Vision Meetings {3 of 3}

OK – first the background.  We had two big meetings to try and catch our faith family up on some very important news around Calvary.  A lot of people came – but a lot of people didn’t.  I’ve been trying to share the information in these blog posts.  Be sure to read the other two posts to get all the info:

What’s Good at Calvary?

What Is Challenging Us?

As I shared in the last post, the finances in our General Fund have been really strained in 2011.  This has been the biggest struggle for us, and has held us back in some ways this past year.  One of the reasons for the financial stress (aside from decreased offerings) is that we have not been able to get “The Cairn” project finished.  This project has taken far longer than we ever imagined.  As a result, we are carrying expenses for that project (Manager’s salary, rent, utilities) with no income at all – something that we did not think would be true.

THE CAIRN:

The Cairn is a new ministry project in downtown Winchester.  We are renovating a 150 year old, 3-story building at 17 South Main Street.  In this building we be placing a full service coffee house on the 1st floor, and a state of the art Teen Center on the 2nd & 3rd Floors.  The Coffee House will be a relational environment, a place where people are invited to gather, mingle, relax, and enjoy good conversation and relationships.  It is our intent that the coffee house will provide the type of environment that fosters the development of real community.  The Coffee House will serve gourmet “fair trade” coffee from around the world.  The mere act of buying a cup of coffee will be doing good, as it will help to provide a fair and liveable wage for a third world farmer and his family.  The coffee shop will also serve a light food menu, host live music, and possibly even eventually be the sight of a new place of worship on the weekends.  Unlike most small businesses, the Coffee House will open debt free, with a freshly remodeled state of the art space and equipment.  Because of this, and the hope that it will be well supported by our faith family, it is our goal that the Coffee House will become self-sustaining as soon as possible.  In fact, we HOPE that it will become self-sustaining AND be able to help pay for the functioning of the Teen Center upstairs, AND be able to contribute financially to other ministries and causes locally and around the world.  Will it take time to get to this stage?  Yes.  Definitely.  Is it possible?  Absolutely.

The Teen Center will occupy the 2nd floor initially, and eventually we hope, the 3rd floor.  The Teen Center will be 3000+ sq. ft of space dedicated to kids.  A state of the art sound system, gaming systems, hang out areas, enrichment programs, loving volunteers, rockin’ concerts, and more.  The Center will help us reach out to kids who our churches aren’t presently reaching, give them a place to call their own, and set kids on a path to know Jesus.

That’s the plan.  But here’s the thing.  It turns out that renovating a 3-story 150 year old building and opening two brand new businesses (Coffee House & Teen Center) is NOT an easy thing to do!  This project has turned out to be far more difficult and far more costly than we ever imagined.

Why?

A number of reasons.  Basically, from a construction perspective, everything that was open for interpretation has gone against us:

• We’ve had to install a Sprinkler System in the ENTIRE building before we could open any part of the building ($85,000).
• We’ve had to build a second set of stairs off of each floor and provide a “fire protected envelope” from the third floor all the way to the outside of the building – which required not only new stairs, but the installation of a new backdoor exit as well.
• Once demolition was underway and we exposed the floor/ceiling joists, we discovered that the structural support for the 2nd floor was inadequate to support the number of kids in the Teen Cetner that the space would allow.  This meant we had to tear out the floor on the first floor, dig down under the building, poor concrete footers, have structural steel hauled in by cranes, and erect that steel inside the 1st Floor Coffee House to support the 2nd Floor Teen Center ($50,000).
• We’ve been required to build 5 brand new handicap accessible bathrooms for the first two floors alone.
• We’ve had to replace the glass in the front windows with shatter proof glass.
• We discovered that the existing elevator shaft and opening was not large enough for a modern elevator.  Though we are not required to have the elevator until we open the third floor – we had to go ahead and dig the pit below the building, poor the concrete, and construct the shaft itself on floors 1 & 2 while we are building those out.  To do so later, after construction was already completed on these floors would have been catastrophic from an operational perspective. ($60,000)
• As it turns out – when it comes to buying the equipment for a coffee house, whatever number you might guess that the equipment is going to cost, you’re probably going to be too low.  Did you know that a commercial espresso machine can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to as much as $100,000?!  We’re much closer to the lower number than we are the higher one, but building out this space has come with a staggering learning curve.
• I could go on and on and on…but you get the idea.

