Vision For The New Millenium Meeting III

Good evening, everyone. Thank you for venturing out. It's important that we begin tonight with a word of prayer, and then I want to sort of set the platform for the folks who are going to share, and then we're going to interact a little bit. And hopefully by the end of the evening, we'll have a lot better idea about what God has in store for us. So let's pray together. And Lord, we do in bowing our heads, also yield once again to your Lordship and declare that we love you and we so value what you have done for us and are doing in us and want to do through us. Lord, it's an amazing thing. Thank you, Father, that for some reason you looked down and saw this group of people some nearly 20 years ago, and you poured out favor and grace, and you just continue to do it in ways that astound us. And thank you, Lord, that we've learned how to put up with each other and to accept one another's faults and laugh at one another's quirks that we just don't understand. But in the end, Lord, you're doing a great thing. You're redeeming souls and restoring lives and giving hope to those who are desperate and healing to those who have need. And I'm just so astonished, Lord, that you give such purpose to life. So help us now as we just talk. And as a family, Lord, I'm sure there's going to be things in our minds that we can't quite connect tonight. And yet I'm so grateful that we have nearly 20 years of faithfulness to build on. Lord, if this was the first day together, I'd be scared out of my mind. But I'm so confident in who you are that we just look forward to revealing the plan to us. In Jesus' name, amen. First point I want to make is that who's ever here tonight is someone who really wants to be here. It's a very low-key meeting. It was really just barely mentioned on Sunday. I purposely did not want to make a big announcement because as you're going to hear tonight, what is happening right now with North Way is a work in progress. And if that gets said a number of times, hopefully the message will get through. We do not fully understand all that's taking place. But let me just say this. It's big. What the Lord is doing is big. And it's bigger than any of us envisioned. I want to take you back 20 years ago. First question I want to ask you is how much did you weigh 20 years ago? You did, Gene. Oh, you said about the same? No. No, I didn't. Gravity is an awful thing and keeps working. But here's the good news. And I'm so glad you came to the front. God bless you. The Howards came all the way to the front. They didn't sit in the back. Give them a hand for that. Thank you. I love it when people aren't afraid to sit in the front. And 20 years ago, and Gene is here, and Paul is here, and I'm sure a couple of other elder council members will probably sprinkle around, we'll tell you it was never our intent to set out and build a big church. We never sat around and calculated, how can we build the biggest church in Pittsburgh and draw attention to ourselves? And listen, I will tell you that that isn't necessarily a bad thing to do. I mean, to want to do a great thing for God. But our intent was, it was always this, it was always to be wholehearted and to raise up disciples who love Jesus with all of their heart and did whatever He told them to do. That was our intent. And as I think you may have heard said a couple of times along the way at the previous meetings, we figured this might grow to a couple hundred and whatever, and that's about as many fanatics as you can get in one place without causing trouble. Because at that point, really, we were a bit fanatic. What we did, Gene was one of our lead guys. He was accused of being a potbanger back then, or I guess we all were at that point. And I was 33 years old, and all I had to recommend me to the people at large was a youth group of kids, and that was it. And so we didn't know. But as we moved along, we loved people, and we received people, and God just kept sending them. And then we, early in that process, had a prophetic word. So we were loving people and doing what God said. God gave us a prophetic word. Now, we probably here tonight have sort of a range of understanding of prophecy. It's not my intent to go into some rather long explanation of prophecy, but simply said prophecy is a gift of God given to encourage, exhort, and, in essence, expand the possibilities in people. That's what it's about. At times, there's a word of warning involved. At times, it's a corrective. That can fall under, to me, the encouragement side of things. God's encouraging you from making a big mistake. But his word to us was, I will send you all that you'll care for. In other words, it turned our focus from going out and trying to figure out how to get people in to learning how to care for people, care for their soul, care for their external needs and their internal needs, their felt needs and their real needs. And so that became a very simple little description of how we functioned as a church. And as that continued to drive us, God sent us more and more people. I could spend a lot of time, I don't need to. Many of you were part of the history of when we wandered into the Bradley House. Did you know we were the first tenant in the Bradley House? God has a way of making us first, by the way. I went with Jim McCain's son, Jay, formerly McCain, Ford, knocked on the door down at what is now the Bradley