Looking Up – Making Room
Dear Hope Church Family,
This Sunday we will raise the curtain to our Making Room for More capital campaign.
Just articulating those words elicits a full range of emotions and reactions! Our campaign consultant from Generis, Joe Brand, has reminded me several times over the many months of our discernment and preparation that campaigns are never “benign,” but hopefully not “toxic.” Let’s be intentional together about making this a life-giving and God-glorifying journey!
One non-benign result from the campaign is hopefully the freedom and ability to increase our capacity for welcoming folks into the life of the Gospel as it comes to expression through Hope Church. Yet, if we simply raise capital and somehow pull off this building campaign, we will perhaps miss the deeper, broader, and longer-lasting aims of this campaign. We do desire to literally make more room for more ministry and more hospitality and more mission, and we earnestly want this to be a season of renewing our vision and mission as a church: more embrace, more equip, and more engage. More imagination for the power of the Gospel to redeem and heal our lives and city, more trust in our God who is able to more than we can currently conceive, and more personal participation in the advancement of His Kingdom.
In keeping with these aims, for the next 5 Sundays, we’ll be mining the Scriptures together to renew our shared vision and mission as Hope Church and not to enumerate all the reasons why we need to give money to a building campaign. This campaign is not merely about raising money; it’s about drawing each of us to know the God of “more,” drawing us into the ways that God is at work at Hope, drawing us deeper into our covenant family, and having been drawn closer, empowering us to open the doors a little wider to our neighbors and friends.
Grace and peace,
David