🔴 Campus Planning Update! 8/11/23

We started with two questions: how is God calling us to be a blessing in our community, and what are the biggest needs of our church?

There were so many beautiful and bold answers to the first question given by members of our church family. I could tell that people were really dreaming big when it came to thinking about how we could serve our community in a way that points to Jesus.

But when it got to the second question about the needs facing our church, there were some repeating themes that kept coming up. So we formed a "Campus Planning Team" to help us determine how to best use our facility to meet our needs and the needs of the community. After all, the wonderful and talented group that built the facility a decade ago had done a fantastic job planning for the future, but we were ten years past that. It was time to respond to current needs and plan for the future again.

The new Campus Planning Team is made up of a diverse group of individuals, including elders from the Leadership Team, core members who have been with New Life since the beginning, parents of kids and young adults, and members representing various age groups within our church (including a high school student) from 17-81 years old.

The team has met a few times to address the problem: what are the most pressing needs of our church and does our facility currently serve those needs?

You can click below to get a full report of the initial three-hour meeting, but here is a short run-down:

The team considered all the responses from our survey, and narrowed it down to a few important needs in our community that we feel called to meet. Then they narrowed down the needs of our church and summarized both lists to focus on kids, families, and the elderly.

These are the three main focuses of our ministry at church that we feel should take priority in this next season.

Then came a long and thorough process of critically looking at our facility and asking, "does our current facility meet the needs of kids, families, and the elderly?"

This helped it become evident that we are facing a growing demand for more space to accommodate our kids. Currently, we exceed our kids church capacity whenever we have more than 25 children, which occurs 1-2 times per month during the school year.

Therefore, our next step is to work with an architect to dream about how we can either rework our existing facility. This may involve rearranging walls to create additional space in our kids wing or potentially constructing an addition to our building. The Campus Planning Team will present several options to the Leadership Team, who will then seek congregation approval for a finalized plan.

Transparency and open communication are crucial during this process, and I want to ensure that you have all the information you need. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me or any member of the leadership team with questions or to request further details. You can also download the full report of the Campus Planning Team's first meeting by clicking the link below.