this. This is simply the diagram we have had hanging out in the hallway. This is also one of the diagrams we've used when making presentations to the township through the fall of 89 toward the rezoning of the property. Just to refresh you, we went into this project in mid-89. Under my hand is approximately where our property is now, the six-plus acres that we're on. That was zoned commercial, and then this other 18-acre parcel, which added two hours, makes about 24, 25 acres total, has all been rezoned now institutional. Most of our efforts, most of my efforts last fall centered around the challenge of seeing this rezoned to institutional, which is very, very important to us so that we can expand into the future without a lot of shackles on us. If we wanted to keep one or the other parcel zoned differently, it would also mean that there would be invisible lines that we would have to deal with between the properties, which would make it difficult to build, to add on, without being 50 or 100 feet away from the imaginary zoning line and so on. So that's history. It's all been rezoned to institutional. We are now able, in fact, we're in the process right now of working through the final little issues that relate to the actual purchase of the property with First Federal. There's no negotiation necessary regarding the price. Their asking price is still the same, the $600,000. The only thing is there are some extenuating circumstances relating to off-site piping and so on that we are working through with them and the township right now, which we think we're in a few weeks at the most of having resolved, possibly even next week. I have a couple of meetings set up next week with the key representatives of the seller and the buyer and the township and the engineers and so on. So we're very close to being able to purchase it, which is really one of the reasons why we wanted to have this time of sharing with you so that we can bring you right up to date regarding the next steps we're going to be looking at. Okay. I just recently got a letter that said that we will need to close on the property by March 15th and that's fine with us. The little delay has not hurt us at all. They're paying for the interest and what have you. And as of right now, as I speak to you, with the prelude giving and the other monies we've been able to save, we have over half of the money in hand for the purchase of the property. We have over $300,000 in hand and we're negotiating a couple of different loans to consolidate the balance of the mortgage on this and to acquire the property next to us. And that's very, it seems to be very attainable according to what we're understanding from the lending institutions we're talking to. Our resources certainly justify our requests here and we're not going to be putting any pressure on ourselves to do that. That isn't really a big challenge. Although, needless to say, I'm trusting that some people will still desire to come on board in the process of attaining a property, which haven't done so yet. Now, let me talk for a few minutes about why we need to not just sit on this. And I want to share with you some statistics, if I can, and we did our best. We're working at learning to use our equipment better. I understand we've got some people who would be really helpful in learning to do this now in the congregation, but I want to share with you how the ministry has been growing and why some sort of expansion is really necessary. Let me first of all show you that we have the weekend services there, okay, the colored one. Can we have that first? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is on an average weekend. This is what the services look like. Since most of you only go to one, you may not know this. Why don't we, can we turn that, guys, can we turn that about 10, 20 more degrees this way? For some of the folks, I can see they're straining and I don't want to have a healing service after this. Careful. All right, that's good. Is that better? Okay, good. Thank you. Now, the purple lines there represent what's happening in the Saturday night service on an average weekend. Now, today was a little below average. Wonder why? But on an average weekend, this is the kind of attendance that we see. 1989, on average Wednesday or Saturday night was a little over 200 people, about 500 people in the first service and somewhere in the neighborhood of 650 people in the second service. So an average weekend attendance, that's the way it would break out. Now, we have been growing steadily at 20 to 25 percent per year and if you just keep, continue to project that over the next four years through 1993, you can see that our attendance on Saturday night would run in the neighborhood of about, looks like close to 600 people and if we had room to get all the people in here at nine o'clock, there'd be well over a thousand and if we had even more room, we could get upwards of 1,800 people just based on that 20 percent growth rate. I think that's accurate. Now, let's have the statistics of the total average attendance. That's the total average attendance. Now, total average weekend attendance. Do we have that one? That's the right there, okay? This is the way it breaks out. Right now, it's about 1,300 on average weekend. By 1993, that would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,700 adults. Now, we're just talking adults here, all right? From 1989 to 