Week of Thanksgiving 2005

2005 was a busy, busy year. We finished up our Beth Moore study (for women) and John Eldridge (for men) and went into a study of the book of Revelation on Wednesday night. That set my agenda for midweek bible study the rest of the year.

Our Sunday services continued to grow along with the pains of expanding the Kingdom Kids ministry. The friction of trying to cover our Tuesday Night Bible Study would eventually yield the traction to start the amazingly awesome TNT. We became very concerned with finding larger venues to hold the congregation. We looked at the Assembly of God church around the corner, the Commerce Bank building on the square, the old Evangelical Free Church space in Southland Shopping Center along with Family Center's conference facility, and other tenants at the Mill Walk Mall. Every summer Tracy would say, we can save money if we stay here (at HCS) and we should drop a bit in numbers as we enter the summer. Every year we grew right through the summer! Praise God!!

Finances ultimately played a big role in our strategy for staying at HCS. Should we move and allow room for growth, or stay and go to two services? Ultimately we decided on an overflow room on Sunday morning and a larger office which we could use for classes would do the trick. That was a very wise choice as those accommodations worked out wonderfully. The facilities team was well under way. By the fall of 2005 they had interviewed the contractors and were prepared to make a decision on Bowden Construction. From the beginning of 2005 until the end of that year Tracy was busy collecting and collating data and preparing documents to see what our loan options consisted of. A special thanks to Tracy, the board, the facilities team and the membership of HBF for their faithfulness in that critical time of our church history. Our financial picture improved as we headed into 2005 but so did our growth. From the beginning we were concerned our finances may not allow us enough room to build large enough to accommodate our growth pattern. So we set our sight on what we needed not what we had.

The theme for our 2005 Vision Conference was right on the money! The Adventure of Life was the theme and we had Gene Purtle, Harold Hatman and myself lined us as speakers along with Sam Shockley. Sam Shockley at 60+ was preparing to go to the mission field of Zambia Africa on an extended short term mission trip. He was living the adventure of life as he and Mary trusted God to spend their retirement years serving God on the continent of Africa. Harold was preparing to quit his job, sell all he owned and go to Brazil, Gene was trusting God to set inmates free from the bondage of sin and God was about to launch HBF into our first building project. Talk about the adventure of life! We had a sweet Vision conference that year as God continued to knit our hearts together.

By the fall of 2005 it was time to see what we could realistically afford to build. Bowden contractors had been hired, Joe Lampen was in the planning stages and HBF needed to come up with enough cash to see a building that could seat at least 300 people built on our property. Because of the generous giving of our small congregation which was just hitting the 100 in attendance mark, we had $59,383.72 in the savings ready to be used on the building prior to our Harvest offering in November of 2005. That is good giving by any standard. However we needed much more to build anything close to what the facilities team had predicted would meet our needs for future growth. We received a huge blessing of the Lord when HBF entered December of 2005 with $227,400.00 in the savings account ready to be used for our new facility. Wow! What a one time offering!!

Everyone knows I do not preach on giving unless we approach it in the text I'm passing through in my expository message. To HBF's credit, we did not have a capital campaign, faith promise or any of those things. We simply presented the reality, prayed and the Lord provided! It goes to show that when the Lord orders it, he will pay for it.

As we left 2005 and entered 2006 God made it clear that we were gaining momentum. Ultimately buildings will burn, but the souls of men and the Word of God are eternal. It was astounding to see our young church truly strike the balance of putting the souls of men in perspective as we trusted the Lord to provide a platform for us to launch out across the county, country and the continents with the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.