Tuesday, January 02, 2007
new church moves in
Today is January 2, 2006 and we have made things ready over the past month for New Covenant Community Church to move in to our building starting today. New Covenant Community is a merger a little over a year ago of New Covenant Presbyterian Church and Covenant Community Church. They sold their two buildings which are near each other in the Highland Square area and asked to rent space from us for the foreseeable future as they sort out who they are and where they want to go geographically. They are part of the International Council of Community Churches.
They will worship in our Fellowship Hall at 10:30 a.m. while our worship service is at 9:30 a.m. in the sanctuary. They will have Sunday School in the rooms along the Market Street side of our building at 9:45 a.m. We have children's classes at the 9:30 a.m. time in the classrooms along the north/parking lot side of the building, but also some adult and a youth class at 11:00 a.m. But most of our community/learning experiences are in small groups at various times throughout the week for youth and adults. They have two rooms for their office complex across from the Music Room. They will use the Fireplace Room as their main meeting and gathering room. We will continue to use the Parlor and now the Music Room as our two main meeting areas.
When we renovated our building seven years ago and also began to be more intentional about our core values and bedrock beliefs, we sought to be more flexible in how the space of our building was used so that we could allow it to be used by a host of activities that help people to recover the physical, emotional, and spiritual pieces of their lives. That has happened. We now host ten 12 Step recovery gatherings, every 9 weeks are a host congregation for Interfaith Hospitality Network of Summit County, Boy Scout troop, Cub Scout pack, and annually support Community Support Services with organizing and dispensing Christmas bags for their clients. There are during the year other gatherings such as concerts, recitals, and community education/information gatherings. We also host yoga, massage and jazzercise in the building as well as the labyrinth walk. For nine months of the year we have our own Fairlawn-West Preschool in most of the building which has 70 children in it. This is in addition to all our regular small group, music, and church life gatherings. (We do encourage our small groups and even our church governance bodies to meet outside of the building in homes, restaurants, and public facilities as well to continue to remind them of to whom we are called to serve in the mission of Jesus Christ - the world around us.)
Hosting New Covennat Community Church will cause us to stretch ourselves in this purpose. It will probably cause them to be stretched in it as well since they have been used to two buildings dedicated primarily to their mission as they heard God calling them.
One of the realities of the very late 20th Century and now the 21st Century is that church life as we knew it in most of the 20th Century has changed a great deal. Church buildings were built especially in the 20th Century when there a large number of volunteers and significant amounts of money to help organizations to function. That is one piece of the change in the past 20 years. So church buildings will need to find ways by their congregations to "reach out." However, the necessity of streamlining the organization and to become more creative in the use of their facilities may very likely be nudgings or even strong shoves by God to refocus the purpose of the church, at least in the American context, to what IS the true purpose/mission of the body of Christ. Sharing this space with New Covenant Community Church will help us to realize that this is not "our space", but always is the house of the Lord. We are called to offer it to the service of God in sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ in the world around us...not simply for ourselves.
They will worship in our Fellowship Hall at 10:30 a.m. while our worship service is at 9:30 a.m. in the sanctuary. They will have Sunday School in the rooms along the Market Street side of our building at 9:45 a.m. We have children's classes at the 9:30 a.m. time in the classrooms along the north/parking lot side of the building, but also some adult and a youth class at 11:00 a.m. But most of our community/learning experiences are in small groups at various times throughout the week for youth and adults. They have two rooms for their office complex across from the Music Room. They will use the Fireplace Room as their main meeting and gathering room. We will continue to use the Parlor and now the Music Room as our two main meeting areas.
When we renovated our building seven years ago and also began to be more intentional about our core values and bedrock beliefs, we sought to be more flexible in how the space of our building was used so that we could allow it to be used by a host of activities that help people to recover the physical, emotional, and spiritual pieces of their lives. That has happened. We now host ten 12 Step recovery gatherings, every 9 weeks are a host congregation for Interfaith Hospitality Network of Summit County, Boy Scout troop, Cub Scout pack, and annually support Community Support Services with organizing and dispensing Christmas bags for their clients. There are during the year other gatherings such as concerts, recitals, and community education/information gatherings. We also host yoga, massage and jazzercise in the building as well as the labyrinth walk. For nine months of the year we have our own Fairlawn-West Preschool in most of the building which has 70 children in it. This is in addition to all our regular small group, music, and church life gatherings. (We do encourage our small groups and even our church governance bodies to meet outside of the building in homes, restaurants, and public facilities as well to continue to remind them of to whom we are called to serve in the mission of Jesus Christ - the world around us.)
Hosting New Covennat Community Church will cause us to stretch ourselves in this purpose. It will probably cause them to be stretched in it as well since they have been used to two buildings dedicated primarily to their mission as they heard God calling them.
One of the realities of the very late 20th Century and now the 21st Century is that church life as we knew it in most of the 20th Century has changed a great deal. Church buildings were built especially in the 20th Century when there a large number of volunteers and significant amounts of money to help organizations to function. That is one piece of the change in the past 20 years. So church buildings will need to find ways by their congregations to "reach out." However, the necessity of streamlining the organization and to become more creative in the use of their facilities may very likely be nudgings or even strong shoves by God to refocus the purpose of the church, at least in the American context, to what IS the true purpose/mission of the body of Christ. Sharing this space with New Covenant Community Church will help us to realize that this is not "our space", but always is the house of the Lord. We are called to offer it to the service of God in sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ in the world around us...not simply for ourselves.