The people of Calvary have continued to give faithfully to “GO,” and it is those funds that are finishing out the space.  But the cashflow has not kept up with the outgo.  We had to pause the project a few months ago.

There have been times over the past few months that finishing the space has seemed far from our reach.  At times I have questioned whether or not we heard God clearly.

Our estimate a month ago was that we are still about $550,000 from opening the space.  The “GO” funds have been coming in at a pace of about $3,000 per week.  Do the math.  That’s 183 weeks – that’s over 3 years!!  Can that be right?  Did God REALLY want us to develop this ministry?  And if He did, why wasn’t He supplying the funds that were needed?  God and I had some pretty tough conversations where I would just say – “Lord, if you want this to happen, you’re going to have to do something, because I feel like we’ve hit a brick wall.  I feel like I’ve done things wrong, or led us down the wrong direction.  God – if this is going to get done, you’re going to have to do it.”

And so — He did!

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT:

Calvary was recently given a very large grant from a private foundation.  The grant is for finishing “The Cairn.”  The money will come in over the next few months – and the total will be between $400,000 – $500,000!!!!  The continued contributions of our members are important — we still have a lot of work to do and thousands of dollars to raise in order to get the Teen Center open.  But we are so close to seeing this become a reality!

CHRISTMAS OFFERING:

We’ve been collecting our Christmas Offering all month.  It’s our way of saying “Happy Birthday Jesus.”  It’s also a way for us to push back against the materialism of this season in America, and “put our money where our mouths are.”  We are supporting two causes with the offering.  Part of the money will go to THE CAIRN.  With the ongoing weekly contributions and the grant money, we project that the Coffee House on the first floor will open with the next few months and that the Teen Center will be open by summer IF we can raise about $30,000 for THE CAIRN in our Christmas Offering.  The other cause is to build a well in Quanamithe, Haiti.  This will be a large capacity commercial well – serving tens of thousands of people.  A child dies every 20 seconds in the world due to contaminated water – a problem that experts say could be solved if we spent just $20 Billion a year on Water Projects.  For comparison – Americans spend $455 Billion a year on Christmas! (presumably celebrating the birth of our homeless, penniless, savior – the one who said He came to preach good news to the poor, comfort the broken hearted, and heal the sick)  It is part of a much larger ministry center and outreach project being led by Vapor Sports Ministries.  The Scobee family, members of our church, have been carrying the burden for establishing this well on their own – and they’ve been trying to raise the funds for quite some time now.  The original cost was estimated at about $60,000.  Approximately $30,000 is still needed.

I hope you’ll be a part of our Christmas offering this year.

 

Vision Meetings {2 of 3}

{This is Post 2 of 3}

We conducted two vision meetings at Calvary over the past week.  Considering the time of year and how hectic everyone’s schedules are – we had good participation, with about 125 people attending one of the meetings.  This is good, but that means there’s a lot of people who weren’t able to attend.  Each meeting lasted an hour, and went pretty well.  I can’t begin to do it justice in this post, but I’ve had several people ask me to relay to them what they missed, so here’s my best attempt.

I broke the meeting down into several sections:

• “What’s Good?”
• “What’s Challening Us?”
• “The Big Announcement!”
• “Christmas Offering”

“What is Challenging Us?”

This is an incredibly easy one to answer – it’s finances.  We haven’t said a lot about this, because we NEVER want money to become the focal point at Calvary.  And yet, the reality is that the General Fund has lagged behind all year, and it has been incredibly challenging.

Now, let me remind you – we’ve had a great year.  If you didn’t read the first post in this series, you should stop reading and go back and read it now.  Things are good at Calvary.  I’m about to tell you what is bad, but you need to hear the bad news in the context of all that is GOOD!  The lack of finances has not stopped our growth as a congregation or taken our focus off of Christ.  And as you will see, though this has been challenging, not all of the news here is bad if you dig under the surface and attempt to understand WHY it’s happening.

