Vision For The Millenium Meeting

Thank you. How many of you are sitting in the seat you normally sit in on Sunday? Yes, some of you are right in that seat. That's your seat. I congratulate you on not being budged under any circumstance. Thank you all for making an effort. I know it's a beautiful evening and there's lots of things to do and I really do appreciate you coming and I think after we're done here in an hour or so hopefully we'll have some sense of the importance of this decision. I have to say, I'll just comment from my heart. It's interesting, if I was here to announce that Carol and I were breaking up and our marriage was over, I'm serious, that I had an affair or something like that, this place would be packed. Wouldn't it? I mean, don't people love that stuff? But you talk to them about the possibility of making a huge difference in the lives of the world and the lost. God bless you all for your heart, but it's rare. It is rare. The great news is we built this church with people like you from the beginning. We've always had that group of people. We sometimes look at each other and say, how did we do this and what's up with the rest of the people? And that's something that in the end the Lord is going to have to sort out. I mean, that's just between... I'm actually glad Jesus is building his church and I'm not and Scott isn't and the elders aren't and Jesus is and I can't answer all those questions, but I am grateful that you came tonight to kind of hear out what's going on and then to give some input and hopefully we'll have some sense of where to go next, which by the way is rather pressing. I mean, the timing of our gathering is of the essence, as they say. Let me give a little context. We're here because the Lord is blessing our church. I mean, he really is blessing our church and that should not be a surprise. I mean, if you come with any consistency, you know it isn't always predictable and you can't always tell on any given Sunday how many people are being impacted and so on, but we just know the numbers are steadily increasing. In a moment, I'm going to show you a couple of slides that verify that and at the end of the evening, we're going to give you copies of material so you have it in hand. And when I say he's blessing, I don't just mean because there's more people. He's blessing because lives are being changed and the testimonies that we have many Sundays, I think, are sort of a peak into the hearts of many, many people. And there are folks today whose lives are testimonies in progress. They're already lining up for their landing in the fall to share what God's doing. And then there's the many untold stories that some of you could share that are reflections of what God has done in your life and continues to do as you grow in grace. So, it's phenomenal. It's just a wonderful thing to think that we started with nine couples 19 years ago. It's unbelievable. It's a wonderful thing. So, we're here for positive reasons. I know that's kind of like the news. It doesn't usually get much attention, but it's a positive reason and I praise God for it. Now, I'd like to share with you just why I think what we're going to put up here on this screen and talk about is of very interesting timing. What we've established here over the years has been around the lordship of Jesus. And again, for those of you who are newer, I just want to reiterate something that the old-timers know that over the years I've been committed, to the best of my knowledge, to keep our church on course of having Jesus be the lord and the center and really the shining light of who we are. Jack Hayford taught me years ago never to build a church on an emphasis. He said Jesus wouldn't build a church, his church, on an emphasis. And so, even though there are many, many good things, you know, we have wonderful praise and worship and we have great moments of celebration, but I don't want to be the praise and worship church. And we have wonderful teaching ministry at all different levels. And some of you wonderful teachers out there, but this isn't a teaching church. And we have great small groups and so on, but this isn't a small group church. And I could talk about healing or faith or all those things, and all those are wonderful things. They're all in the Bible and we should do them all, but none of them, I don't want to be known as the church that's that kind of church. I want to be known as the church where Jesus is lord and center. And that's, by the way, not quite as easy as it sounds. Sounds like a no-brainer, but you got to get my mail from folks who want to make this a certain kind of church. Now, as a result of that, I have to tell you, our growth has been steady, if not dramatic at times. I think more dramatic growth happens when you catch onto an emphasis and ride it for a while. The problem is it usually isn't solid growth. And many churches with emphasis kind of driven ministries tail off when the emphasis passes, which it always does, by the way. So the great news tonight is, folks, I think we are at possibly the beginning of the best. In other words, the first 19 years have been exciting, but the rest is going to be the best. And if I didn't believe that, I honestly would not expose myself to the hassle I'm about to get. Because this is not going to be an easy thing for us to understand. There's a verse in, and if you brought some of you Storm Troopers