House. If you don't know, it's now the Chadwick's, Max Planck's. It's still behind H.O.P. Lumber. That's all I know about. And we were the first folks to go in there while George Bradley was setting up the place. I knocked on the door and I said, Hey, are you going to open this restaurant? He said, Well, I'm thinking about it. And I said, Would you like to have a church come be a tenant? He said, No. No, I wouldn't. And anyhow, we negotiated for the food, as someone explained. And so because we were willing to buy the food, he was willing to have us in. Four years later, we had more people than he did. And you know the story of how God then supplied that building to us. And, folks, that was one of the first major miracles in this whole journey, how a little band of people could go into a building, a very desirable building in a lot of ways, I mean, to fit the kind of church that we were. And it was out of sight, but it was pretty accessible to those in our general area. And in case some of you, how many of you were not around back in 1985? All right. Only about 85%. I don't think you can tell a story too many times, except to say the heart of it was this. When we stood up, we made an offer on the property. The guy refused it. We had to leave and go down to a little Catholic church called St. Teresa's down in Westview area, or Perrysville area. And I really did think that might be the death of the vision. And on our first Sunday in there, it was 52 degrees. You thought it might be the death of you. It was so cold. Many people were worshiping with their down jackets on. Do you ever try to worship the Lord with down? You know, you look like the Michelin man. And it wasn't working. I mean, things were crying. It wasn't working. You know, we were praising and the breath would come out. It could have put it in the end of the whole thing. But the group stayed firm, kept praying. The man went through a terrible divorce situation, had to liquidate his assets. We bought the building that we had offered a $1.2 million deal over five years. We bought it outright for $625,000, including all the stuff inside of it, the leftover booze and all that stuff. And it was a mess in there. We had to clean up. And that was the beginning of knowing that God could do the miraculous. And I'll never forget. And this is what relates now to 15 years later. Listen. There were a lot of people at that auction on April the 30th, 1985, with a lot more money than we had. Our maximum bid was $800,000. My elders council said, servants council at that point, we called them. They said, The most we can possibly bid is $800,000. And the auctioneer stood up and said, Who can bid $800,000? I said, The first bid is going to be $800,000. He said, We're dead meat. But nobody said anything. And so who can bid $600,000? And Bill James, are you here, Bill, tonight? Bill James Sr., he said, Shut up. He said, I'll do it. I didn't bid anything. Went down and we started at $250,000 and ended up at $600,000. So we ended up well under our ceiling. And there was a guy there, a big Rolls Royce convertible, and his name, some of you may know, had come planned by that building to be his headquarters for the McDonald's franchises he owned in Pittsburgh. Later told Bill James, I just couldn't bid against the church. Not because he couldn't afford to, but he just somehow couldn't open his mouth. I have a hunch some people were praying for something just like that. We grew for nine years in that building. And I won't go into depth. You know how we got here. Driving by one day after three years of trying to expand where we were, failing. You talk about failing and wondering where God was. We tried everything to buy the property around that church in Waxford. Door-to-door in the apartments and condos next door. I mean, everything imaginable. Wouldn't happen. Didn't happen. Couldn't happen. Stopped in at the old shed there in 1992 and said to the guy, would you ever consider selling this drive-in theater? It's a nice little spot. Just all woods around here and this little drive-in theater. Wiped the grease off his hands. Never forget this. Wiped the grease off his hands and said, you got 1.2 million bucks? And believe me, we sure didn't look like we did. I said, no, but we got a good chunk of it. Thirty days later we closed on the property. And the Wonder Mall and all these other great plans that someone else had for here were radically changed. And so God has been providing. There isn't a person who's gone on this journey that can say, we just kind of were cool and made our way and tapped some guys with a lot of bucks to buy stuff that we needed. It just never happened that way. And that's why when I come to you now and say, well, here we are again, I don't do so apologetically because God is leading this parade, folks. To me, that's what it's about. How many of you have ever prayed, I want to be part of whatever God is doing and get in stride with it. That's so much better than trying to create your own thing and hope God gets on board your thing. Or running around looking for where it's happening. But if it's happening where you are, then get in step with it. And that's my sense. And I won't repeat the story of how the elders really in corporate prayer sensed God telling us, go check in this land next door on May the 6th of this year. And within a month we realized an opportunity was presenting itself to make this purchase. That's