I say this a lot, but one of my favorite Sundays of the year, every year is this Sunday. And since the very beginning of the church, we've taken one Sunday, the beginning of the year is typically the second or the third Sunday of January. To talk about a couple of things, to talk about what we've learned from the previous year and what we've prayerfully discerned, but also what we feel like we're being called to step forward into the next year. The first year that we did this, we were six months into life together as a church and was just realizing that our initial vision, our initial idea was that found we'd be a church, pretty much just kind of be like the southern side of Starlington.
We realized that at that moment that we had people who were driving from really far distances every Sunday morning to be at church. When we went back and we realized that we had five parishes typically represented on a Sunday morning here at Foundry. We had people that were living in West Monroe and in Bachelorette and in Monroe and in Swartz. And we realized, wow, this is a lot different than we thought it might be.
And as we talked about that first year, the second year we realized what it was like for us as a church to come together and to have a third of our congregation be in kids. And about how that was leading us and directing us and how we felt called to move our children's ministry position from a volunteer to a pay position, what was it, stake that in that realm. You know, last year we came together, we had just finished, we purchased the six acres that are behind us right here from St. Andrews.
And we had raised the money put in the parking lot. And we talked about how that was this last year, 2018 was gonna be a year of transition. It was a year of transition, but also a kind of a year of growing up. Like a lot of ways we felt like 2018 was like the middle school years for Foundry.
So you're kind of awkward, you bumble about sometimes, you get nervous in places. But so much of this year, and I think if I had to kind of quantify what it was, is this the right time for who we are as a church? Is it the right time? This is based off what we've kind of learned from all the years past, but also the ways that we've hoped for the future together.
So we do these Sundays because we believe that Jesus is active and alive in our world, but Jesus has also given us unique ministry. That Jesus gives the local church, and the local church is at her best when we understand what unique ministry is, what unique vision and mission, and what Jesus has called us to do. And over the last three and a half years, I feel like we've coalesced idea of Jesus is big enough really well together. So we come together to kind of look into that, we think about what comes out of it, but we also come into it kind of assuming a few things.
Because we assume that we are not called as a church to be stagnant, that we are not called as a church to settle, that we are not called as a church to come back and say, wow, okay, we're going to sit still on this now. John 1 14 is huge for us, where we really understand and get so much of our idea and sense of mission from it. It says, where it became flesh and he made his home among us. And we've seen his glory, the glory of fathers, one, and only son.
We kind of take that whole neighboring thing seriously. Jesus is here with us right now. And that calls us to do things differently in some ways. And so our expectations of that will change the way that we see and we act and we work as a church.
And so I say, this is the right time. Well, what does that mean? I think a lot of it is, you know, for a long time at Foundry, there are things that we felt like we needed to do. They felt like we were called to do.
Sometimes some of these things were things that just churches should do. We're wondering what's going on with that. And this is the right time because we've learned a lot of things in the last few years. And we've learned we've also changed a lot.
This is the first time that we've not been having to move in and out every Sunday morning. I'm looking across the room. There's a lot of folks that remember what that felt like. I was working with somebody or this week on a call as another new church and was just buying their first portable system.
And I told them to listen, that's the unity. Three times the people you feel like you need to do this. And it's been more money than we did because everything is going to break. If you ever worked like set up back and forth, said Foundry could break a steel I beam in half.
And it's like these are the lessons we have learned. This is we spent six months here in this place. And that's informed a lot of what we've learned about ourselves. It's also informed a lot of what we feel about is going to look like in the future.
A conversation we had this past week, I'll tell you this is fun. It's also not so fun. It's the main decision of why we're going to move out of the high school so quick up here before we started construction on the building was we had run out of space for kids. We had absolutely no space left for kids.
And we moved here. And we found space for kids. And our teachers were able to do a better job. And they had classrooms that could be in all that kind of stuff.
Well, found out last week that we've run out of space again for kids. It's good for them to have, isn't it? We've learned lessons along the way. And so this is the right time.
But I want to tell you about one thing. I love so much. In the end of the year, every year, we do our year in survey. And every year, we glean so much information from that.
What's so funny is we've never been surprised on it. It's always like in many ways what the survey is, is let's see if people are feeling what our leadership's gut reactions are right now, what things are going on and what we need to. And so on our survey, this came in. It made me very happy because it fits so much of what we desire to do four years ago when we started the church.
But there was a question. It was the last question of the survey. This was the second response that came in. The question was this.
How can Foundry better serve the needs of the greater community? What the person says is this. I feel like Foundry was a great job filling a niche. It's overlooked by many other churches in our area.