butcher bibles, I want you to pull them out. If you didn't, don't feel condemned. And I don't even have an outline to give you tonight, okay? This is really scary. So a very simple verse in Acts 13, 36, that means a lot to me, and I've prayed it over my life many, many times in my quiet times. It says, for when David, speaking of King David, had served God's purpose in his own generation, he fell asleep and was buried with his fathers. And this is the scripture that really I would expect all of us would want to have said of our lives, that we serve the purposes of God, right? What is the purpose of God? We want to spread the gospel. We want to see Jesus exalted. We're going to talk about that in a second. We want to serve the purpose of God in our generation, in other words, so that people make it make sense to them. And then we die. And I don't know any other option. I mean, that's all going to happen. And perhaps for some people, that's really clear, and they know exactly what that means. For many of us, we're discovering that. And in all cases, I think that changes to some degree. How you perceive that when you're 20 changes when you're 40. And I expect when you're 60, is that right? And it changes. But isn't it wonderful to be able to say that you were faithful to do that? Pastor Rick Warren from Saddleback Valley Community Church said this about God's purpose. He said, in the words of Jesus, he said, it's the great commandment and the great commission together. Or I'll quote him. He says, a great commitment to the great commandment and the great commission will grow a great church. Those two have to go hand in hand, folks. And I think we know that by now. We have the great commandment. We can love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength and love one another, you know, as ourselves. And that can be a really neat little group. And we can worship the Lord. And we can have small groups and barbecues and be cool. But if we don't do the great commission part of it, I start finding lots of faults with you and you and you and you with me. And it isn't long before that wonderful little, you know, small group church that loved each other and worship the Lord starts to get kind of uncomfortable and distanced. And it isn't long before that those churches tend to just dismantle themselves. Because the great commission is what propels us outward. You'll make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them all that I've commanded you and lo, I'm with you always, even to the close of the age. And so I mentioned those things on Sunday. And what's exciting to me right now and what's laying the foundation for what I'm about to share is we believe that through the grace of God and his timing, we're getting a clear handle on how we can go on to another level as a church so that the core of who we are, I think you represent that core. You're not by any means the sum total of it, but you represent it. That core can grow dramatically. The people that are dedicated to that purpose of fulfilling the great commission and the great commandment. And if we can do that, then we're going to fulfill the purpose of God in our generation and be pleasing to him. And then we can die and receive our reward. And so that's what this is about. It's about being that kind of church. And we are excited because for quite a while, we've been wondering now, Lord, how are we going to go on and do this in a larger context? One of the things, how many of you would like to be part of a large church that's impersonal? Okay, nobody wants to be part of a large church. In fact, the number one fear when they come in this place is, well, it's too big and therefore it must be impersonal. But how many of you discovered that a large church can be very, very personal and you have some of your very best friends in this context, your very best friends? I do. My very best friends are right in the context of this church. And that's a wonderful, that's what it's supposed to be. And so the church can grow larger and it can grow tighter and actually closer as we go along. And we're excited because we believe the Lord's now giving us a clear handle on how that's going to happen. He's opening our eyes to see some things and we're going to be transmitting that. I gave you a little picture of that on Sunday, a little peek at those purposes and how they play out. When you love the Lord with all your heart, that's what? Obviously, worship. And when you love your neighbor as yourself, you're serving them, meeting their needs. When you go and make disciples, you're evangelizing them. When you baptize them with the water and into the body, you are including them in the fellowship. And when you teach them all that I've commanded, you're discipling them into maturity. That's what we want to do. We want to connect people and mature and serve and equip them and then send them out to each other so we can glorify God. And this is important because this isn't just, I'm not just filling up space, okay? The last eight minutes wasn't just so this isn't to warm me up. Because if that wasn't happening, then what I'm about to show you right now, we would not have any reason to even think about it. But I want us to just stop and say, thank the Lord that He's giving us this insight. And I'm going to tell you something, six months from now, so I'm going to write this down. If you want to hold me to my