Building Move Vote and Discernment Reflections

On Sunday, February 23, 2014 our church voted with an overwhelming majority to redesignate as needed our capital campaign funds to be used to remodel and launch 2168 North Cedar as our Sunday morning campus.  The vote was done audibly so there is not an actual count, but my best guess is that about 90% of those present voted “Yes.”  I am very excited to move forward with this process and see where God leads us, although as Thomas Oates shared, there are a couple of steps yet required before we sign a lease: getting the permits from Delhi Township and having a hazardous materials test done on the building.

While the overwhelming majority voted for this redesignation of funds, there were a three questions that were raised that I would like to take a moment to address.

1.      Can we really grow in this space?  Is it big enough? 

This is probably the key question that was asked, and it is the question I have been asking from the beginning.  The short answer is that I believe it is big enough to be a transition space for us.  I believe we can grow to a regular attendance of somewhere between 250-300 people in worship (not including the children and teens in Kids Creek and StuREV).  Here’s the reasons why I think this space is big enough:

1. The worship area can hold up to 200 or more chairs.  We are not submitting plans for 200 chairs because that would require more zoning regulations to be met.  We are submitting a plan with 130 chairs because that is currently where we are at with some room to grow.  But it is possible to fit 200 chairs in that room.  Having 200 chairs does not mean you will have 200 people in worship.  That’s because when a person walks into a room that is 70-80% full, they feel psychologically like there is no place for them.  70-80% of 200 is 140-160.  For simplicity sake, let’s say 150.  Two services with 150 in each service equals 300 people in worship each week.  Both services will not be equally attended so 300 is the top of our theoretical size.  Let’s say that one service has 100 people in it and the other has 150.  That means we have 250 people in worship each week.  That’s where I get the range of 250-300.
2. The second reason I believe we can grow to that size is because JourneyLifeChurch just down the road is in a space that is equivalent in square feet, and they are hitting 300.  They have outgrown their building at that size.   The difference between where they are at with 300 in attendance and where we will be at is that we will not own the building and will not have to sell it before moving to a bigger building.  This building is a transition building for us.
3. You may ask about parking for 250-300 people.  Let’s say that on average you have two people per car (some cars will have one and some will have four).  That means we will need 125-200 parking spaces if we grow to be that size.  There are currently about 100 parking spaces in total between 2168 N Cedar and the Holt Farmers Market.  We are not asking for permission at this time to use all the spaces at the Holt Farmers Market.  We are only asking for enough space to meet our current size and then some, but there are options for expansion in the future, and those options motivate us to be good neighbors with the Farmers Market.  But we will also need even more parking spaces than that to get the 125-200.  There are several businesses to the North that could be approached, an empty lot across Cedar, and parking on residential streets in the area.  From the very get go in this building, we will be asking regular attenders to park in the “inconvenient” places to keep spaces up close available for guests and those with special needs.  When we run out of spots in the current parking lot, we will be asking regular attenders to again consider parking further away.  Is this a perfect situation?  No, it is not.  But there is no perfect building.  Is it a good option with more options in the future?  Absolutely.
4. The range of 250-300 people is assuming we keep only two worship services.  We could expand to three services on Sunday morning.  I don’t know what the perfect time for those three services would be, but just for discussion’s sake, let’s say we offered one at 8AM, 9:30AM and 11:00AM.  Let’s say there were 75 people who attended 8AM, 125 at 9:30AM and 150 at 11AM.  That would put us at 350 adults in worship each Sunday morning.  Now we have a serious critical mass of new people to begin adding significant giving to a capital campaign to own our own building to ignite authentic life in Christ in even more people.
5. While it is theoretical in nature more than a certainty, one last option worth reflecting on is the option to buy the building at some point in the future.  This would open up over 14,000 square feet for us.  For comparison sake, Holt UMC is only 17,000 square feet and 3000 square feet is just the front hallway.  We could potentially take an entire floor or 7000 square feet for worship.  That would double the number of chairs you could fit to 400 and give us a 70-80% capacity of 280-320 and a two service capacity of somewhere around 500-600.

