What You Must Know as Your Church Moves from Portable to Permanent (part five)
We’re wrapping up a series on taking a congregation from a portable location to a permanent one. Don’t jump in mid-stream: get started here.
You made it.
Not only to the end of this mini-series (although that’s no small feat in itself), but to the opening of your new facility. You survived site plans and city codes, groundbreaking and change orders, COs and inspections. Those pesky portable road cases have been unloaded for the last time (and maybe mercifully pushed off a cliff), the wall art is up, the supply closets are stocked, the grand opening celebration is around the corner, and the anticipation is at an all-time high.
You made it.
You’re done.
…or are you?
I said at the beginning of this series that there’s one thing I fear the most any time we move into a new building, and that sentiment – and all that goes with it – was what I just outlined. Moving in doesn’t mean moving on. That’s why moving to permanent involves a fourth (and most important!) major mind-shift, and that is:
4. Ribbon cutting ≠ finish line
That’s my fear. That after years of being portable, after countless thousands of prayers asked and answered, after the blood, sweat, and tears of getting a building off the ground, after seeing God’s faithfulness at every turn, my greatest fear for our people – or myself – is that a new building brings a new sense of “We’ve arrived.”
That sentiment can gut the purpose of a building. It can gut the purpose of your people. It can gut the purpose of your own leadership.
Here are four ways the “We’ve arrived” mentality can too-easily creep in:
We live as residents, not sojourners.
I love the imagery of Jeremiah 29, where the prophet gave certain commands to the Israelite exiles in Babylon:
Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
Jeremiah wrote of the tension the nation of Israel would be living in: they were to set up house without making it their home. They were to establish a residence without becoming residents.
In the same way, our new building must serve as more of a tool and less of a home. Is it a blessing? Of course. Should we be thankful for it? Obviously. But it can’t be a place of arrival. Rather, it must signal a new beginning, a new outpost for the gospel in our city.
We protect the property rather than advancing the mission.
Similarly, we have to be careful that the new building doesn’t become an idolatrous monument. In part two of this series, I said that we have to guard against “This is perfect and must be protected.” Listen, I’m all for taking care of our stuff. I don’t think that carpet spills and Sheetrock dents should be the norm, nor do I think they should be unexpected.
I’m reminded of the story of the old farmer, who would pay cash every decade or so for a brand-new, souped-up farm truck. Right there in the car dealership’s lot, he’d pull his old beat-up truck right alongside the shiny new one, and proceed to haphazardly toss log chains, tool boxes, and other farming miscellany from the bed of the old into the bed of the new. His intent was obvious: the new truck wasn’t for show, it was for work. He couldn’t do the work if he was afraid of a few scuffs along the way.
We stake our claim rather than claiming new ground.
When a congregation has been mobile for years, a building can bring immediate nostalgia. But it’s an odd type of nostalgia…the kind where you pine for something that you’ve lived without just fine, thank you.
Imagine a group who has held their small group in living rooms, coffee shops, and high school cafeterias for a decade. A new space can dangle a mighty tempting offer to make life more convenient for themselves, to move into a classroom armed with our grandma’s donated coffee pot and our posters of the fruits of the Spirit (I may or may not be speaking from lived experience).
I’m not saying you should never have space for adult discipleship groups. If your building plan forecasted it, you’d be a fool not to utilize it. But it all depends on the design of your building. In our context, we intentionally build with one age range in mind: that of high schoolers and below. We encourage – yea verily, push – our adults back out into the community, into those living rooms and coffee shops they thought they’d left behind. Which brings us to the final of our four “We’ve arrived” mindsets:
We drift inward rather than pushing outward.
Perhaps you’ve noticed a pattern in all four of these postures: the building becomes home base rather than a jumping off point. Or to use an analogy my pastor is fond of: a cruise ship rather than an aircraft carrier.
What’s the point of a cruise ship? Our comfort. Deck chairs gazing at the ocean. Round-the-clock pizza buffets. Entertainment on every stage for every age. What’s the point of an aircraft carrier? It’s to mobilize movement for troops. To get people to the heart of the action. To serve as a launching point directly into the heart of the battle.
If a new building smacks more of a vacation and less of a vocation, if it connotes pleasure rather than purpose, we may have missed the point of why we’re there at all. Let’s not allow our grand opening to signal that we’ve settled; let’s use it to continue to advance in reaching and blessing our community.
What I hope you’ve discovered in this series and will discover as you move from portable to permanent is just what a gift you have – and must manage – as you launch into the future.
A building is a gift. But the mission is your mandate. Never confuse the two.