word, you will tangibly see the impact of what I'm talking about. Six months from now, it's going to be more positively intense around you, i.e. more people being affected than we've seen ever. Just you can write it down. It's, I believe it's from the Lord. It's going to be, and it's the fruit of what's been happening underneath amongst your pastoral team and your elders and some of your key leaders. And it's going to start spilling out. And let me tell you, the water is sweet and you're going to want to get in it and drink it. And it's coming. So that's important. And in fact, it's important enough. We've got to stand and say, thank the Lord together. Let's do that. Lord, we just give you praise and thank you that you are moving in this body and we exalt you, Lord. And we speak our praise to you, Lord, out of thankful hearts that you are working on me. Let's give Him praise. Go ahead. Exalt your name, Lord. I've benefited, Father. Keep it happening, Lord. Show us your purposes. Reveal your glory to us, Father. Be exalted, Jesus. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord. Blessed be your name. Thank you, Father. Thank you, Lord. And may we always have grateful hearts, Lord, for we who were dead in our sin, Lord, have been seated in the heavenly places with Christ Jesus and given a purpose, given a reason for living, given a future and a hope. And we just claim it and receive it, Lord, and believe you to enlarge it in each of our hearts in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Now, I'm so thankful for that. I can tell you that a few years ago, I could not have said that with the same level of confidence. Let me show you up here on the screen, and we may have to, I hope we can see through the lights and so, God's at work. And the first chart is this. It should be the average attendance of children and youth in our church family. And right here marks the halfway point. This is halfway in 2000. This is where we are right now, about 625 students and kids average weekly. And this is average, folks. So, you know, this is a little tough number to get to exactly because it's more or less. Projecting the same growth rate, this is what we see happening over the next five years. We're double because we're growing at about a 15% rate. And those of you who are in numbers, you can do the math and that takes us to about 1200 children and students on a weekly basis. If we just stay at the current rate, if things would get hotter, i.e. more effective, this would go faster. But this is not, in other words, I'm not speculating here. This is based on where we've been, especially in the last two and a half years. We've just been going up. Okay. Here's our membership. If you add the total number of people that call this their church home, you can see right here, halfway through the year, we're a little bit around 3000. And if you project that same growth rate in five years, we're going to be at 6537. You say, well, why do you think that would happen? Well, for the reason I spent the first 10 or 12 minutes describing to you, I think God's pulling together a wonderful clarity of vision. And you're going to start sensing it. You're going to start being excited about it with us. Okay. So all these are measurable numbers. And it's interesting, when we moved out of Marshall, there was about 1100 in that book. Okay. And we had some flatter years in here because it was some tough sledding. We were really focused on keeping ourselves balanced. And some folks pulled away because they thought it was too big, or they didn't want to hear about money, which is a very relevant issue, by the way. Others just felt, I remember people saying, well, I liked it when it was smaller, as if the building somehow impacted that experience and so on. But then as we crystallized our vision and talked about how God was raising up disciples and reaching the next generation, things really caught fire. And you can see how especially these last two and a half years have really been significant. Okay. This is projected, 3250 is projected for the end of the year 2000. So we're right around 3000 who call this their church home now. On an average Sunday, the attendance is a little bit under that. But as I've often said, on any given Sunday, how many of you won't be here this Sunday? Come on, sinners, put up your hand. I mean, how many of you won't be here this Sunday? How many of you don't know? Yeah, well, we have to make this a little more demonstrable. Would you just help us all stand up if you can't be here this Sunday? I'm standing. I'm standing. Okay. Thank you very much. That's about 25% of the core people. Okay. And you're the committed ones and some of you are going on vacation. Some of you are heading out of town, whatever it might be. And that's very typical. 