I share all of these ideas just to show you that there are several options available to us to grow in this space.  I believe 250-300 adults in worship is very realistic in this space, and that would represent the potential for our church to more than double in size in this space.

2.      Why the urgency and short notice on this vote?  Why not wait for further discernment and conversation?

There are several reasons why we chose to move quickly on this opportunity before us.  First, we have been in Lansing Christian School for fourteen years and the last seven have not been very kind to our momentum for Sunday morning.  While beginning a Monday night Church in a Diner created a 22% increase in overall attendance over the weekend worship services, Sunday morning attendance has stalled to decreased slightly over the last year.  Four different consultants (Jim Ozier from North Texas, Paul Nixon from WashingtonDC, Dirk Elliot from Detroit Conference, and Gary Step from our own West Michigan Conference) have all told us that LansingChristianSchool is going to be a difficult place to grow for several reasons.  LCS is a Christian school known primarily by the Christian sub-culture.  The building is not in a visible location.  The broader culture sometimes has negative associations with a Christian school.  We are in the shadow of a mega-church.  We use a lot of our energy to set up and tear down each week.  Our offices are regularly confused as our worship space which communicates nothing much happening on Sunday morning.  These six things have conspired to slow our momentum and create in our culture a kind of spiritual stagnancy that makes it difficult to invite our friends.  A change is needed and the sooner the better!

Second, while we could push the landlord to wait longer for us to discuss the situation further, the landlord has offered us an incredible deal in the rental price of the building ($5/square foot) and the willingness to reduce the rent to pay us back the cost of putting in a sprinkler system (roughly $60,000 or $1000/month off the rent over a five-year lease).  These two offers make the rent affordable at around $2000/month.  There is no other option that we have looked at over the last three years that is anywhere near comparable.  These two options could be taken off the table at any time by the landlord.  He knows he is giving us space at an incredible rate, and he knows that we know this.  He is motivated because his building has set empty for several years, but real estate can change in a moments notice.  We are ready to move forward as quickly as possible because we’ve done over three years of homework on what is fair and reasonable and this offer is beyond fair and reasonable.

Third, moving into a building offers us the opportunity to “relaunch” our church in the community.  When you move several things happen.  First, people who drive by and see the activity become curious about what’s going on.  They stop in and check it out just like they stop in and check out a new restaurant in town.  Second, new doors open with your social network.  You have been inviting friends and family and co-workers to come to worship at SCC, and you’ve worked through your entire social network.  Moving to a new place gives you a new reason to invite everyone in your social network again.  Third, there are really only two good times to launch a new church or venue in the calendar year: about a month after the new year in late January/early February is the second best time and about a month after school starts in the fall or late September/early October is the best time.  We’ve already passed the opportunity to relaunch in the new year.  That puts our next window of opportunity to relaunch in the early fall.  It may seem like there is a lot of time between now and then, but there is less time than you might imagine.  We have to remodel the building, a two to three month process assuming all goes well.  This will put us in the building sometime early June.  We have to inhabit the building and work out all the kinks over the summer so that when the fall comes around, we’re ready for our “Grand Opening” and reintroduction to the community.  If we wait much longer that timing window will close and we will miss the opportunity to relaunch SCC at one of the best times of the year.

Fourth, every time we have talked about a building at any vision meeting, we have always reminded the church that when the right opportunity comes, because of how real estate works, the process will likely move quickly.  When you have been “dating” for over three years and the right “mate” comes along, you know it when you see it.  What is worth acknowledging is that there are two different experiences here of the process.  The process may have seemed quick to the congregation as a whole, but to the leadership who have been involved in this process for over three years, it has been a very long and at times trying process.  When the right building came along, we were ready to move and move quickly.  This process included both formal meetings and communication like the newsletter, open house, and vision meeting.  It also involved a lot of informal meetings and communications with anyone who wanted to have their questions answered along the way.  For these four reasons, the leadership of the church was ready to move and move as quickly as possible.

