Weekend Recap

Well, that was certainly a weekend and a half. Or maybe half a weekend. I'm not sure if my glass if half full or half empty right now but I've always been an optimist.

I've posted the 'moral of the story' in the comments for this story.

The annual business meeting at church yesterday was the most entertaining annual meeting that I've ever attended. As they introduced the speaker for each department in the church they projected their name and a picture of that person - which was actually a picture of some celebrity. Various puns and jokes were made and it helped to liven up the meeting.

They also showed artists' renditions of possible designs for the new church that GTA will eventually be building on Sarnia Road. Apparently a key issue for the city planners is water reclamation on this property so it has to have some sort of pond system. The design keys into that with water falls and small rivers at the front of the church with mostly-glass exteriors for the building, the idea being that you would like to be outside in the park area as much as inside.

The rendition of the foyer was wide and tall with an impressive view of the outside through the glass walls. It had a big globe with a focus on world missions, which tied into future goals that Pastor Rick mentioned. The church included a Starbucks style cafe to encourage mingling, which we already do in a more limited way at our present location.

The sanctuary was a hexagonal design, with five sides around the stage rather than the usual oyster-shape. The idea is that we can fit more people into less square footage while allowing everyone to feel closer to the front.

Finally, the children's area was described as a "Disneyworld kind of feel." The rendition included full out themes built into the walls and furniture and it included various jungle gyms and whatnot. The idea here was that "this is where dreams are made." George Barna has a statistic that states that most people develop their worldview by the age of 13, so this design keys into developing the children's dreams and inspiring them.

These were merely early-stage artists' renditions and the design may be quite different in the end. They wanted to dream big in the earliest stages and work backwards from there to deal with practical issues and necessary changes. They didn't want to copy existing buildings to being with but they admit that we'll probably make mistakes during this entire process of designing, building and moving to the new church. No one's pretending that we're doing something that hasn't been done hundreds and thousands of times before by other churches.

The key danger, they said, was that the church can build you instead of you building the church. You can end up focusing on what we'll do in the new place without properly devoting all of our current resources to our current location. We need to be the best church we can be now as well as in the future.