When we started the church, we knew that 60% of people in a population will go to church. 60% of people have an affinity for it. They are used to it. They understand the language.
60% of people will go to church. And what happens most of the time is churches just trade those 60% back and forth. That's everybody else. 40% of the population has been reached out to.
They have been mission. They have been evangelized. They have been whatever agitive you want to put to it. But they're just not going to go to church.
And almost it's the very beginning. It's pretty much the state the same now is that roughly 50% of Foundry has a church background as an adult and has church experience as an adult. The other 50% of Foundry does not have adult memory of church. In many ways, this is the first time they have been in church.
And so that 40% was something that we've always leaned ourselves towards. We're going to focus on that. We're going to go after that. We're not going to worry so much about the other side of things.
And so when I read that comment, that niche, I love that because any church can be every church. But only one church can be our church. Any church can be every church. Things that churches just can do.
But only one church can be our church. Only one church can do things that God has uniquely called us to do. And we believe God has uniquely called us to do unique things. And so that's kind of the thrust of what we thought about so much that we were kind of coming towards 2019.
It's how Jesus is reaching each one of us differently, because each one of us come from different places. So we're going to find our scripture today from John. And it's the story of Jesus encountering many of his disciples for the very first time. It's chapter 1, verse 29 through 50.
This is what it says. It starts off with John the Baptist talking about Jesus. The next day he, being John the Baptist, saw Jesus coming towards him and said, behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. This is a he whom I said, after me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me.
I myself did not know him, but for this purpose, I came baptizing with water that he might be revealed to Israel. And John bore witness. I saw the spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, on he on whom you see the spirit descend remain.
This is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I have seen and borne witness that this is the Son of God. The next day again, John was standing with two of his disciples, and he looked at Jesus as he walked by and said, behold, the Lamb of God. The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed him.
Jesus turned and saw them following and said to them, what are you seeking? They said to him, Rabbi, which means teacher. Where are you staying? He said to them, come and you will see.
So they came and saw where he was staying. They stayed with him that day, but it was about the 10th hour. One of the two who heard John speak and follow Jesus was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. He first found his own brother, Simon said to him, we have found the Messiah, which means Christ.
He brought him to Jesus, and Jesus looked at him and said, you were Simon the Son of John, you should be called Cephas, which means Peter. The next day, Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, follow me. Now, Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter.
Philip found Nathaniel and said to him, we have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. Nathaniel said to him, can anything good come out of Nazareth? Philip said to him, come and see Jesus on Nathaniel coming toward him and said to him, but hold an Israelite indeed in whom there is no deceit. Nathaniel said to him, how do you know me?
Jesus answered him, before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you. Nathaniel answered him, Rabbi, you were the son of God, you were the king of Israel. Jesus answered him, because I said to you, I saw you under the fig tree, do you believe? And you will see even greater things than these.
And he said to him, truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven open and angels of God ascending and descending on the son of man. I love this passage, this is the thing, there's a lot of stuff going on here, right? Who has questions? There's a lot, but we're not gonna do that today.
But there's one thing about this story, I love so much is this is a story of Jesus making himself known and encountering people. It's full of movement, he's going from here to there, he's like a geographic study almost all these places. But every single person he has an interaction with, he's meeting them on their level. He's meeting them with their experiences, he's meeting them with their assumptions and he's calling them to a higher life.
There's a lot of these names in here, so he's kinda will cruise through them quickly. But the first thing we see is John the Baptist calling him the Lamb of God. This is one of the only few places in the New Testament where this phrase is used. He's speaking to the role of the Lamb in the Hebrew sacrificial system, a tone of forgiveness of sins.
If this Lamb takes the place and bears the penalty of sin on behalf of others, John knew exactly what this whole thing was about. He knew where this story was going to end. The whole the Lamb of God, it takes away the sins of the world, he also, it's Jesus called the Son of God here. In the Gospel of John, there's this fascination with the Father-Son relationship between Jesus and the Father and we see that spelled out here in the beginning, but we also realize that Jesus is the perfect mirror to the Father.
The inside of his humanity, he shows us what following God is actually like. Fully God and fully man, this is the human relationship. Is there no more of a real human relationship in the relationship with your parents? Good or bad?
Is there no more real relationship that's there? This is God coming to our neighborhoods in the biggest way. Living inside of that. That Jesus coming, he's bringing the Holy Spirit into the human story fully and completely.
