This past Sunday, as we launched a new year and a new sermon series, I shared a new challenge with the congregation: to raise one million dollars in 90 days.

If you would like learn more about this effort, we will be holding a leadership dialogue following our second service this Sunday, January 14^th. I will be joined by members of our board in the sanctuary to give a brief presentation and allow time for any questions you may have. Please join us if you are able, but for now, I wanted to provide some background on why we’ve chosen to launch this campaign and share some of our hopes surrounding it.

Four years ago, on the heels of a completed capital campaign, The Reach Initiative, our church was riding a wave of excitement and growth across our ministry. Our attendance was at an all-time high, our engagement in global and local missions partnerships was increasing, and there was a sense that God was on the move. Our elders at the time were already praying and dreaming about what God might want to do next. Reach 2, as we called it then, included a series of new initiatives we hoped to launch later in the year 2020.

What happened next took everyone by surprise. Suddenly our plans were replaced with a need to rethink our entire ministry overnight. Due to the pandemic, we shut down our in-person gatherings for four months, and for the next eighteen months experienced a series of starts and stops as we gradually reopened areas of our ministry. However, thanks to the new technology and infrastructure made possible by The Reach Initiative, we were able to stream our services and innovate within our front-line ministries in ways we’d never imagined.

In the spring of this past year, our elder board decided it was time to refocus on the future. This past fall, a team of elders began to meet and pray about what God might want to accomplish in our church in the next five to ten years. Progress is being made, and we hope to engage the congregation this spring and launch a new initiative soon.  

In the meantime, we decided it would be a good idea to reduce our remaining debt by one million dollars in advance of the planned change in interest rate in the second quarter of the new year. (We originally raised five million and borrowed five million, and currently have a four-million-dollar balance.) This would save us over one hundred thousand dollars a year in interest and allow us to maintain our present monthly payment going forward. And we have again committed to give ten percent of these funds to new and existing missions partnerships.

To help launch this effort, I invited a handful of families, including our elder board, to make a gift or pledge before January 7th. Last Sunday, I was thrilled to announce that we now have three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. We’re already one third of the way!

On Sunday we asked people to commit to praying with us over these 90 days and to consider giving a gift or making a pledge by Sunday, April 7th. We handed out goal cards and asked for people to return them to our offering boxes around the sanctuary by Sunday, January 21st.

If you were not here this past week and would like to participate, you can find these goal cards in the seatbacks of our sanctuary this coming Sunday, as well as FAQ sheets near the main doors. All information related to this effort is also available on our Reach 2024 webpage.

Thank you for your continued faithfulness to this ministry and for your part in what God is doing in the life of our church.

Pastor Rob