Below is some background on the our current location given in my weekly communication. I didn’t want the info to get lost so I’m re-posting here:
I want to take a moment to explain why we are in this particular building. The bottom line answer is that this is the closest we could get to Chamblee and Doraville without being in Chamblee or Doraville. It’s not because we are trying to stay out of either place, just that each of them have very prohibitive zoning laws for churches.
The place that I truly wanted to move into was a couple of blocks from all the apartment complexes off of Chamblee-Dunwoody Rd on Cumberland. The building overlooked all the apartments and backed up to the soccer fields. We wanted to open a community center that we would use on Sundays. However, we were a church and the requirements for being a church (four lane road, so many parking places, etc) were so numerous and expensive that we couldn’t get the place without performing some major engineering feats on the roads leading to the building (let alone what the building itself needed). There weren’t really any churches for sale in our focus area. There were always the schools, but the group of people who made up the church at the time were not interested in lugging things in and out every week. It’s not that they wouldn’t if they had to it’s just that if we could avoid it they would be more happy.
We were despairing of finding anything, when someone came to us about the current space. It was in unincorporated DeKalb County, so we avoided all the red-tape of the cities. It was helping someone out of a lease they couldn’t honor. It was actually the space that the church which bought our old building wanted as a first choice but couldn’t work out a deal to get. While the other warehouses were more our size neither was available (Colorgraphics was still in the smallest space, and our next door neighbors had just moved in as well). We knew we could honor the first three years and that we would have some strong data to see if it was sustainable long term or not.
Everything was progressing with one small hic-up about a year into the process. We had a six month delay in building out the space that stalled our moving in for almost a year. It didn’t just delay taking occupancy it meant more rent on another place and a delay in our five-year projections. In the time of our six month delay we prayed and asked for confirmation. We both grew and had some Divine interventions (dreams, financial gifts, conversations, etc.) that we received as urgings to stay the course.
This brings us to today and our need to have a rent reduction or find other accommodations. If this happened (and I hope it doesn’t) our few options involve going to schools or other churches (unless either municipality has changed its rules). We will talk with both Cary Reynolds and Sequoia if we need to. We will also talk with the Seventh Day Adventist Church in the Northwoods subdivision. But honestly, my hope is to be able to stay and take advantage of the investment already here and the opportunities to use the space for Kingdom purposes. We need to grow and give, and both doable if we can decrease rent and get in the habit of giving consistently. If anyone has any ideas for other income generators we could the space for I’d love to hear your ideas.
So that’s the story of why we are where we are. It wasn’t a matter of being in love with this warehouse as much as the fact that there were no other options. We looked and prayed long and hard. When this place came available some of the elders felt immediately that it was the right place.
Now let me share one other thing that is a discipleship issue. You can take it for what it’s worth, but as a general rule I advocate that people not look at current struggles as proof that bad decisions were made in the past. It’s not that they aren’t the result of a previous cause. This can only be determined when an issue has been explored with reason and prayer. It is to say that they are not essentially linked. It is part of the western mind-set to think linearly, cause-and-effect, good planning = good outcome and good outcome = good planning. This just isn’t always the case. This is not to say that we don’t reflect, examine, and question the past when things get difficult. We must do these. It is to say that sometimes we get trials from the Lord at important times, and/or that he is changing directions he wants us to go.
I use to work in disease prevention in public health. You learn very quickly that it is hard to measure things that don’t happen. In the same way, it is possible to assume that even if we must change locations (and we don’t know yet if we do) that it was still the Lord’s will for us to be here for the first three years in order to get us to this next step (whatever that is). We just don’t if not being here meant no growth with the blessings of who he has brought here, or if being here kept us from worse trials and troubles. We just don’t know. We know why we came here. We know why we would have to leave if we must. But we don’t know that our current situation was inevitable.
But enough of this for now. I’m sure we’ll talk more in the future as we need to. Thanks to everyone who has shared their thoughts and ideas with me. My particular leading style feeds on the input and ideas of others. I value them. I value you. Thank you for taking the risk of sharing even when you thought it might hurt my feelings or bruise my ego. That’s real commitment and love when you gently share things that you think might be hard.