A Word of Preparation/Caution:  I’m going to share some real numbers here.  To some, these numbers will seem impossibly large and will be difficult to relate to.  In my first ministry, back in 1995, our annual budget was about $36,000 per year.  So sometimes these numbers seem rediculous to me too.  However, before comparing us to another church or situation, please keep in mind that everything is on an economy of scale.  Our books are always open, and you can request a copy of our financials at any time.  If you have a question, just ask.

This year is the first year since 2005 that we have not seen growth in our General Fund giving.  We have actually seen a slight decline, and this has made it difficult to meet our obligations.  At one point this year, we were about $70,000 behind (this is equivalent to just over 3 weeks of our budget) in income verses expenses, but some of that ground is currently being made up.  We clamped down hard as a staff beginning in June, and have managed to spend 7% less than we had budgeted through the end of November.  That means that we’ve actually spent $70,235 LESS than we had planned to spend.  But even with those cuts, we are still way behind in what we anticipated the offerings would be – so we still have a shortfall of $38,976.44 (as of the end of November).

A few important points to consider…

• We projected Modest Growth:  We built our 2011 budget projecting modest growth in giving from 2010 to 2011.  We did experience 20% growth in attendance, but we actually experienced a decrease of $175 per week in giving.
• Our “Per Capita” Giving Dropped Significantly:  If you take the total offering for a week and divide it by the total number of people in attendance, you arrive at a “per capita” number — or the amount given per person in attendance.  Our Per Capita had been rising steadily for the past 4-5 years, but this year it dropped by $4 per person.

• The giving per person at our Clear Fork Campus is low:  Numbers from our Clear Fork Campus are factored into our numbers.  Breathitt County, where the campus is located, is the 3rd Poorest County in the Country when going by Median Income.  This has had a negative effect on our per capita numbers.
• Our Teen Ministry Numbers are Up:  This is a great thing!  But, like our Clear Fork numbers, this has contributed to the decrease in per person giving numbers.  Those beautiful, wonderful, awesome teenagers don’t give a whole lot.
• The Economy:  During the first few years of the current economic downturn, we did not see any visible signs of the financial chaos in our world affecting Calvary.  This is no longer true.  There are many congregation members who have modified their giving habits in response to challenges and strains that they are facing in their personal situations.
• Kingdom Generosity:  Even during this financially challenging time, we have encouraged our faith family to continue giving outside of the walls of Calvary.  As mentioned in the previous post, our people are giving almost $200,000 per year thru sponsorships with Compassion International.  Our members also continue to financially support a number of great causes directly, and we continue to take up special offerings and contribute to other worthwhile causes over and above our regular general fund giving as God leads us.  Surely this has had an impact on General Fund giving, and yet its hard to feel all that bad about it.
• GO Campaign:  We are just about 20 months into the 36 month GO! Campaign.  The people of Calvary have given 5234 gifts for a total of $499,542.60 during that time.  Quick math will tell you that this giving adds up to over $6,000 per week (this is the average, but much of that was giving in large lump sums early on.  We see about $3000 per week typically).  This money has been spent to launch the Clear Fork Campus; to launch the Vintage Worship Service; to do some Master Planning for the Redwing Drive Campus & the 50 acres at Boonesboro Road; to invest in some much needed technology for the school; to launch the Cairn – our coffee house & teen center in downtown Winchester; and to give $45,000 away to other missions, ministries, and causes.  If this money had gone into our General Fund, we would have no financial problems at all.  In the first year of GO!, this campaign had no visible effect on our General Fund giving – but this year it has.  Some families have made a choice between fulfilling their GO pledges or giving to the General Fund.
• Changes in Family Status:  Cathy Smith, our Administrator, poured through financial data between last year and this year and identified a number of families who had experienced a significant change in status.  Some retired, some lost jobs, some moved away.  These families accounted for approximately $75,000 that was given last year but not this year.
• The Slow Progress of the Cairn:  The Cairn, our downtown coffee house & teen center ministry has taken far longer to complete than any of us originally anticipated.  It turns out that renovating a 150 year old building and opening up two new businesses is quite a difficult thing to do!!!  As a result, we are still absorping costs associated with this ministry in our general fund that we never imagined we’d still be carrying this far down the line.  Our original intent was that we would complete this project as the money came in, and that we would not borrow the funds necessary to complete it.  This has been difficult, and has made it even harder to cut costs.