an astonishing thing. We were not looking for it. And again, why is that important? Well, so that you know and that you can tell the people that you influence. Because if you're here tonight, you're a leader of sorts. Your presence here tonight says you care about what's going on in this church. You can walk out of here and say, well, Jay's not out trying to build a dynasty. And the elders are not caught up with some kind of, you know, possess the land because it's great to have a lot of property under your name. It isn't. There's nothing going on like that. We're responding to what God is initiating. That's what we're doing. And so, most of that you heard in one of the previous presentations if you were here. Our plan at that point was, you know, you're looking at a lot of money over here. $4.7 million for the 46 acres, most of which would have been developed and ready for sale. And last I checked, we didn't quite have that much laying around. That was before this weekend's offering, though. It might be there now. So we were wondering, how do we do this realistically and quickly? Because part of the impetus to move forward on the part of the developer was he wanted a quick sale. And that's his business. Why he wanted to do that, I don't really know. I don't want to speculate. But we agreed to see what we could do. And one of the avenues that we were pursuing we began to present to you a while back. Let me just, I'm going to lateral this off now to, there are three people that are here tonight that some of you may recognize, and many of you will not, but they represent something. These are folks that I've come to know in the last year or year and a half. And really quite randomly speaking, these folks didn't have any connection before they came to North Way. And I just, in different kinds of conversations, as I have all week long, I got to know each of these folks and realized that they had a passion to serve the Lord with their gifts. And the great thing about them all is that they really believe the Lord's at work here. And I have to tell you, they're starting to see some things that some of the rest of us maybe have gotten a little bit comfortable with and aren't seeing real clearly. And it may be helpful to hear from them. And beyond all that, they're willing to put their energy and their creativity and their resources into seeing this happen. And that should encourage some of you, you know, like Paul and Gene Arlene and Jim and Nancy, and all those of you who have been here all these years, there's a new wave of people coming along. And that's an exciting thing to share with you. So, it went from the people to the prophecy to the provision. And now this property, someone come up with a fifth P. Please be quiet. Pray. How about pray? Well, we have been praying and we've been praying for the Lord to show us what to do. And I'm going to turn the microphone over now to Beverly Hamilton, who's going to tell you, as we've been praying, what plan is coming up on the radar screen here. And again, I want to underscore, this is a working process. This is something that God is showing us. And literally, every single day, something changes. It changed again this morning. So, if you're the kind of person that doesn't like change, can I interest you in a cup of coffee out in the lobby? Because this next hour or whatever it's going to be is going to drive you nuts. But if you're the kind of person that believes that we serve a sovereign God who is in charge of things, has it under control, and he can be trusted, then get ready to believe him for something great. So, let's give Bev a great hand for just coming up and sharing. Thank you. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not good at this microphone thing. But we're going to go from high tech to low tech. And here's kind of what we're going to go through. At the last meeting, we talked to you about the opportunity for us to move forward. And one of the things we mentioned to you was the bond fund. For those of you that know me, you know I have a lot of humor. Here's kind of the status of the bond fund. Now, Pastor Jay had made a reference to the Lord is really in this. I've got to tell you, as Eric, Doug, and I have been together, I think it was Doug that coined this phrase, the Lord is driving the bus and we're on. We don't know which stop is going to be next, where, or what location. So, this is the Lord. The Lord said this isn't it, and I'll tell you why. There are really six challenges or opportunities that we have with the bond fund. The first one is we would have to secure all of our assets in order to do the bond fund, which means we would have to secure this building, this property, the property next door, in order to proceed with the bond fund, so that's the first one. The second one that we talked to you about, if we did do the bond fund, was to defer interest for two years. Recall that? That's not legal, so we could not do that. We could not defer the interest for two years. I'm sorry, that's crooked. You guys should have told me that. Okay, the third one is the current market for bonds, for church bonds, is about 9%. In order for us to do this for the church, we would have to have a lower bond fund than that, a lower rate for you. So, we were looking at something about 4%. The challenge for that, and then we would sell about 5 million to the congregation, to the body here at the