Building Update #1

Well, it’s been a busy couple of months around Friendship Church!  For the most part that explains why I took a two month absence from posting another blog post.  Besides all of the normal stuff that happens I’ve been doing a lot of preparation work for our future building project.

To give you a little background on how we got here; two years ago we were looking at our growth and realized that very soon we’d be out of space in our building.  We talked extensively at that time and actually met with a small group of men, all of whom are elders today at Friendship, and prayed through, talked through, and did research on whether or not we should consider building.  At that time we decided that it would be a better use of our resources to begin doing two services, even though all of the “experts” told us we wouldn’t be successful.  We believed that was what God was calling us to do.  It was a HUGE step of faith, and I’ll be very transparent and say, I was nervous!  We launched our two services for the first time in March of last year, a little over a year ago.  Since then we’ve grown by 35% or almost 100 people, we’ve seen over 50 people come to know Christ, disciple over 120 through our Workshops!  Suffice it to say, it was obviously the right decision and God has blessed us beyond measure. 

So far this year we are running just shy of 300 people each weekend, and our kid’s ministry is packed to the gills!  If we continue growing anywhere near our current pace, we will outgrow our facilities in a year or less.  We’ve spent the last several months, praying, talking, and researching all of our options and we are confident that this time we need to build.  Right now we are in the slow, not very exciting, phase of the process.  We’ve been talking with financial people and getting ourselves in the best position possible; we’ve had quite a bit of site engineering done, to make sure we know all the potential “surprises” that may come up; and we’ve met with the City of Greenwood to find out there…um…demands ( I jest of course, they’ve actually been very helpful).  All in all the process is going along very smoothly and we are excited for this next phase to begin!

Here’s how you can be praying:

• Wisdom: we are going to be making a lot of decisions as we continue to move forward, and we’ve got a tremendous group of elders.  However, you can never, ever pray or have enough wisdom when making decisions that will have such a significant impact as this potentially could.
• Vision: one of the reasons that I believe God has blessed Friendship is because we are constantly moving forward towards our vision of “Glorifying God as an Effective and Influential Church”. We don’t want to become so bog down in decisions and details that we stop pursuing the vision.
• Faith: God is doing some pretty amazing things, and I’ve been around long enough to know that when God is moving He’s going to ask us to take some pretty big steps, which means we’ve got to have some pretty deep faith.
• Focus: All of us elders have full-time jobs where we have responsibilities, and on top of that our families.  Times like this demand a lot of meetings, and extra hours of reading and research.  It can become overwhelming, and cause us to lose focus or get frustrated.  I don’t know about you, but no decisions I’ve ever made when frustrated worked out well!

Thanks for praying for us and for the future of Friendship Church!  That’s all for now, but keep an eye open for the next update…