1993, that's about, as you can see, it's about doubling in attendance over a five-year period. I think that's right mathematically. Now, we all know that God could do marvelously more than that. We could, you know, I could tell a joke and the whole place would fall apart. You know, I mean, no, I'm just kidding, but God obviously has control of these issues. Now, there's a very faint line there. Do you all see it? That's the children's ministry. That isn't included in those numbers, but it certainly is included in the impact and I wanted, Pastor Jeff, just to take a couple minutes and share with you what's happening back there and what the implications are in terms of the squeeze with the kids. Jeff, if you could come up right now, please. I know that you're here, many of you, because your children are important to you and one of the things that I feel very strongly about is how well we attend to their needs. Tell us where we're at with that, Jeff. I was just thinking, as a lot of people, we've been here now for going on near seven years and before that wall there used to go on that room that used to go all the way over to the window wall over there. I remember we used to put all the kids over there and put those orange partitions that you see that have all fallen over and we separated them. We had them all in one room and so now when we're back here, I think, well, that's great, but what's happening is that in order to keep the quality there and keep a good ratio of student to teacher, we need to have a little bit more space because what happens is the classes get larger and then we feel and what we want and expect out of these classes, the quality then we feel is not what we would want it to be. Come in and say, oh, things look great, but you talk to the teacher after a 11 o'clock service that's had 35 kindergartners in one room and she probably wouldn't see it that way. So that is where we are. As we're growing, we would like to be able to split these classes up, but we have nowhere to go. Really, we wouldn't. I don't know what we could do. And so quality becomes an issue. Quality of training, quality of the care for the kids. Exactly, yeah. And in the lower grades, we need a lower teacher to student ratio. Actually, we should be at about four to one, something like that. I mean, six to one maybe. That means every six child should be one teacher in there. For the 35, we have maybe four teachers in there and that's a little bit that we don't want to see it at that point. Okay, Jeff, thanks very much. Let me share with you real quickly now the above average cumulative attendance. Let's just do the cumulative one, okay? On the above average weekend, right now we're seeing between 250 and 300 people on Saturday night on a good weekend, between 500 and 600 people at the first service, and we've had some weekends, if you've been here, where every seat, virtually every seat in this auditorium is full in second servitude is about 800 people. So that, and if you project those figures, it's substantially higher. You can see that it's conceivable by 1993 we would have 3,000 adults in attendance. That's if things would accelerate at all. Now, that's just to give you an idea of the magnitude of the need and the issues, and there's lots of different ways that this has implications, but I just wanted you to know that that's where we have been going. And because of that, another subset of things that are raised as an issue are some of the other ministries that are calling for support, and the prime one of which, of course, is Eden. Eden Christian Academy that we helped to establish seven years ago, was it, or eight? About seven years ago, I believe, is now bulging out. We have, if you come here during the day, Pat, how many children are at our facility on an average day? Almost 200 children here. I mean, this is not a quiet place to get away and be alone, because I know that. And we know that we could add more if we had space for them, and I think that Eden has pretty much maxed out at lower grades space-wise, let alone the fact that part of their vision, of course, is to have a high school level educational opportunity for folks. We have been talking with the Eden board, and of course, one of our elders, Dave Lloyd, is on that board, and Jim Franks has been on that board, and so we have a real good line of communication, and we are working with them to try to have some arrangements that would be suitable and workable for them as we develop this property. And I know I can tell you, and they would affirm that there's a whole lot of interest in that. It just depends on how it works out. So that's calling for some help. There's lots of limitations. Pastor Tom could speak for a while tonight on the implications, the limitations he feels for youth. Did you want to make any comments on that, Tom? Why don't you, because I know you feel pretty strongly about it. Have you ever come on a Wednesday night and ducked your head back in the family room and seen what 60 or 70 junior highers were doing there? It's quite an experience. Yeah, Sam. The truth is that we, the only thing that stops junior high from becoming a more, a greater impact is space at this point. Two things that we need to work on, that's the thing that we need to work on. In fact, we're at this point looking for a place outside of this facility to move. Unfortunately, the Lord hasn't opened up a door yet. We've