Second Sunday...

Well, we had our second week in the new sanctuary yesterday, and this week I made sure I ad battery for my camera so I could show off the new building here. Here are the pictures in the order you might see them if you were walking into the building.

I have several more pictures, but these are the basics. We are so stinkin' excited to be in this building. For those that don't know the back story, 3 1/2 years ago we decided to seel our building that the church had been in since 1927, but we had outgrown. We sold it within 6 months, but rented it back for 1 year while we got our new place built, well, that year came and went without anything tangible getting done. So, we moved out congregation of about 100 into a tiny room that would uncomfortably seat 55 people. Instead of having the kids with us through worship - as was our tradition - we released them to their classes at the beginning of service. We did that from March of 2006 through July of 2006. Then, in August a local Baptist church loaned us a canopy type tent (no walls) to use, but they needed it back for Labor Day weekend. By the time Labor Day rolled around we had secured another tent from a friend of my dad's that had two walls, but we only had that one through the first week of October. At that point, we were faced with moving back into the tiny room, and risking losing all the growth we had experience in our tents. So, dad had settled on renting a school, but at about $1000 a week, hat was going to be tough. the finance committee, however, had other plans. They decided to buy a tent. Even if we only needed the school for 6 months, that 26 weeks, and $26,000 - we could get a decent used tent for that. At the same time in Washington, a man who had held tent revivals was retiring, and he knew my grandparents. We were able to buy a tent, roughly 150 nice folding chairs, a great heater, stage, and projection screen all for well under our budget for just the tent. We were in that tent for 14 months - almost to the day. the fire department informed us that it had to come down, and at that point, we were forced to have services in the tiny room for 3 weeks, then we got into our new building on January 6, 2008 with a 60 day temporary permit. It's been a long, someimtes rough, road, but through Christ, we made it through.