We’re Not Just Building a Building

Ten years is a long time to wonder about something.

For most of our church’s life, the question of a permanent home has hovered in the background. And honestly, looking back, I think the timing matters. We needed all of this time, all of these years of being formed by Jesus together, before we were ready to take meaningful steps toward building something permanent. God has been building us peace by piece. Now we get to build with him.

But before we talk about what we’re building, we need to talk about why.

We’re Living the Same Story

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah sit near the end of the Old Testament, and they tell a story that feels surprisingly familiar. Israel has spent years in exile, displaced from their homeland by the Babylonian empire. The temple, the place where God’s presence dwelled among his people, has been destroyed. The city walls are rubble.

But God makes a promise: they’ll return. They’ll rebuild. And God will come to dwell with his people again.

That’s not just their story. It’s ours.

Even here in our city, the simple and sacrificial way of Jesus runs directly against the grain of the self-centered, power-driven culture around us. We are, in a very real sense, a people planted in hostile soil. And like Israel, we have a choice: assimilate to the culture, retreat from it, or build.

We’re choosing to build.

The New Testament makes clear that God’s people are now his temple. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that the Spirit of God lives in us. Peter describes the church as “living stones” being built into a spiritual house. The presence of God that Moses encountered on the mountain, that the temple was meant to contain, that Ezra and Nehemiah longed to restore, is here when we gather together for worship, fellowship, and service.

What we’re building isn’t just a building. It’s a place of encounter.

Two Prophets, Two Challenges

While Israel was rebuilding, God sent two prophets to keep them on track: Haggai and Zechariah. They had different styles, but the same mission.

Haggai was blunt. He looked at God’s people focused on their own comfortable houses while the temple sat unfinished, and he called it what it was: misplaced priorities. The question he puts to them is the same one worth sitting with today. What am I actually using my life to build? Is it purely for my own comfort and security, or am I leveraging it for something larger?

Zechariah was a visionary. Where Haggai shook people up, Zechariah lifted their eyes. His message was simple: this is not a small thing. “Not by strength or by might, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord. Don’t despise the day of small things. Keep pressing on.

We need both voices. The challenge to get our priorities right, and the vision to remember why it matters.

What a Building Makes Possible

A permanent home isn’t the goal. But it opens doors that a portable church setup can’t.

It means space for teaching, not just on Sundays but through workshops on theology, marriage, and parenting, and potentially a K-6 Christian academy where kids are shaped by scripture every day. It means real hospitality, a space where the loneliness and disconnection so many people in our city carry can be met with genuine community. It means margin, the ability to actually practice Sabbath and linger in worship instead of watching the clock because we have to tear everything down. It means moments: salvations, weddings, breakthroughs. And it means marathons: the sacred weekly rhythms that form people over decades and get passed down to their grandchildren.

The Next Steps

Over the next several weeks, we’re inviting our church into this initiative together. Our goal is 100% participation, because the whole body moving together matters more than the size of any individual contribution. We have a two-year financial goal of $2.5 million, which covers both our ongoing ministry operations and meaningful steps toward building at our future site. And we’re doing it through a single unified fund, so no one has to choose between supporting what exists today and building what comes tomorrow.

Commitment Day is May 17th.

Between now and then, the invitation isn’t to give. It’s to pray and ask God what participation looks like for you.

We aren’t building a name for ourselves. We’re trying to make space for God to dwell here, peace by piece.