why a new facility?

The vision behind a new facility for Mountain View Community Church

A Building is Only a Tool
We all know that Mountain View Community Church is not the red brick building that sits on the corner of Oak and Whedbee Streets. Mountain View Community Church is a living and dynamic organism that consists of people; people who have been called out of this world to be followers of Christ and who have been given a mission to go back into the world as His ambassadors. At the same time, we can also recognize that our church building is a big part of who we are as a church family. Within the walls of the building, much ministry takes place. It is our central place of gathering as an entire church family and helps to facilitate corporate worship. It is a place of equipping, fellowship, and outreach. In many ways, the church building is for our church family what a home is for a biological family. The home doesn't make the family, but the home supports the life of the family.

As such, we view our church facility as nothing more than a tool. It exists to help facilitate ministry as we seek to be faithful to what God has called us to be as a church. If the church building, either our current facility or some new facility, ever starts to get exalted or placed above ministry and reaching people, then we will have lost our focus. We want to avoid this at all costs.

The MVC Space Crunch
Ever since we moved into our current facility, we have been dealing with various "restrictions." Initially it was parking. Where will people park? Will they be willing to walk a few blocks from their car to the building? People adapted and we have been able to make do with the parking available to us. Next, it was a crowded, single service. Should we add another service? We did, and over the years we have tried different service times to best meet the needs of people and free up more room. As the services were filling up, so were all the support spaces within the building, most noticeably, our nurseries and children's areas.

As long as we have been in the current facility, God has continued to grow His church. Even when we sent out roughly 100 people to plant Windsor Community church, we were back up to and exceeding our previous size within one year. Each year we have made adjustments and taken steps to try and maximize this facility that the Lord has entrusted to us. Each year we have been able to "squeeze" more out of the building. And "squeeze" is a good word to describe what is felt by many. Our children's wing is bursting at the seams. We are unable to offer any equipping forums or classes for adults on Sunday mornings due to space limitations. Walking through the Family Center between services has been described as "chaotic." Because we are in close proximity to other houses, our practice and training times for music and worship are limited in order to respect the wishes of the neighbors around us. Nearly 25 to 30 young moms find community and encouragement in our Moms 4 Moms gatherings. This outreach requires using even the cry room to care for the more than 50 young children that are there.

In many ways, we find ourselves facing the same questions that growing families face. Do we need a bigger home to meet our changing needs? If so, how much can we afford? Is now the right time to make this move? Can we solve the problem by adding-on or changing our current home? These are all questions we have been asking. From a very practical perspective, we are in great need of more space to continue to grow and reach out in our community.

How Will a New Facility Help MVC Fulfill Our Vision?
While space is an important motivator for securing a new church facility, it is probably not the most important. The biggest question is what has God called us to be about as a church, and how does a new facility help to accomplish that God-given mandate? This is a good question for us to wrestle through and it brings up many cautions about building a new church facility. Pastor Tom Harcus, who we sent to Wilmington, NC this last summer to plant a new church, articulates some of these cautions in his dissertation he completed last year. He notes that:

...the overarching objective of any building campaign should be to furtherthe Kingdom of God in our world.

With this in mind, he presents the following considerations:
  • In most cases, not all, the net result of building a new facility is an increase in the number of un-shepherded, unaccountable, and uncommitted people (as reflected by their giving and serving).
    Question 1: How will a new facility allow us to better shepherd God's people and enlist more people in Kingdom work?

  • Most Christian activity is justified under this banner of "furthering the kingdom of God", but very few actually accomplish this in real evaluation (souls saved, lives transformed, churches planted, and community saturated with the gospel).
    Question 2: How will a new facility further the Kingdom of God?

  • Most churches do not multiply themselves in the planting of other churches. There are many reasons for this. However, for the purpose of the subject matter, it would suffice to say that this is not what God intended. God's most effective strategy in evangelizing the world is through the multiplication of churches as patterned in scripture. (Matt. 16:13-18, 28:18-20; Acts 1:8, 2:41-43, 8:1-3, 11:22-26; 13:1-3; 14:21-28, 15:2-4, 22-36, 18:22, 20:17, 28, 32; 21:18-19; Phil. 1:27; 2:12-16). A new facility can be an enormous kingdom expense of thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars that could have been used to plant churches.
    Question 3: How will a new facility enable us to plant more churches?

With our commitment to church planting, and with these cautions and concerns in full view, why are we moving forward to invest in a new church facility? Here are the answers to those important questions.