been closed down every return. And yet, when we can expect anywhere from 60 to 80 kids, depending on the given night they were doing. And again, that limit and the space itself limits us. There's, the family room allows us for little creativity at any, if any, in the family room for kids. 60 to 70 kids sitting in the family room is fine if all they want to do is sit. But if you want to do anything with junior hires, which you have to do, there's nothing to do. So just for an example, the one week we tried to do something a little creative. We made this obstacle course in this other room over here. Just so happened that night, Pastor Jay decided that he wanted to speak earlier. So we have all these kids running, ruining and destroying tables over there. And Pastor Jay's trying to talk over here. So we had to hush them down. They had to sit for about 15 minutes until we could regroup and move them back into the family room. That's just some of the obstacles that you have. Children's ministry, God has blessed on Wednesday nights as well. And they kind of take over everything back there. So it's really difficult. So that's where we're at, especially the junior high ministry, the challenge on a Wednesday night. Space is our problem. All right. Thanks, Tony. So let me just pause here. Are there any questions that you might have to this point about the validity of the need and the number of considerations that we have? Before I get on and share with you what the options are, which is my next step, I wondered if any of you had any questions related to where we are currently in terms of need or projections or usage of the building. One thing it's not on here. I can't, for example, how many people come here on a Monday night of this group? You're here Monday night for something. Hey, Ross, would you verify that there's barely a space where one can go on a Monday night? I mean, it's amazing. Every place is, I mean, all the rooms are broken down and there's people everywhere you go. And that's not really a lot in common. And that's, we're delighted for that, but that's the building. The people who would argue, well, a church is just used one day a week, have not been here. That's all I have to say. Okay, any questions? I'll pause right now and then I'm going to go on and share with you what the options are as we understand them at the present time. By the way, mentioning, you know, the projections, I think we would all also confirm that the Lord has seemingly put us in a place where growth is just happening everywhere. Demographically, the projections for the next 10 years are that Warrendale will become to the North Hills as North Hills Village, or North Hills Mall, North Way Mall and Coffman's now Giant Eagle used to be the center. Do you understand what I'm saying? The demographic center will be moving out to where Warrendale will be that by the year 2000. So we are really right in the center of the demographic hub of the whole thing. I think God maybe knew what he was doing in that and has blessed us really just enormously. There are so many places that we haven't even touched and that, by the way, is one of the reasons I think that probably you'll see a lot more churches planted out this way because there are a lot of needs and people go with their needs. Do you want to add something to that Scott? Sure. Yeah, just to give you a little perspective because I see things from the harvest ministry standpoint. Over the last four weeks, I sent a letter out to the harvesters letting them know that from the last weekend of January to three weeks later, we had seen 128 adults fill out cards as first-time visitors here with us. Record kinds of numbers. If you had been with us afterward today for just our reaching out to the newcomers and Francis were there and some of you were there, we literally filled every seat and every table in that room for the third time in a row. We've already got nearly 30 people sign up for the next Discovering the Way. Two current Discovering the Way classes with roughly 25 to 30 adults plus kids in each one. If you're thinking we're dreaming about growing in the need, you're wrong because it's very much of a reality to us. All right. Obviously, I don't have any questions about any of this. You have questions about what are we going to do? I expected that. All right. Here are the three options and here's where I'm going to trust maybe you can use material to write down if you want to remember this because I don't really have a handout. Three options as we see it. The first one, I'll use the drawing. The first one would be to go right ahead and seek to establish the proposed worship center. That's this building right up here. I'm amazed how many people still don't know what I'm talking about when I say where that is. You absolutely cannot miss it if you walk out the door and look up and see the tree line. That's where it is. Most of you know that, of course. To press ahead with this, this building as it, and by the way, that model out there is not a working architect's rendition of what it's going to look like at all. I mean, that just, that may be, you know, a shot in the dark. Basically, it's a footprint. Basically, it's just that's how much space we're going to cover, which is about 70,000 square feet on two floors. 