25 to 30% minimum are not here on any given Sunday. It's usually a little bit higher than that. Okay. Now, we have a plan. We knew this growth was taking place. Okay. We have a plan to accommodate this growth. We weren't sitting back. And I'm happy to tell you that the leaders of this church are looking forward. And I'd like us to slip to the first slide, please. I have to jump ahead a couple of the property that we currently own. Let's do that, shall we? Let's skip over the next couple of these panels. And that's it. Thank you. This is the property we currently own. Forget this. This is going to be the expanded parking that we talked about. I should say forget it, but don't be confused by that. And that's going to be the new shed. And if you recall, because of your support, we were able to purchase this, about nine acres, eight of which are buildable acres right back here, contiguous with our property. And our plan has been, we would, going forward, expand. These are two buildings right here. It could be multipurpose, more office classroom kind of buildings. And as we would grow, we would move some of the kids' ministries into here and the offices in here, move the kids' ministries perhaps upstairs in the current office building first, and then eventually spill over to here if needed. The other way we can expand ministry here, if you look back in these walls back here, these two walls, the long walls in the rear of the sanctuary are non-load-bearing walls. And those can come down, and I've been told at considerable expense by the building experts, we can, it is engineeringly possible to ramp right up in over rooms 104 and 105 and build about 500 or 530 or so extra seats so that we can get 1,950 or so seats in this auditorium. Obviously, that next bank of seats would be the most desirable because they'd be the farthest away. And people could come in and grab that last row and need, it would take some considerable upgrades too, and lots of different areas. Visually, I don't think people would want to sit back there without some kind of video enhancement. It wouldn't really work, and that's alarming to me. So anyhow, but that is a possibility, and in fact, up until two months ago or less, maybe a month ago, that was the only possibility in my head. I don't want to be very candid with you. That's, I thought, and however we were going to grow, that would be the way we would do it. And it still may be. I still think that's a viable option. It is not one that I would say, well, gee, that's the end of our life together. I mean, we would have a, we still have a terrific facility, one of the best I've ever been in in terms of the layout and the way it works. But there would begin to be some impediments, and there are some challenges to spreading kids over to this area. I'm still having ministry going on here, because if you remember the numbers, where are we in five years? How many kids? 1,200 some kids. They won't all fit in this building. I promise you. Okay, so that's the plan, and it's a good plan, but it's conservative. It probably underestimated what we sense God might be doing. Now, let me give you a real quick update on what the immediate situation is. Two months ago, the elders agreed to meet every Saturday morning to pray together for unity, to kind of discern the heart of the Lord for his church, and I think it's a tribute to the men who serve as elders that they want to pray in legion. In fact, when we call elders, the first thing we ask them to do is to be men of prayer. Prayer, people, and then the purposes of the church. Those three things is what I ask every one elder to agree to. We met on May the 6th, Saturday morning, and I took a chapter out of Mark Gephardt's book and said, let's go prayer walking. It was a beautiful day, much like today, just a little bit cooler, but just very clear and pretty in the morning, and we broke into four groups and started north, let's see, north, east, south, and west, and started and prayed for about eight or ten minutes in that direction, and then sort of swiveled around, if you understand what I'm saying. We just, okay, north, east, south, and west, and then we started swiveling around, and when we came back about 40 minutes later, we met under the port de kashir, and we said, well, what were we sensing? And the number one thing that we sensed as we were praying was how thankful we were to be in such an incredible location, where we were visible to so many people that were driving by, 40 some thousand cars a day go by here, and then all this development. We don't see this as a hassle, friends, we see this as an opportunity. These are people that are going to come to know the Lord. I mean, they're going to be known. People say, now where's this apartment? Okay, yeah, they're not going to say by the sheaths, all right, they're going to say by the church. That's my prayer, anyhow. All right, and so we were thankful, and again, I want to say thank you. I don't know how many times I can say this, but thank you, many of you who gave up things, you gave up vacations, you gave up new cars, you gave up bonuses that we could be in here, and there's just no way I can repay you, but the Holy Spirit certainly will, because you cannot give God. Now, the next thing we discerned was, well, you know, every group of elders came back and said, we kind of sensed that the Lord was saying he might have some purpose for us in this property. Now, keep in mind, on May the 6th, there wasn't a single machine over there, not one tree shredder, you know, not one bulldozer, nothing. So, a little over two weeks later, our elders council met, that's the subgroup of the elders that are responsible for the corporate affairs of the church, and we talked about the response of the elders in prayer and to that situation, and we asked Jack Lightbody to go and talk to the owners of the property to see, you know, what if anything was happening over there, and Jack made the initial contact, went out to lunch with one of the partners, didn't seem to