We continue to rejoice with our achievement of paying off the mortgage. Plans are underway to mark this event in the life of our church similar to the ways the Israelites marked the accomplishment of crossing the Jordan and the other celebrations recorded in scripture. Though I haven’t convinced anyone to share their memories in this forum of how God has worked, I know they’re out there.
Traditionally, paying off a mortgage is celebrated in a mortgage burning ceremony. But paying off the mortgage is something I want us to remember, not forget by turning it into dust. For ceremonial purposes, we’ll be burning copies of the mortgage, but I suggested we frame and mount the original document as a monument to what’s been accomplished and what He may do in the future. This is not the end, it’s just the beginning.
Why is this just the beginning?
The local church will always be faced with a space problem. House churches need houses that are big enough; churches facilities that have existed since the 1700s need upkeep and maintenance. Churches that are growing exponentially have to find ways to handle all the people. In the northeast, we don’t just have a space problem, the weather conditions require that our spaces have walls and insulation – we can’t get away with using tents.
No matter what approach is used to solve the space problem; there are costs involved. Churches that rent space pay premium amounts without gaining any equity. Churches that have mortgages pay premium amounts of interest, but gain equity in return. Churches that meet in homes run up someone’s utility bills and the house was likely bought with mortgage. Existing buildings have maintenance expenses. It’s not a matter of saving the cost of a facility or being able to re-allocate the facility expense to ministry expenses. Space costs money, it’s just a matter of how it will be spent.
We are already accustomed to making a monthly mortgage payment. For the past 15 years or so, we’ve made a monthly mortgage payment and never missed one. We’ve weathered some financially trying times when we really tightened the belt and wished we could’ve tapped into the mortgage money, but we survived without doing so. God has blessing us with a double harvest right now that our ministry has been able to grow in spite of having a mortgage payment.
If we are always going to have a space problem, and space is always going to cost us money, and we’re already in the practice of setting a chunk of money aside for facility expenses, why not keep up the practice?
What’s the game plan, moving forward?
Now that the mortgage is paid off, we will continue to pay ourselves each month’s mortgage payment to save up money to put a new roof on our building. We anticipate this will take about a year’s worth of payments, if not a bit more. That would take us into Spring 2007.
Beyond the roof replacement plan, our thought is to keep making the virtual payments so we have ourselves positioned on the launch pad to be able to join where we see God working. Obviously, talking in these sums, we are specifically thinking of future facility issues, but the monies that we set aside ourselves, the virtual payments, are monies that we can choose to use as we see fit. That’s different from the monies designated for the expansion fund, the IRS requires us to utilize those funds for expansion purposes only.
That’s why we see this celebration as the beginning. It’s the beginning of our praying, seeking, dreaming and pursuing what God has in store next – striving to identify where He is working and how we can become a part of it. We move forward with the confidence that God has revealed His will to us in the past, provided for our needs in extraordinary ways and has worked through us to stake a claim in the greater-Lititz area for Christ.