Next Post:  “The Cairn, The Big Announcement, & The Christmas Offeirng”

Vision Meetings {1 of 3}

{Post One of Three}

We conducted two vision meetings at Calvary over the past week.  Considering the time of year and how hectic everyone’s schedules are – we had good participation, with about 125 people attending one of the meetings.  This is good, but that means there’s a lot of people who weren’t able to attend.  Each meeting lasted an hour, and went pretty well.  I can’t begin to do it justice in this post, but I’ve had several people ask me to relay to them what they missed, so here’s my best attempt.

I broke the meeting down into several sections:

• “What’s Good?”
• “What’s Challening Us?”
• “The Big Announcement!”
• “Christmas Offering”

“What’s Good?“

A lot!  There’s way more GOOD going on in our faith family than bad these days.  We are blessed, and God is working among us.

We have witnessed a record number of baptisms this year!

• Baptisms: Baptisms are a significant indicator of spiritual impact.  Each Baptism represents an individual who has publicly proclaimed Christ as Lord and submitted their life and will to His care and control.  The last 3 years have been some of our best in terms of number of Baptisms, and this year is already a record year, and we’re not done yet!
• Youth Ministry:  Our Youth Ministry is exploding under the leadership of our Youth Pastor, Steve Crosby.  Steve is a mature and Godly man who truly loves the kids.  Everyone knows that we have huge numbers of kids coming on Wednesdays for small groups and on Sunday nights for relationships & Worship (7pm).  What everyone doesn’t see is the incredible amounts of time that Steve spends with the kids — loving, investing, discipling kids in large groups, and sharing his life with them one on one.  His house is almost always full of kids, and he even spends time “skyping” with a few of the students who are away at college to maintain those accountability relationships.
• Clear Fork Campus:  We launched our Clear Fork Campus in Breathitt County just a litte over 1 year ago.  In that time the small congregation has grown from 1 person to almost 50 gathering together every Sunday.  The atmosphere is warm and loving, and we have celebrated 6 Baptisms in our first year!  Ron & Pam Leedy are serving as our Campus Pastors there, and they are doing a tremendous job.  We couldn’t be happier with how the first year has gone.  Statistics tell us that only 13% of Breathitt County attends church on any given weekend, and the 2010 Census Data revealed Breathitt County as the third poorest county in the country by Median Income.  It is a fertile and important ministry field for us!
• Kingdom Generosity:  The people of Calvary are proving themselves to be TRULY generous followers of Christ.  This year, approximately 23% of our General budget was spent on Ministries & Causes that reach far beyond the walls of Calvary Christian Church.  This is good – but it doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story.  Consider this:
1. We’ve set aside almost $45,000 in additional funds out of our “GO!” Capital Fund to give away to local & foreign causes.
2. The people of Calvary sponsored an additional 70 – 80 Compassion International kids this year, taking our total well up over 200 children.  At $38 per month, that means that you are giving approximately $8000 per month — it could add up to another $100,000 per year in Kingdom Generosity.  Compassion will give me an end of the year report soon, and I can’t wait to report the real numbers to you.
3. Many have begun supporting Ashley Wingate in Haiti, and a number of others have personal ministries that they have begun investing in all over the world.  I recently heard of one Calvary family who wanted to help finish a dormitory at a mission in Africa, but they didn’t have the cash available.  They took out a Home Equity loan to see it completed.  WOW!  Crazy?  Maybe.  But crazy for Jesus!  What’s crazier:  a home equity line to give children in Africa a place to live or a home equity loan to update my “more than adequate, but not quite nice enough for me” kitchen cabinets???!!!
4. Once again this year, you have provided over 600 gifts for Children & Families at Operation Happiness and at our Clear Fork Campus.  WAY TO GO!
5. We are attempting to raise AT LEAST $50,000 right now for our Christmas Offering.  Last Years offering was approximately $35,000.
• Leadership Development:  We have some great leaders emerging at Calvary.  Rachell Colebank has been able to raise up a number of key volunteers in Children’s Ministry; Cathy Smith has some outsanding servants emerging in our volunteer office/administration roles; Steve has great small group leaders, “the best he has ever had” according to him; Warren Colebank recently told me that his worship teams are overflowing with good hearted & talented people in a way that he has never seen before; Dickie Everman has a well established plan for raising up new leaders in Celebrate Recovery; and I am super excited about the quality of the 9 candidates that we are currently vetting for Deacons.  The Elders are currently reviewing these candidates, but they have already been examined and approved by the Pastors and Nominating Ministry Team.  These men are passionate, engaged, and committed.  I can’t wait for you to meet them and learn who they are.  It’s going to be a GREAT season of ministry with these men coming forward and joining those Deacons already living as “Servant Leaders” in our congregation.

