The last couple days I've been talking about our new site for The Journey. Yesterday I talked a little bit about what that means for The Journey. You can read that here!
As I said in the first post of this series, we've been thinking, planning, and praying for this for almost 7 years. Why did it take us so long? A couple reasons:
1. Almost everything we've read has said you need a campus pastor. Someone who functions like the pastor of that site, but someone who can fall in line with the larger churches vision, and is comfortable not being the main communicator. That, along with finding someone that fits The Journey dna, has proved to be very hard to find. Lots of people just don't fit us. On top of that, many of the best leaders have their own vision they want to see fulfilled. Finding the person that fits us and their vision matches almost perfectly with The Journey's has been a very difficult task. On top of that, we're asking that person to raise half their salary.
So, why even try? Because we believe this is the best way to reach new communities around us, and because we believe it's the best stewardship of our limited resources. We can use the same systems, the same Journey Kids programming, the same central offices, the same staff (in many respects). This is a huge advantage financially. Added to that is the positive branding we have had in our community - rather than start with a brand new name & no identity, we felt it would be better to build on something established that has a positive connection in the community.
2. We were a week or two away from signing a lease on a school facility almost 17 months ago that fell through at the last minute. That significantly set us back on our timeline and our budget. We were ready to go, had staffing ready to go, had the finances ready to go & then we've been on hold for well over a year. That was both discouraging and frustrating, yet we have simply moved forward trusting that God has something else for us.
3. We have been committed to the US-31 corridor. There are a number of facilities and possibilities in the city of Muskegon, etc. but we were committed to the vision that God had given us, and to the community we were feeling led to. Every time we talked to people, researched, prayed, it was obvious to us that the choice for a second site was the M120/US-31 interchange. That is a challenge as the facilities available in that area are limited.
Monday - I'll share a couple things we've learned.