Leveraging Property- A Mosaical Look at the Evangelistical Decisions of a Pastor

I am interested in one thing right now: advancing the Kingdom of God in the NE Salem area. I happen to be a pastor of a local church in NE Salem, so I am positioned in such an office that should enable me to see my interest be advanced.

My church, Fellowship Church, has been at the same location for over 20 years. It has made some lasting impact in people’s lives, but not nearly to the extent that we would like to see. Strangely, many of the people who have been impacted by the ministries of our church have not been from the general neighborhood at all. We need to see that change.

When I came on as a pastor in August I immediately implemented change to see the Gospel spread through the church more effectively.

One such thing we did was simply change the church’s name and logo. It used to be called Bible Center Fellowship and had a confusing logo and tagline. There was nothing wrong with those things but after about 25 years, those things had lost their effectiveness and we became invisible in our own community. If you pass something a thousand times and nothing ever changes, you stop noticing it.

Surprisingly, our little name change and logo change attracted a lot of attention and lowered some people’s guards about checking out our church.

That’s just one small step though. I’m trying to see what the biggest things we can leverage are to see God’s Kingdom grow through the ministries of this church. Right now I believe it is our location.

Our building has been here for well over half a century. It reflects a ‘small community church who reaches out to a Christian population’ style of yesteryear. We have done some extensive remodeling to make it look nice and much more contemporary, but you can only put so much lipstick on a pig.

Our building and location has served us well for twenty years, and we are thankful for it, but I beleive that if we are to see our church grow to new levels in the next decade that we will have to move to a more visible location into a more contemporary/progressive looking building. This is what I
am praying for.

There are some locations that are amazing that my son and I have been praying about. One of them is the old Circuit City store on South Lancaster. It would make an AMAZING church. BUT, it is $23,000 per month to lease! $23,000. I know that there are churches out there paying that kind of money on mortgages and leases but how do they get that kind of many without already being big?!

I think moving into such a building would take us to a new level of growth. We sit on valuable real estate now and maybe leveraging that to move into a building that would be more effective is a better option- God knows.

So I’m praying for a revelation from God, finances that could only come from Him, and the perfect spot in our city to draw people into a place where the powerful message of the Gospel can impact their lives. And I’m just crazy enough to think hat a location and a property could have a large part in doing that.

One problem- we’re in the process of building a youth center on our existing property, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.