For the past two weeks the church has sounded more like a construction yard than a sanctuary. We’ve been pulling up carpet, scraping glue, and moving tile. We are in the midst of a facelift that will remove all the carpet in the welcome center and replace it with beautiful large tile.
When it is all said and done it is going to look beautiful. In the meantime it has required a large number of people to give up their free time, and make a huge commitment to the church. We didn’t want to spend the money to sub out the job, so instead we are doing it ourselves.
Yup, as a church we decided to go down the do-it-yourself adventure. Thankfully, we have some amazingly skilled people who have done this before, but still, the hard part about DIY is the actual DIY. Meaning, that if you want to get the project done then you actually have to show up and do the work!
And that is exactly what we’ve been doing; we’ve been doing the work. Through the course of this process there have been more than a couple of jokes saying, “Who’s idea was this?” And at the end of the day I think we all know the answer; it was ours.
It was a collective decision to do something different. The struggle that we were having is that our space didn’t match our Spirit. We have an amazing church, and we needed our environment to match.
So, while the carpet was fifteen-years-old, and had water stains, replacing it with tile wasn’t because of those reasons. The real reason is because God is on the move here; God is doing incredible things with incredible people. The real reason is that the Spirit of God is bursting at the seams of this church and it is time for every visitor to notice.
There comes a point in the life of the church, and our own lives where we have to let the outside world know what is happening on the inside. When you’re happy – smile, when you’re sad – shed a tear, and when your church trying to engage the city in new and dynamic ways – you lay tile.
What are you going to do to let the inside out?