One church, Two locations!

There is an old saying, "Don't let the shoe, determine how big the foot gets."

we are facing a similar situation in our church. During the school year, we are running out of room for our kids. This is not OK. As a staff and leadership, we have been praying and seeking God's will on this crucial issue. Our goal is to bring as many people as we can to Jesus. How can we overcome this barrier?

The urgency of the request

Here are some of the comments we have recieved:
- One lady told Risse that our children’s rooms are so crowded that she isn’t going to invite new people anymore because she is ashamed.
- Another told her that the rooms are so full; they don’t let their kids go back.
- In addition, children have expressed being uncomfortable with such large classes.

Is it time to Build?

Now some of you may be thinking," we need to build to make more room for kids."

Yes building is in the future plans of our church, but even if we where to start building right now; we wouldn’t have the building up for a year or two. In short, building would take care of this problem in the long run, but what about the short term. What about this fall? Are we going to turn people away because we don’t have room for them?

How can we make more room for kids?

Here is the solution we feel God has led to us to take:Move our staff offices to an offsite campus so that all of those rooms will be freed up for children’s rooms.

Why would we want to do this?

1. If we moved our offices off site, that would free up the rooms the staff our using for children’s ministry. Let’s face it. This is a priority issue. And the question is do we have place a higher value on having our staff’s office onsite or reaching kids for Jesus? My vote is reaching people for Jesus.

2. If we moved our offices offsite, we would have room for our growing staff. I don’t know if you are aware of this, but we are already out of room for our staff. For example, Coleen our ministry assistant has to office out of Leroy’s lounge. So she is always packing up her stuff and moving to another room all day long. Risse is upstairs in the youth area. This move would free up not only room for kids, but also for staff.

3. If we moved our offices off site this would not be something new for us. When we started this church, we had our worship services on one place- the Byron legion or Byron elementary school, and our offices at another place- those office spaces next to the Byron bowling alley.

4.Now some of you might be thinking: “an office in one place, a worship service in another place, I have never heard of such a thing.” Well, it is actually quite common. There are plenty of churches who do this. They are called Multi-site churches, and many church experts agree this is the church of the future. They are one church but have many locations. In fact, among protestant churches:

• Well over 1,500 churches are multi site.
• Over the next few years over 30,000 church are expected to become multi-site.
• One in four large churches are multi sight. And statistically, we are considered a large church when the average church in America is less then 100 people.

Thank you for your patience during this transition time. It will take a while to get used to it. But after a while, after seeing all those kids being reached for Jesus, we will be glad we made this move.