Bite the Bait, or Just Keep Swimming?

The church building we use was formerly an Assembly of God Church. They moved about a ½ mile away and built themselves a new building and now rent the old one to us.

A few weeks ago, their pastor stopped by and asked, "Would you like to buy our building? We will lower the price from $160,000 to around $100,000."

We got excited, but then had some doubts. It sounded too good to be true. We prayed, sought advice and took stock of our situation.

Sunday morning I announced, "Let's give this situation a week of prayer and next week have a discussion. We need to see if we SHOULD say "yes" or not. We can also have a "Faith Promise" service, and see if we are willing to raise our offerings. This will tell us if we CAN say "yes."

I thought the church would like to buy the building, but the next Sunday, everyone wanted to continue renting. The reasons: poor parking, a bad neighborhood, too close to a river and a bad roof. The clincher was when we discovered the owner never got permission or filed papers for a church at our location. So, on any whim, the government could disallow us to meet there anymore.

We then decided to spend our offerings building the congregation through visitation and meeting members' needs, rather than looking for a permanent place.

The good news in all of this is we did raise almost $200 more a month in giving for this next year. We hope to offer this to one of our Bible college students, and in turn, get more help in visitation. Today, I spoke with a young man named Julio, who is a new pastoral major at our Bible College. I scheduled him to preach Sunday and really hope that he will come and help us build up our congregation.

We do hope someday to have a place of our own. Right now, we hope to be helped by someone who has a heart for missions, and in return, be a help to them.