Ashley & Jennifer had opportunity to hug each other in a Chicago airport. Jennifer was on her way to Kenya for three years. Ashley was returning home for a short break from Haiti.

• Ministry Engagement:  We’ve seen members of our faith family begin their own ministries this year.  Ashley Wingate became a missionary in Haiti for 2 years.  Jennifer Watson went to Kenya for three.  The Aldridge & Gasdorf families began an adoption ministry called “Choosing to Love.”  The Hacker family started the “Clean Start Ministry.”  The Woosley family launched a ministry for Seniors called “SOS.”
• Celebrate Recovery:  Dickie Everman is dong a great job with this ministry.  CR meets on Tuesday nights with 70-100 people gathering every week.  They also have “Step Studies” that meet almost every day of the week, and they have started two “Step Studies” in the Clark County Detention Center this year – one for men and one for women.
• Community Involvment:  We made a decision this past year that when faced with an option between doing something of “our own” on our Redwing Campus, or doing something “with the community” – we will choose “With the community.”  This has resulted in a number of interesting opportunities & situations.  To be clear, we don’t think that all of these events are HUGE or that anyone claims Jesus as their Savior simply because we hand out candy on Main Street for Halloween.  BUT, we do believe that it makes an important statement for us to “show up” in the community whenever we can.  Our resolve is that we will have “long obedience in the same direction.”  We will keep showing up – we hope gaining a little more trust and standing in our community each time that we do.  Here’s a few things that happened this year:
1. Halloween Mania:  We’ve gone downtown to participate in the community Halloween event for the past two years.  This year, we saw a significant turn in this event.  We handed out candy from our office location, and from the location of our future coffee house & teen center.  Our teens, close to 70 of them, prepared and performed a flash mob dance to the classic – “Thriller” several times throughout the night.  We also made candy available to a few businesses that needed a little help and didn’t have enough to hand out.  This ended up being a tremendously positive family event this year.
2. Christmas Parade:  Our worship team was invited to play an hour of Christmas music on the courthouse steps prior to the parade.  Calvary Christian School also had a float in the parade.
   

   The view of the crowd from the Courthouse steps right before the Christmas Parade. Our Worshp team played Christmas music for an hour.

3. Kidz Club:  This summer we launched a ministry to children who live in the Memorial Park Housing Complex.  This ministry has continued to the present.  About 15 children participate on a weekly basis.
4. High School:  Steve Crosby, our Youth Pastor, takes a team of volunteers into the High School one day a week to eat lunch with the kids, interact, and build relationships.
5. Shearer Elementary:  has invited us to get involved there and serve the school, children, and faculty in a variety of ways.
6. Property:  Our property on Boonesboro Road has been used by both Clark County Community Services & The Homeless Coalition for 5K races this year.
7. You – the people of Calvary are everywhere, serving on the boards of several of the nonprofits in town (Community Services, Homeless Coalition, New Beginnings), and volunteering in all of them!
• Calvary Christian School:  Our school is thriving under the leadership of our Principal, Ned Hess.  We now have about 325 students from 2 year olds thru the 7th Grade.  We have an outstanding group of teachers and staff, and the students are thriving.  Each year becomes a challenge to see how we can accomodate the growth of the school, and this year is no exception.
• Attendance: The number of people present in worship in all services at all campuses is another strong indicator as to the health and momentum of a congregation.  We have a record attendance at Calvary this year – just barely averaging less than 1000 for the year.

We are experiencing record worship attendance this year!

“Vision Meetings” To Be Continued…Next Post:  “What’s Challenging Us?”