church. Then the other $2.5 million we would have to sell outside of the body. One thing I did not mention when I talked about securing all the assets, the bond fund would not have been the $4.7 million we'd need next door. It actually meant about $7.5 million. The next challenge, and you can see the legalese there, in among liquidity, that means that if you bought into the bond fund at 4% and you wanted to sell the bonds outside of the body, the going rate is 9%, so that would be a challenge if you wanted to liquidate early. The next one was the real thing that the Lord showed us. The bond fund would not have put us in a position where we would have been liquidating debt or getting rid of debt. We would have been postponing debt. It's kind of like the credit card shuffle. You pay your MasterCard with your Visa and you pay your Visa with the American Express and so forth and so on. That's kind of what we would have been into. So at the end of a two-year period, we would not have been better off than where we were today. And then the last thing, the leadership just didn't feel good about it. There was no peace in the leadership, the elders council, the pastors. There was just not any real peace around the bond. So, therefore, we decided not to move forward with that. And from there, I'm going to go to Doug, and Doug's going to talk to you about kind of where we are currently with the finances. And at the end, we'll all, you know, if we have time after questions and answers, talk to you about why we're so excited about this. But we are really excited. Thank you, Beverly. I have the easy part. She's described why it's not the bond scenario. I'm going to give you some of the numbers. And I'm going to start by repeating something that Pastor Jay said, which is this is an ever-evolving process. So what I'm going to present today is kind of how it looks as we sit here today. It is not, you know, the Lord's total journey is not entirely clear, and I'm sure it will change from here. But as it sits today, these are some of the numbers that would be involved with proceeding to buy the property next door. We have an agreement to purchase the property in essentially three payments, the first payment being, if we close this month, a closing payment of $2.8 million, a second payment that would be due January 4th of 2001 for $700,000, a third payment due June 1st of 2001 for another $600,000. So, in effect, in three payments, we would purchase the property. We then have some developmental costs to finish off the property, maintenance costs, et cetera, which we've fairly accurately estimated over the initial period, the two-year period, more or less, from 2000 to 2001, to be about $770,000. Then beyond that, we would be borrowing about $3 million from PNC Bank to finance this temporarily. And there would be some carrying costs associated with that financing and some small carrying costs associated with the deferral of those two payments. That adds up to $550,000 over the course of the first two years. And then finally, a little bit of money left over, which we need to kind of develop our plans for the next phase, which would be the building phase. We could do some architectural work. We could build a model so that we would have an idea of what the ultimate end result might be. To sum all of that up, the funds required, basically, to proceed with the phase that we're talking about tonight, which is essentially to own the dirt, to own the land, is about $5.6 million. Now, how are we going to come up with $5.6 million? And again, in an ever-evolving process, at this point in time, I will be switching back to high tech, and I'll show you what lots I'm talking about. So just for now, keep in mind Lot 3 and Lot 4, and I'll show you where they are on the property. But we have kind of tentative agreements or preliminary agreements from two different buyers to purchase pieces of the property next door. Lot 3 potentially could sell sometime before the end of the year, and at a cost of $600,000. And these discussions are fairly far along. I mean, they're not written agreements, but they're verbal agreements. I mean, these are solid purchasers. And Lot 4, which I'll explain in a minute, around April 1st of next year, that should say 01. They haven't already bought it, as much as we might like. We have a price of $1 million. So that would give us $1.6 million, roughly, from the sale of portions of the property next door. And would leave us with basically $4 million that we need to finance within a campaign. And so at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Eric to talk about our plan for the new Millennium Vision, essentially a two-year capital campaign to fund $4 million that are needed to make this happen. Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. I forgot that. Can we switch to high-tech? Let's see if I can get this right. The experts will have to. This is the property next door, 46 acres in total. And the scenario is we're kind of calling this in the circle. Here's our existing worship center. And this would be the new area where a new worship center, parking facilities, et cetera, would be constructed. Then this area back here is Lot 4. And that is the property that we have a buyer, a tentative buyer for $1 million. And it would be for housing, housing development. Then Lot 3 is this section right here, which we would be able to sell for $600,000. The plans for that property would be to build two office buildings, within which we would have the right to house some of our office space. So if the need exists, we can put some office space within the buildings that would be constructed there. But in the process between the sale of that property and that small property right there, we would generate $1.6 million. The other thing to be aware of is that there would be a trade involved. There's a two-house complex up near the corner lot there, or two buildings. I wouldn't call them houses. That we would need to be within the circle. And at least one scenario, the leading scenario we're thinking at this point, there are others as well, for gaining the access to those two buildings would be to offer a trade with respect to that property right there. So that would give us the property within the circle. And at that stage, we need $4 million. And we would own, obviously, all of the existing campus, including the Grace property. And we would own inside the circle property and what we're calling Lot 2, which is this area here, for future development plans of any thoughts and process that the Lord might provide. So that's where we stand today. Again, having been involved with this on the fringes, at least, for some time, this thing has been very dynamic and has changed a lot over time. And I'm sure it will change again. And I'll talk a little bit at the end of the day about kind of my view of why I think we need to do this. But that's kind of where we're at today as we stand. Did I miss anything? One point, Doug, of clarification here, because I know this question has got to be in people's minds, because this is a little bit of a change from where we were. There are a few of you, I'm not sure how many, that felt like, well, you know, the Lord has given us all this, and why are we divesting of any of it at all? Why, you know, can't we envision a use? I will tell you, between the Elder's Council, this Millennium Team, and the best prayerful waiting on God that I can muster, we believe that there is ample land for us to develop any kind of campus that we can envision at this point over the next 20 years. Doug mentioned parking, but there's also, if you want to notice here, space, approved space for two 40,000 square foot buildings. So there's 80,000 square feet of buildings there. There can be another, I think it's 40,000 more square feet down here if we decide to do it. We have enough space to build a university. Or a nice racetrack for cars, actually. That's what I had in mind there. We could do some nice burnouts right there. It's about a quarter of a mile. I don't know. But I want you to know we took it very seriously. Because as someone has said, you know, we need to think not just a year or two, five years, but 10 years from now. And what this does, it gives us the ability to expand in lots of different ways. And we still have a good chunk here, as Doug pointed out, of green space that we can use. And, by the way, on this space here, if the Lord wants us to, now watch this. If he would so desire, five years from now, this developer is willing to sell us the two buildings he's going to build. The great thing is he's going to pay to build them, lease them to us, with an option to buy them. So if God sends us thousands of people who say, hey, we need this, we literally could end up owning everything up to here. And this, as Doug pointed out very accurately, is still not certain. This is a possibility he may want to relocate somewhere else, may just want some money. So it could still be something of that scenario in the long run, we don't know. But I think this is the best way we can do it without putting the church so over the limit of extending ourselves that it would be irresponsible. And I don't think anybody here wants us to do that, including the Lord. I think faith is, hey, there's still a lot of faith here, folks. For those of you who are wondering where's my faith, it's right here. It's right here. So that was Doug Kittenbrink. Now Eric Anderson is going to tell you the very simple plan that this team has come up with. And by the way, I want to underscore, they came up with this plan. I was not involved in the process. Let these three alone in a room for a while and it's like, I mean, sparks fly. So here's what's happening. And this is how they determined the Lord may want us to proceed on this. Leave us alone in a room. We start spending money. That's what happens. Well, you've heard the challenge. The challenge is $4 million. Doug was so nice to say the challenge was 5.6 and then found himself $1.6 million and then gave it over to me. So the challenge is $4 million. And that is something that we envision being entitled the Millennium Vision Campaign, which would extend for two years. The official kickoff would be in February timeframe of 2001 and then would carry for two years after that. And at some point before the end of that Millennium Vision Campaign, we would begin to wrap up or ramp up the next phase, which would be actually building the new worship center. But we'll take first things first. We need to acquire the dirt. So obviously we're going to have a larger rollout and a very formal rollout to the congregation regarding the Millennium Vision Campaign. The reason that this group, I think, is a really good litmus test is because we are looking to try to jumpstart that campaign with something that we're calling