It is helpful to remember that moving quickly is not new to the people of God.  In March of last year I preached a series on the book of Numbers.  We explored what it was like for the people of God to set up and tear down a tent to worship and to follow God’s lead in that process:

Sometimes the cloud would stay over the Tabernacle for only a few days, so the people would stay for only a few days. Then at the LORD’s command they would break camp.  Sometimes the cloud stayed only overnight and moved on the next morning. But day or night, when the cloud lifted, the people broke camp and followed.
Numbers 9:20-21 NLT 

Here’s one paragraph from that sermon:

Friends, something I have learned as we’ve begun looking for a building we can call home is that it is a day by day process.  We find one door open one day and we walk through it.  All looks good, but then it shuts.  We find another door open another day.  All looks good, but then it shuts.  We’ve seriously looked at three different buildings or properties.  All of them looked like they might work, but then didn’t end up working because of cost, zoning regulations, or parking issues.  It has been a bit of a maddening process.  But I suspect that some day the cloud of God’s Spirit is going to rise up off of Lansing Christian School and settle somewhere else, and things are going to happen very quickly.  That’s somewhat just the nature of real estate.  We’re not sure whether that will be buying a building or finding a new place to rent that has the right location and is at the right price, and is a place where we can set up and stay set up.

You can find the entire sermon here.  It is worth reading again to reflect on how God works and moves in a community of people “in the wilderness.”

3. I was asked why I was not speaking more to the questions and concerns being raised.

This is an interesting question, and I think it is helpful to reflect on something that John Savage taught us a couple of weekends ago about communication in the listening and caring training.  He said that communication requires encoding and decoding a message.  The encoding includes intent and the decoding includes inference.  The person sending the message uses words and non-verbal communication to encode intent and the person receiving the message “reads” the words and non-verbals to infer intent. What I believe was inferred by some was that I was unwilling to answer concerns. What I was intending to communicate was something along the following lines.

There were by design two parts of the meeting.  The first part was intended to be more of a dialogue following a presentation that allowed for clarifying questions to be asked and clarifying answers to be given.  The second part of the meeting was intended to allow for concerns and excitement to be aired freely.

My own experience of being in a group conversation and discernment like this is that the person with the microphone has power.  In this case that meant me and Thomas Oates who were at the front of the room.  I also realize that it is quite an intimidating situation to speak to a room full of people about a concern and have “the pastor” respond to it, especially if it seems like the pastor is getting defensive.  So my intent was not to ignore the concerns being aired, but to respect the concerns being aired by making sure there was space to speak your mind and heart and spirit without having “the pastor” respond to everything said.  This was the primary reason for my relative silence during that time of sharing.  A second more practical reason was that if I responded to each concern that was brought up, the meeting would have either gone much longer or fewer people would have had time to share.

Was there a better way to lead in this situation?  Yes.  Is this still a relatively new situation for us as a church?  Yes.  We have only voted on two items in our fourteen years as a church: to buy a parsonage and this vote.  I was not yet your pastor for the vote on the parsonage.  That makes this my first moment of leadership in helping us discern God’s will together through the process of voting.  Is there room for me to grow as a leader in this regard?  Yes.  Is SCC a community full of mercy and compassion for one another including its leader?  Yes.  Will we grow together to learn how to do this better in the future?  Yes.  Will we ever get to a point where everyone is happy with how we make decisions?  No.  Will God work in spite of all this?  Absolutely!  Thank you God!

If you have further questions, don’t hesitate to call or email me.

Let me end these thoughts reminding us all of the point of the message I referenced above that I preached on the book of Numbers.  I believe it as true today as the day I preached: Trust God’s provision for the future and move forward boldly!