Easter Sunday is always great but this year is something special for my church family. Our church has experienced amazing growth in the four short years since it was started. The church started out with the pastor, his wife, and a handful of people. It quickly grew to include a lot of college kids (our town of about 100,000 has our state's largest State University with about 23-26,000 students) and homeless folks.
The demographic of the church is still very young but over the past 1 1/2 or so I have gone there it has broadened to include a lot of young couples with children and more middle aged folks as well.
Midway through 2012 we knew that we were quickly running out of room at our present location. Our sanctuary (an old downtown grocery store building) would seat right at 200 people. After starting 2012 with an average attendance of around 175 people between three Sunday Services by the time August rolled around we were running around 400.
Pastor found a 112 year old factory building near downtown that had been partially renovated. The main area that would become our sanctuary had been updated and was being used as an event center for weddings, etc. The rest of the side of the building we were looking at was jus a brick shell with bare concrete floors on the first floor and wooden floors in a large loft area upstairs. After the leadership of the church toured the facility and looked at the financial aspect of it the pastor asked us to pray about it and meet again.
At our meeting a few days or weeks later he asked what we all thought. He said that if even one single person felt a check in their spirit and did not think it was the right thing to do we would not do it. We all agreed it was the right thing to do.
This was at the end of summer / early fall. It turns out the timing was really "God's timing" (as the folks in the Memphis thread like to say - LOL). By the time all of the negotiations to lease the building had been done and then the owner given time to do the part of the renovations he was responsible for, we did not get to start work on our part until about 7 weeks ago.
The church hired contractors to do the plumbing and electrical obviously but beyond that church members pretty much did everything else. We have had an amazing group of men and woman who did all of the framework and hanging drywall of the education building and then all of the painting when that was done. This past week we hung three 60" tv's for song lyrics / power point and ran all of the wiring then installed our new sound system.
Tomorrow the work of a lot of dedicated volunteers will result in our first service at our new location. We are starting with seating for about 300 with that growing to 350 as soon as our additional chairs come in. That will allow us to grow to 1,050 between our three services before we have to start thinking about another move.
Has all of our growth been un churched folks? No. We do have a lot of people who were not attending church or did not know the Lord that have come to Christ at our church. We have also seen tremendous growth the last year from folks who did attend church but were looking for something more or who had attended churches where there had been failures in leadership, etc. That influx of mature christians has made the base of this church even stronger in reaching the un churched.
We will continue to do church in the way we always have;
-Going through the bible book by book with typically one chapter being covered each service. (Easter Sunday and several "vision" services being the exception)
-Feeding the homeless every Sunday morning through our 5,000 ministry. We currently feed a hot breakfast to 75-100 people. Some of whom then come to church.
Our themes is - Authentic Worship, Authentic Community, Authentic Community Service.
Here is a link to a video the local newspaper has on their site about the new building;
http://www.dnj.com/VideoNetwork/2253...ey=mod%7Cvideo
Here is a link to the church website if you are interested in learning more about the church or would like to watch or listen to a sermon;
http://www.experiencecc.com/index.php
The pastor, Cory Trimble, is the former Youth Pastor of the local UPC church in town.
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