the Million Dollar Millennium Leadership Challenge. And what our objective here is very simple. We want to provide inspiration and encouragement for the church body to move forward with the Millennium Vision Campaign. $4 million is a big price tag. And we want to be able to demonstrate not only in the way that we talk about it and in the faith that we have and the excitement that we show, but also demonstrate with a financial commitment already showing that this initiative has legs. We want to be able to go to the congregation as a whole in February, knowing that we've got some serious force and some desire and some commitment already behind us. So what we did is we drew ourselves a little mountain. And I have to tell you, I drew a lot of mountains last night. Most of the mountains looked like dog piles. And I kept taking them to my wife, saying, does this look like a mountain? And eventually she said this one would do. So we kind of took off of Sunday's message where Jay talked about coming over to see the Pacific Ocean. And lo and behold, there's the Rocky Mountains. And I thought that might be a fitting descriptor for what we're looking to do here. Very honestly, what we're trying to do is put some very specific points to how we want to raise the million dollars. And we want to be bold and we want to be faithful. We want to believe that the Lord is really going to stir some hearts. I've heard Jay talk about that prophecy a number of times, and I never get tired of hearing that. There's another prophecy that he didn't mention, which I think is equally as important, and that's that everything to care for those people is already in the body. And some of the reason that the bond strategy didn't echo right was it just didn't feel like it was in line with that. And so what we're really looking is we're not trusting that God's going to dump a freight load of money on somebody from out of the sky. We're trusting that we're going to be able to stir the hearts, to be able to put the vision in front of the congregation, and to be able to basically unleash what the Lord has already put here. And so that's really the faith that we're stepping out with. And so if you kind of look at our mountain here, the million dollars is going to come from some very specific gifts. We're looking at two gifts at $100,000 over that two-year period, so it's a total commitment. Five at $50,000, 10 at $25,000, 15 at $10,000, and 30 at $5,000. If you add up those numbers, that gives you a million dollars, and it's a pretty small number of gifts, very honestly. And then we believe we're going to have massive grassroots support, and that's going to be gifts that we would term under $5,000. And that may come from a lot of different places. And then we really believe that the Lord is going to provide what we're calling summit gifts. There might be one or two folks, families, that will actually see so much about what we're trying to do here, and the Lord will have put so much blessing in their particular circumstance that they're willing to commit a gift above that $100,000. But we're calling that core structure, if you will, our core giving, and that's what we're really looking to do. So our challenge, our challenge to the faithful people that are here this evening and what we are going to do as the Millennium Vision team over the next several months, is really look to secure those gifts that we have highlighted there so that we can begin January 1st fulfilling those commitments and so that we can go in not only with very strong commitment into the February campaign, but also already be getting the finances coming in to support what we're talking about here in terms of the PNC loan. Now, one of the other things that we're going to do is that we're going to look to be somewhat specific about a commitment schedule. Some of these gifts are challenging in size, but we really want to encourage the folks that want to participate in this leadership challenge to commit to a regular giving, whether that would be a weekly giving, a monthly giving, or a quarterly giving. Number one, we think that it will help build faith. And number two, as we lay out the timeline for this, it's going to be very critical that we understand how all of the funds come in. And we understand that, especially as you look to some of the bigger gifts, you may be in a situation where you're not dealing with necessarily an income-based gift, but you're dealing with a capital-type gift. And in those cases, it isn't necessarily always prudent to be doing something on a weekly or monthly basis, and that's why we look at quarterly as an option as well. But what we're trying to do is just make sure that we can get that encouragement so that we can go to the church body. I personally believe that if you look at the demographics of this church, knocking out $4 million in two years is actually a cakewalk. And I think where the faith has to come in is that it is going to take, I think, a lot of faith and a lot of support from the folks that are here tonight to help grow the church body to a point where they recognize that we do have this in us. We'll be passing out a commitment card at the end of the question-and-answer session, and the commitment card is really looking to try – now, of course, I buried it under 4,000 of these things. All right. What we're really looking for is one of four responses. We hope that we get a lot of respons