get very far, wasn't very disclosing, then we got together with the other one, and he said, well, all right, here's my plan, and let's go to the next slide, shall we? He said, here's my plan. Now, this one's a little bit tougher because it's not in color, I know that it really is hard for some of you who are not black and white oriented in terms of your video, but you can see this is our current building, this is our additional property, this, forget this, this is those apartments up there, and all along here, this is the property in question, and the last two Sundays I've had this up on the screen, 46.3 acres, this little sub part right here, 2.4 acres, is where those two little houses are, if you come from Cranberry, it's some kind of a little, what is that place? I don't know what they, you know, whatever, they just deal in some sort of stuff, and I don't really know, but they're nice people, I know that, I met nice people, okay, and because I met them, and this is their plan, and right here it's been approved for a car dealership, the last remaining one, there's a permit there, these are all individual commercial lots that have been parceled out, back here, this little broken line, this is C1, their zone commercial one, build, you know, the high intensity retail of any kind in here, this is C2, this little broken line, that's approximately, how much Jack, about 13 acres, okay, and that's property that's suitable for this kind of building, or assisted living for seniors, that kind of thing, and some special permits can be made for variations of restaurants, and those kind of deals, okay, now this is his plan, and it took him, one reason why this property had been idle for so long, it took him almost two years to get PennDOT to agree to give him this access road right here, and there was a lot of rumors about back taxes, and all that was false, it just took him a long time, now, here we are, and this is his plan, this is our road that would go right past the church and connect here, and come out this way, and would be another way to go in and out, as we talked to this gentleman about it, the thought was going through our mind of, what if North Way needed to do something to expand our future, possibly we could acquire a portion of this back here, and tie it in with this piece of property, and it seemed to make sense, and we'd have some contiguous property, and so, because he was asking 4.6 million dollars for this piece of property, plus one point, quickly, the numbers, people are going, grabbing for their pens, go for your pens, you need to do this, because when you do the math, you're going to have a heart attack, all right, 4.6 million, that's what he was asking, there's better news coming, and 1.2 million was the cost to develop the property, i.e., to create the bulk bark mountain, and to put in the storm sewers, and the water lines, and all that kind of stuff, all right, so that's where the number was, and we knew that there wasn't any chance at all of us being interested in the property, but we thought maybe a portion of it might be accessible, and so we came to a place where he was willing to listen to an offer for about 2 million dollars for this parcel back here, okay, a little bit expanded than this, I think, wasn't a little bit over, yeah, it was more like about here is about 18 acres, and I shared this with Matt McCabe, and a couple other people, and in my heart, we prayed about it, because it made some sense in some ways, but I have to tell you, when I sat down with the gentleman a little over 10 days ago, I sat down with the intent to tell him that I didn't think we were interested, I really didn't have peace about it, primarily for this reason, even if we could have negotiated the price down a little bit more, say to, you know, 1.8 million or something, what's the obvious problem with building a large facility back there? Well, it's out of sight, that's a good observation, but what's the really big problem? Yeah, there's one road in and out, how many of you'd like to be in that road in a three or four thousand seat auditorium waiting to get in? Okay, it just does not, the traffic does not work there, and so even though we might be able to arrange some things here parking-wise, it's still, this was a problem, and if you just think of Christmas Eve or Easter or whatever, when you were out there and you were saying, praise God, from whom all traffic flows, you know, and back and forth, and it just wasn't happening. So I didn't have the peace to go forward with it, and here's, with no extra dramatization at all, I sat down with our attorney and with Jack and myself and the other gentlemen, the owner of the property, across the table, and before I could open my mouth and say we really weren't interested, he said, I don't want to sell you that back piece, I want to sell you the whole thing. Well, we already knew at 4.6 million dollars that there, that wasn't going to work, I mean there just wasn't any way that was going to work. So we, he said, well we'll talk about numbers, we'll get back numbers, and he went through a long list of different things that he thought would be very interesting, that it turns out are more important to him than getting that much money for the property, and one of them is to to expedite the deal, because he has some other investments that he's made in other pieces of land and so on that, should he be able to