“Are you messing with my church?”
One of the most common feelings that I get from long-time (here at IBC that is a very relative term) Immanuel members/attenders can be placed under the heading of “are you messing with my Church?”. The answer is obviously yes so the real question is “why?”. I was around for the first strategic plan back in 2000, in fact, we have been at IBC for over 20 years so I think we qualify as “long-time” members. Being a conservative person by nature, I felt somewhat the same way then as has been expressed now. I would call this the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mode for me.
I kept thinking that we just didn’t need a “Strategic Plan” because we had never had one before or at least if we did I didn’t know about it and was quite content. After leaving heel marks all over the church I discovered that this strategic plan thing was probably one of the best things that we had ever done as a Church. We have more space for our people here and two other congregations, one that wasn’t even on the map at the time, have experienced the benefit. If you have never heard the folks from Gateway Bible tell you how they feel about it you have missed out on a true blessing. But back to the “why”, so when we renewed the strategic plan in 2005/6 one of the major features was to finish the building plan that we had started here back in the early eighties. We also wanted to start a more deliberate effort to get out into the community to not just do evangelism but be the salt and light that God has called us to be. We also wanted to continue our partnership with our overseas brothers and sisters that we started in the first plan. All of this together is the boldest move we have made so far especially in financial terms. All I can say is that if it is half the blessing it was as in our first strategic plan it will be terrific. It will mean change but the best thing I can think of is that the people who are not even here or maybe alive now will in twenty years be thanking us or “those people” who started all this or in our case finished the building here and branched out to other campuses. One Life is an invitation to come join us in the change that we think God is leading us to make.
Joel Benson
IBC Elder