35,000 square foot worship area and 35,000 square feet of classrooms slash offices is what that would come out to. I mean, if another person tells me it looked like Brother Dan's church, I wish he put a blue roof on or something. I would have saved a lot of grief. I mean, I even had a lady, I don't think she's here, write me a letter to tell me how we missed God on the design. I said, you know, I said, we didn't even ask God about the design. I said, we just did this. I mean, it was just made up because we didn't know. For those of you who won't turn the sound on, for those of you who need perspective on sizes, just so you know, this building, this building is 26,000 square feet. Does that help you regarding footprints? Okay. Okay, I'm going on to that. Thanks, Chris. In its completed form, the proposal right now is that we could seat 2,500 people under the roof of that building and have hopefully adequate classroom space to accommodate the kids that would be involved there if we were able to use some of the space down here as well. And some of that would be balanced out depending on offices and all that kind of thing. Now, I have asked the architects to help us come up with ideas that would enable us to phase that in so that our first phase under roof here would let us accommodate 1,500 in worship. And then over time as the Lord blessed and people were added to our numbers, we could expand ancillary areas out here, you know, whatever. And these are all concepts that architects, you know, are able to come up with. And that's what we're working on. I feel like it would be better to phase into it and be able to grow accordingly rather than to try to jump into a giant thing that we're not ready for yet. And that's part of that concept. So that would be phase, that would be one possibility. And, you know, if you're a person that's trying to get your gears going outside, what would it cost? What would it cost? What would it cost? Most builders would tell you today that if you're using conventional methods for institutional buildings like this where, you know, you have to use heavy doors and all these two code kinds of specifications and all the rest, you're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of $75 a square foot. Some would say more, some would say less. There are ways to save money in that to be sure. That's roughly what it is. What does that come to somebody? A lot. He said a lot. All right. Well, that's just what it would cost. That's if you, you know, if we walked up and someone said, here's the key, the building's finished, you've got 70,000 square feet, it'd be five million dollars. Okay, okay. Yeah, that's a good question. Dave's question is important to us. He asked if space, if money wasn't an issue and so on, and timing, would we just prefer to have one service together? And we have experienced both, as you all know. I'm of the mind that what we're doing right now is kind of on the cutting edge of winning people because it gives alternatives to people. That's why I kind of prefer a phased approach. I would hope that we would never really just have one service of one kind because I think it gives us more alternatives to win people. So yeah, if you say here's a place to worship for 2,500 people, I probably would say not yet. That's my feeling. I haven't really talked to the elders about it, but I kind of feel that. I think what we're, if I'm reading you correctly in your feedback, you like the idea of some alternatives. You like to come when you sense most, you know, your needs are most appropriately met or when is best for your schedule. That gives you some alternatives. And we hope to stick with that if I think that answers your question today. Now, one possibility. And by the way, there are some subsets of that. We could finish just the worship area and not the classrooms underneath. Use this for classrooms and you cut the cost down accordingly. Do you understand what I'm saying? You could have a bare basement, if you will, and later on finish it at a cost of probably, you know, a couple million dollars or whatever it may be. Obviously the shell and some of the initial work is going to be included in that. Another alternative that Pastor Scott and I were talking about the other day was it's conceivable that we could put a recreational facility and classrooms in first and then over time finish the worship area. It's a possibility I would expect that we could conceivably approach it that way. So that's sort of alternative one and 1B, if you will. And alternative two is this. We know that we must accommodate the kids and we must provide some options for our youth and for our, you know, other active people in the church. And so one thing that we are pursuing quite actively is the possibility of making our first phase of development this gymnasium slash classroom addition right here. If you can see, it's not exactly to scale, but we're talking in the neighborhood as we've been batting this around of 18,000 square feet of space. A gymnasium, a full-size senior high size gymnasium, it's about 9,000 square feet if you include places to sit and, you know, attendant locker rooms and those kinds of things. And then add about another 7 or 8,000 square feet for classrooms. Now what that would do would be to give us an immediate relief for the overcrowding of our kids and some alternatives in classroom space. It would give us lots of alternatives for their youth and things that they could do and our singles and, you know, we oldies who like to do some athletic