A Church Plant Moves Out of Storage
(Mike Gammill is one of our Lead Navigators at Auxano. He recently completed a campaign with San Marcos Community Church in San Marcos, TX. The Vision Clarity impact and unique Campaign story will inspire you.)
In the summer of 2013, San Marcos Community Church was in the church plant doldrums. As a twelve-year-old plant they really weren’t a “plant” anymore, but their base of mission and worship was still a leased facility. They did own land a couple of streets over. They owned a building too, but it was a metal prefab building and was, literally, in storage. Their dreams of permanent place were in storage too.
Twelve years in, the church had hit a plateau and energy was on the decline. “Trying to put on Saul’s armor” were the words the Senior Pastor used when we talked about most of the solutions available to him. He resonated with our Vision Clarity process, because we started with understanding their unique God-given ministry DNA, and then, from there, navigated them through growth obstacles with vision instead of hype, busyness…or a building project.
We started their seven-month vision clarity process in September of that year. The Senior Pastor quickly made a tough decision that paid dividends in spades: he consolidated all weekly ministry programs into a weekly prayer gathering. This prayer gathering became the central nervous system to a revival that broke out shortly after. Church attendance began to increase and a second service was added. Giving began to increase and the Holy Spirit challenged leadership to step up their commitment to – literally – lay the foundation for their permanent facility.
Then, in November, the call came from their landlord that could have disrupted everything. They had 90 days to find a new place to worship (the state of Texas was turning the building into a highway). Rather than seeing this as an obstacle, church leadership saw this as leading from the Holy Spirit. In addition to finding a new place to live, the time had clearly come to launch a capital campaign in the next three months. They needed to raise capital to construct and occupy a permanent church in San Marcos, Texas, a city where it’s easier to open a bar than a church.
The Holy Spirit inspired urgency, along with an increasingly healthy centralized prayer gathering that helped them to overcome a too-short time frame. On Palm Sunday 2014, the congregation made commitments that totaled over 2.5x their 2013 budget. General giving also increased over 30%. In the end, they blew past their goals and greatly increased the generosity level of the church. All this, and their mortgage in 2015 may be less than their lease was in 2014.
Meanwhile, God demonstrated his faithfulness when he led the church to relocate to a nearby dance hall and bar that had closed its doors. When God builds his church, nothing can stand in the way.
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Tags: Generosity, Mike Gammill, Resourcing, Vision Clarity, Vision Pathway Process