close relatively quickly on this property, he could apparently do much better on some other properties that he has invested in. Now, when we started to think about this, and I, it's hard for me to describe this, but I, I sensed the Lord giving us an idea, and I just kind of scribbled on the paper as we were talking in the presence of this guy with Jack and our attorney sitting here, and the next slide will show you what Jack then was able to further develop. This is what could happen on this piece of property. Now, I know it's a little bit faded, but let me give you an idea. This is the current piece, this is what we own, this is the 46 acres. What we could do, we've always seen North Ways having the property that goes from east to west, from out that way back this way, okay? What if we started seeing our campus north to south, and saw the rest of these properties as buildable for somebody else, or if God wants us to use them, he'll make them available to us, but this would become the dedicated area for our campus and our ministry. What this does, and I'll just highlight this real quickly, is it opens our, what does it do for the visibility, the visibility issue? Well, suddenly, if you walk out there and look up the hill, you'll see where the church would be. If you walk out, and we'll be out in time, there'll still be plenty of sunlight, you can even, don't say I said to do this, but you can walk over there and walk up there and see where this would be, okay? Number one. Number two, the traffic problem. Look at the number, we have three entrances, and a flow pattern around the building, and tiered parking. These would be tiered parking, kind of gently sloping down behind the building, and this also would connect us directly with this, and what we believe would work would be this facility then becomes a dedicated facility for our kids, and our students, and any other creative outreaches we want to use it for, and this facility then does not need to double up and duplicate all those issues all over again, it just simply becomes a worship center. This is what we build here. Now, the exciting thing about that is that means that the building of this building would be far less than you normally would think of for a building that might seat three or four thousand people. By the way, those of you who are thinking that the configuration means that the kids will be separated from their parents, imagine that. We would double in size in probably six months, that's my guess, you know? No, I'm just kidding. We know there might be a few issues there, but generally speaking that it happens in a lot of larger churches. I know Urquhart Hill over here does that right now, and a lot of larger churches do that, and that's one way to use the facility that you have without having to pour tons of money into replicating it, and in fact, to be honest, Pine Township wouldn't let us build a building that big, I don't think, and nor would we want to, it would just cost too much money. So, what this permits us to do then is we have traffic flow, and by the way, if we're willing to expend the money, we can also put another traffic signal out here so that the Cranberry people could go, or we're looking into possibly if this would happen, again, we don't know, this is why we're here together, it might could happen here as well, one or the other, not both, but one or the other. Now, these parcels, you can't read the numbers, unfortunately, but this is an acre, a little over an acre, this is 1.9 acres, this is a couple of acres here, this is about four acres, this is, again, these could be developed as, you know, retirement home type things, quadplexes, these are fully commercial properties that could be sold to, you know, medical office building type people, or some of you have corporate offices right up here and the new buildings right up the street, those kinds of things, there's all kinds of options. Could we go back a slide, please? I will tell you that one of the issues that's at stake here, folks, is if we feel it's not the Lord's will that we move forward, that we need to be prepared to accept whatever comes along here, and I can tell you that right now that the whatever will be a fast food restaurant here for sure, and that might be a blessing to some of you, that would, that would, that would speed up your decision when you walk out of church, you just write it in there, and I can understand, although, although I have to tell you're gonna have plenty of options down here across the street, there's going to be three restaurants that I know of across this way. There's an auto parts dealer that's going to buy this one, there's a fire restoration type of operation that's going to buy these acres where they, you know, they bring in furniture and so on that's been burned and smoldered and clean it up and refurbish it. Those are the three that we know, according to the owner, are investigating or close to being under contract, and again, that might be okay, that isn't, you know, they're not terrible people, but we need to understand, I do remember some of you, and we all remember those of us who were there when HOP Lumber moved in. There's a lot of issues that arise with some of that kind of stuff, so just something to keep in mind. Okay, back to the other slide, please, number three. So, this is what we need to currently consider, and I'm going to close my part now and take