We broke ground!

Between our two services on Sunday we officially broke ground for the expansion on our building. If you’ve been around the blog for a while you might remember me talking about BEYOND and how part of what we were doing with that was trying to create some space that could be better used for ministry than the space we have now. It’s been an exciting year and it was great to finally get a shovel in the ground!

The new portion of the building is shown on the right-hand side of this drawing -
our existing building is the left-hand side of what is shown.

It was pretty chilly out there so we did a pretty quick ceremony. One of our elders spoke and reminded people why we were doing this – it’s our vision that God would use our church to “Transform Our Region, Transform Our World” and having the right kind of space for ministry is part of that.

We had people from every age demographic represented – including people who have been part of the church since our current building was built in 1992, replacing our originaly building from the 1890′s. That original building is still standing and is currently owned by another church in town.

The hilight of the ceremony was firing up the Bobcat and actually digging up some of the parking lot. Lots of cheers!

This is part of the new space we’re building which will have
permanent staging and PA and get TONS of use.

Some of you have asked about what kinds of spaces we’re adding to the building. Here’s a quick list -

• North Venue – a mid-sized room (250+) which accommodates several growing ministries and facilitates the running of multiple programs at the same time.
• Mezzanine – a large multi-functional second floor space overlooking the North Venue.
• Youth Lounge – a dedicated room in which our students can “hang out.”
• Children’s Ministry – relocation of our nursery to the main floor, which frees up additional classroom space on the second floor for various kids’ programs.
• Auditorium – improvements to the stage, lighting, projection, and sound in our current auditorium.
• Administration – relocation and expansion of the office space for staff and volunteers

So this is a pretty exciting time for us! We’ve got someone who will be taking pictures as the project progresses so I will post some of those every now and then.