A New Facility Helps Us to More Effectively Equip our Body
Our desire is that the church body at MVC would be the most loved, best fed, and most practically equipped people on the planet. As a "mother" church, we need to be healthy to reproduce healthy daughter churches. This is why it is so important for us to prioritize the shepherding and equipping of our church body. As MVC continues to grow, so do the shepherding and equipping needs. Simply put, a new facility will provide us with the needed space for increasing our equipping and training forums for the church family. Currently, our space limitations restrict what we can offer in this area. A new facility also allows us to grow to a critical mass of people that would cause an increase in resources for meeting the needs of the church family (diversity of body parts, leadership, and finances). The increased resources help us to free up more people and staff positions to prioritize the shepherding of our body. As the church grows, so do the opportunities and needs for people to use their gifts for the Lord, and as they use their gifts, more people are involved in the work of the ministry. It will be essential to help each person understand the expectation that they are to be involved in small groups and use their gifts to serve the body (pew sitters will never be comfortable at MVC!). Indeed, we will continue to prioritize and promote our small groups and Biblical Distinctives classes to protect us from the "church shuffle" and to ensure we are growing in the right way through people being added to the Kingdom.

A New Facility Helps Us to More Effectively Reach Our Community
One of our Defining Marks is that each person is actively engaging their world with the Gospel of Christ. Therefore, we will continue to encourage and train each person to take the Gospel to their own sphere of influence. At times it is also effective to bring people together in larger settings to present the Gospel. A new facility will provide the environment to do so. For example, our Moms 4 Moms ministry, which is maxed in our current facility, but God keeps bringing more moms. A new facility would allow this ministry to grow and reach even more mothers in our community. Another example is our youth and college ministries. A new facility would provide each ministry the space needed to reach the young people in our city. How many other ministries are in the hearts of our people that could be unleashed with a new facility? There are dreams to use the building as a hub to serve the poor and reach their hearts by meeting a physical need. There are dreams to gather musicians in a family center where they could share music ideas while enjoying a cup of coffee. Redemptive relationships can be made in these avenues. The building simply provides us with a more effective tool to gather people together to share the Gospel with them.

A New Facility Helps Us to More Effectively Plant Churches
God has allowed us to be a part of planting four churches over the past 13 years. This has been exciting and to Him be all the praise! We are convinced that this is His design for the spreading of the Great Commission around the world. Out of that conviction flows our desire to be even more effective in planting and reproducing churches. The vision God has given us does not involve starting a few new churches, but rather seeing the birth of a whole movement of churches. This movement has a mindset of each church caring for its people, impacting its community, and also reproducing itself by raising-up leaders and planting other churches.

As Mountain View has planted churches, those churches have looked back to MVC as a hub for resourcing, encouragement, equipping, and financing. Consequently, we have realized that MVC needs to reach a critical mass of people and resources to achieve our goal of planting churches and resourcing daughter plants. As a part of his doctoral study, Pastor Tom Harcus researched other churches who have a similar vision and who are years ahead in actually seeing a growing movement of churches realized. One component these "mother" churches had in common was a critical mass of approximately 1000 people. A church of 1000 provides a larger pool of resources (people, leaders, curriculum, and finances) to support a movement of churches. A critical mass of people impacts the following areas:
  • The mother church becomes a magnet for drawing catalytic leaders who desire to be a part of something that God is doing. This, in turn, enhances its sending capability.
  • The mother church has the strength and health to send out strong teams with multiple leaders increasing the likelihood of survival and reproducibility of the church plant.
  • The mother church has the staff to provide training and transferable resources to be leveraged by all of the church plants.
  • The increase in resources allows the mother church to invest into the health and vision of the church plants.
  • The momentum of the mother church can be leveraged as an example to raise additional resources needed to support a church planting movement. As leaders are equipped and sent out from the hub church, there is a common experience, training, culture, and DNA that can more easily be transferred to daughter churches.
So does that mean our goal is to grow to be a church of 1000? No! If our goal was to simply grow to get bigger, our philosophy of ministry would be much different. Our goal is to glorify God, to be faithful to His Word, and be passionate about reaching the lost. As we have tried to be faithful in these areas in the past, God has produced the fruit - transformed lives and growth. We desire to continue to let God produce the fruit of growth. We will be faithful to His calling. Furthermore, we think it is wise to respond to what He is doing by moving forward with a new facility that could better support that critical mass of people.

Important Considerations
As a church grows, there is the concern that it will lose its intimacy and its ability to care for its people. This has been a constant reality for Mountain View since it started with a core group of 40 people over a decade ago. God has continually grown the church, and with each season of growth, greater emphasis has been placed on maintaining community and caring for people. The key to this has been through our small groups, or flocks. We firmly believe that as the church grows, our flocks have to grow at the same rate so that we can still shepherd the body. Moreover, while increased size can impact community, it does not determine whether or not a church will experience community. A church of 100 can lack true biblical fellowship or personal relationships while a church of 2000 can be effective in fostering these things. There is no hard and fast rule. The key issue is one of ministry philosophy and focus. As MVC continues to grow, we will continue to evaluate each person by the "Defining Marks" of the Christian life: encountering Jesus daily, experiencing dynamic community within the body of Christ, growing as stewards of all that God has entrusted to them, and engaging the world around them with the life-changing message of the gospel of Jesus Christ!