The Go-To Church by Bryan Collier

Author:Bryan Collier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abingdon Press
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Second Site

You might assume that the second site was pretty much a repeat of the first site—multiple locations, site pastor, moving to the community, and so on. The reason I am including the story of the second site in this chapter is because it has almost nothing in common with the first site. Each circumstance is unique, and it was our second site that taught us this most profoundly.

We began the second site in a community thirty miles away from Tupelo. It is a bedroom community in which the people work, shop, and eat in Tupelo, but it is also a region where there is a lot of pride in the schools and individual communities. We also had about a hundred and fifty people who were driving thirty miles to Tupelo on Sundays for worship but were finding it difficult to connect to other opportunities or engage their unchurched friends in a way that would inspire them to make the thirty-mile drive with them.

With these parameters in mind, we had a meeting in the local elementary school to judge interest in starting a new site. We had done our homework and knew that there was already a significant amount of interest, but we wanted to engage others who lived in that community in the possibility of reaching their unreached friends and connecting them to a site. We sent out invitations to our people who already attended The Orchard in Tupelo, and we made follow-up phone calls. We gathered in a gym where I cast vision for this new site. We introduced the site pastor and told the crowd we were looking for a location. We started our Northside site in a corner of three communities—Saltillo, Guntown, and Baldwyn. None of these towns is very big, and for that reason, there were not a lot of options for places to meet. We also did not really want to locate directly in one of these towns because it would prevent the people in the other communities from attending. We found the perfect corner where all three communities are within four miles of each other. The only problem was that there was only one location that could serve as a possible meeting place—an old Ford automobile dealership whose building was in foreclosure.

The cars had been gone for years and the building, because of neglect, was in disrepair, but it had potential. Over one covered drive-through, it said “Service,” and over the other, it said “Northside” (the name of the Ford dealership). What better words could we have put on our building? We thought it was the perfect location, but the bank that held the property in foreclosure did not. They did not want to sell, and they certainly did not want to rent to a church. Churches were unpredictable, in their estimation, and the unpredictability of the last tenant was what got this property in this mess. We got their message loud and clear. They were not interested. With that option off the table, we began to look at other options, but there simply weren’t any.

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