How To Be A Hero
Our church has some very serious building needs. The main building is forty years old and is not adequate for our ministry, and hasn’t been for many years. Things have been done to band-aid it like add a classroom wing and a separate building with even more classrooms and a youth room, but we still only have one set of bathrooms in the main building, and they are downstairs by our only fellowship room. During the week, our basement is a pre-school, so on Sunday morning you get to look at Ernie and Big Bird on the bright yellow walls. Not to mention how we make our older member struggle going up and down the stairs afterward the service to have coffee. And that, with everyone downstairs after church, you can’t hardly move and can’t hear yourself talk.
I’m not complaining — I’m really telling you like it is. All the members of our church agree that we need do to something major, though we all have been dragging our feet. Our main excuse has been cost and our location. We looked at buying more land, but if we could afford to buy a decent-sized plot, our building would be smaller than we have now — which would defeat the purpose.
Then God brought Brown Church Development to talk to us. They consult with the church, design what the church needs (as opposed with what the church wants, which can be two different things) and then they build it. All for a set price — if their plan costs more than they projected to us, they eat that extra cost. And all they do is build churches, and they know what they are doing.
The Council and the Building Team met with Brown’s CEO last night and went over their proposed contract. He went over every piece of it and glossed over nothing. The members present all agreed that it was a surprisingly clean contract. We decided to sleep on it and meet Sunday after church, but no one disagreed that we should work with Brown.
As I’m reflexing on all this on the drive to work, I’m listening to a podcast from Mosaic Community entitled “Deborah: Unlikely Hero” (the direct link seems to be down, unfortunately). The speaker talked about how Barak wouldn’t go to war without Deborah, because he didn’t really want to go. He didn’t think that God would fulfull his promises. Deborah was a hero because she was willing to do something that no one else was willing to do.
This is the same issue — for years, we’ve known that we needed to do a major overhaul of our building facilities, but we’ve been too scared to do it. Now God has presented our leadership an opportunity to make things better for our ministry, and our present and future members. We are being called to do things that no one else has wanted to do.