Bittter-Sweet Beginning

As many of you know, our church building was damaged beyond repair in a fire on Palm Sunday 2006. The building was old and charming on a beautiful location. It was also unsafe, too small for our congregation and had a total of three toilets. Before the fire our congregation had already purchased some property with the hopes of building a new, more functional home in a more accessible location. Since the fire we were able to sell the old property with the damaged building on it for a wonderful cash sum. We have also settled with the insurance company and then contiuned to raise support from within our congregation. With all that though, money doesn't go as far as it used to. We will be building a 10,000 SF building that will be up to code and easy to expand on. It will have a 250-seat sanctuary and will have 9 toilets!! We hope to move in to our new building this coming summer..... or even fall would be nice. We haven't broke ground yet... so we'l see!

Anyway for those of you who have been following our story, I wanted to post some pictures of the old building. The new owners recently demolished it. It was a bit sad to see it gone. It is strange to drive by and not see that old building standing there. As you can imagine a few old-timers in the community are a bit bitter towards our church for selling it and allowing it to be torn down. However, despite their strong opinions few of them realized the extent of the damages. For our church body while the loss of the building has been sad....we see that there is sweetness to be found with our Father in Heaven. "Don't store treaseures for yourselves her on earth where moths and rust will destroy them... (Or Fire!!)... and thieves can break in and steal them. But store your treasures in heaven where they cannot be destroyed." Matthew 6:19-20