things on occasion. And it will also enable us to get a little more worship space over here. We can, you know, regularly open that wall and have overflow space, which is not good seating by anybody's standards, but is something. And this option we've been pursuing actively to see what it would cost and so on, but again, let's just use the figures. If you say 17, 18,000 square feet, $75 a square foot, you're going to come in at about a million and a half dollars just to do that. All right, so those are the active alternatives. This other building here, the chapel, is by everyone's estimation the last phase. After we finish this and this or this and whatever way we go, this will be something. You see, if you want to get married, unfortunately, some of our people just, I mean, it's kind of hard to conceive of a wedding in a church for 2,500 people would sit, you know, it's just not intimate or a funeral or a prayer meeting, you know, those kinds of things. And the chapel would serve those needs very, very well. Okay? Okay, Bill, thank you. Bill asked, what about the parking? Now, in any of these scenarios, we are working on an avenue that would enable us to start providing adequate parking right away. If we went with the alternative of the gym and classrooms first, we would still bring in equipment and start to move some dirt up above here. As you, I think, all know, our south driveway, the one that's out that way, close to Richard Road, is going to be one of the main access roads right up to here. Forest Oaks will become a cul-de-sac and we'll be able to connect this road right up there. And no matter what we do, Bill, whether we start this first or if we go ahead and start the large project first, we're going to clear parking up here so we can ease that problem. And one of our goals is to try to connect this road with the North Point Meadow Road, which is the one that comes out there at the traffic light. You all know what I'm talking about? By the ground right up here. It's not really even try. That would be a part of that phase. So you have a tremendous benefit of additional egress and entrance with the phase. And may I say that we know that the parking now is strained. It's workable but barely. The second service on a Sunday can be very, very difficult. And I appreciate those of you who are helping with the parking lot ministry, Dave Erdner and all his team, and those of you who've recently volunteered helping us a great deal to send a message. I want you to know, lots of people come and go if there's no parking. And you say, well, I wouldn't do that. And I know you wouldn't, but a lot of non-Christians would. And that's what happened. So yes, that will be part of it, Bill. And that would be part of whatever we do next because we know we need that. And David Weiss is still agreeable, but that's nothing in concrete. They could say no more parking there and it would be difficult. Just to back up one or two steps, one of the reasons that we decided on a phasing plan in addition to the existing building plan is because we want to connect these properties as best we can internally. This is not the final layout, but actually part of our thinking in having an addition on the west side of the building will be that internally we'll be able to rise up to this hilltop. Not necessarily completely under roof, although we're not tossing out that option, but ultimately we hope that this does function very much like a campus where we can easily get kids one direction or the other or ourselves without having to fight the elements. And ultimately both buildings are surrounded with parking areas and you've got a real flow for people. Now obviously the question becomes which alternatives are you weighing most heavily? From the perspective of the elders, it seems like the greatest number of immediate needs are met if we pursue the addition. And that helps relieve the situation with the kids. It gives us some new alternatives with the youth. It certainly is the alternative that Eden prefers. And it also is financially much more doable right off the bat. Keeping in mind, however, that all the resources that go into that are resources that cannot go into this, which means that will probably delay this project. Now you say, well what difference does that make? Well, when you look at the numbers that we have, it can make a great big difference when it comes down to sustaining our growth and enabling us to provide that care. So these are issues that are in tension with each other. Yes? Well again, I've been told that from the minute we make a firm commitment to this addition, it'll be at least one year to map it out and get all the approvals and build it. That's best case scenario from the point we make a decision. Now this will enable us to expand somewhat in here and keep accommodating, but one of the key issues in all this, folks, is your willingness to be flexible. And when I say you, I mean the general populace of the congregation. If you insist on worshiping at 11 o'clock and that's your time and you and God have this agreement, it will be stuck. We will not be able to grow much more at 11 o'clock. If you're willing to come down into nine, come Saturday night, then we have a lot more flexibility. As long as we remain physically sane, you know, if we have to add a third service on Sunday, we will. I want you to know it's very costly emotionally and physically to do mult