Jesus is also called a rabbi, which means a teacher. You have this whole weird interchange of what time, where are you going, where are you staying at? That's because rabbis typically had a place they taught people at. So these first disciples were expecting Jesus to be a traveling teacher, which is kind of a common thing in those days.
And they find out something totally different altogether. He's also called the Messiah. Messiah means anointed. And we also say Jesus Christ, like Christ, that word comes from this idea of Messiah, that he is Israel's hope.
He's what they've been waiting for. He's the rescuer, he is the Redeemer. He's sent by God. That also right here speaks to the divinity of Jesus, fully God, fully man, because he's interacting with us in a way that no man actually can't.
That no human has the ability to save the rest of humanity. Only God can do that. And he's Jesus, the anointed one, Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the Christ. We also see him recognize just for who is, it is most based human sense.
He's Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph. It's where he's from. It's who his dad was. I mean, we laugh and think about that.
How many times is that question? Go where are you from? Oh, who's your family? I mean, basic human relationship stuff there.
He's also called the King of Israel though. They realize that his lordship is over the earth. He kind of goes back alongside of that Messiah, but also the hopes and dreams of what each person is waiting for. Other part of the story that I love is within the Samuel.
That kind of the last part of it, he meets with this guy. The first thing Nathaniel says is, well, can anything good come out of Nazareth? He's just knocking Jesus his hometown. That place is trash.
You can't do anything good from there. I'm sure we can all insert a town where wherever we grew up from, there was always that other town that was worse than us. I'm from Alexandria. So we had a lot of options.
And then anybody who's not from Alexandria says Alexandria usually. You make the, but what about if it's like, Nathaniel is dogging Jesus, is doubting the most of his ability, and then he's given the greatest thing, the greatest truth. Even when we come to Jesus questioning him the most, he offers us the greatest things. So we've seen Nathaniel do.
And then also throughout the story, this idea of finding Jesus, finding people, and people finding others. And it's to look for something purposefully. It's not like you're stumbling across that $10 bill you left in your jacket from last season. We all enjoy that, right?
Oh, great, awesome. And then there's also that dash around the house trying to find your keys. When you're looking for them, you know they're there somewhere. It's to find purposefully.
Jesus was intentionally looking for these people. And then after they encountered Jesus, we see Jesus, then they leave and then go looking for other people who need to meet Jesus. It's intentional looking. It's intentional searching.
It's intentional finding. Goes back to the whole 60, 40 thing we talked about earlier. 40% of people will not come to church. It is not an option in their life.
And what we found out is we assume about that thing. It's a very, very different point of truth. And before we were starting the church, I had three or four months, right, I didn't have so many more responsibilities. I skipped church for like four months.
Couple of things, number one, I get it. It's nice. Two, I'm a preacher skip. There's not that many preachers kids assumptions.
I actually do have. Like when I was a kid, when he thought of church skippers, it was like, oh, it's like that Chris Christ offers in song Sunday morning coming down. It's like they're sleeping something off. Like, oh, no, I mean, by this point in time, I'm 35 years old.
I have a realistic vision in the world. They're like, people are just spending time with their families. They're spending time doing the things they love. They're spending time doing things that add value to their life.
They're spending time sometimes. That's the only option of the only free time they have during the week. When we look at our mission field and we bear down heavy on it, we have the ability to because of some denominational grants and monies and access to things. Do you know what's the one thing that people who are not in church, but people who are also in church and with the number one named greatest barrier to church involvement is in their life?
It's time. And that's 70% of people to the greatest barrier to our involvement in church is our time. And the time is a very different thing in our world now than it used to be, isn't it? Time seems to move a lot faster in our lives.
Our world moves a lot faster than it used to. Does anybody in here actually have the luxury of only working five days a week and never getting bugged when they're not working? Time has changed everything. And so when we're coming into this year and realizing there are things we feel called to do and we feel called to minister to this place that Jesus has given us, we have to look at what the name things are and time being a named barrier is pretty important.
And that changes the way that you look at things, you look at things, you decide to do things and the way that you react to things and the way that you feel like you can strategically accomplish goals. It changes things, time changes things so much. The first step for us that we felt like we had to do these and all these things that we feel like are gonna be in 2019, all of them are things we feel like this is the right time, we have learned what we need to do to go with this full force. But all of these things are also, we feel that it is mission critical to our life as a church, that we cannot go any further unless we do these things.
And we want you to do our capital campaign in the spring, we talk about today, there's no way that we can grow, there's no way we can reach new people unless we do this. And I'm really excited. One of the things that came off in the surveys from a lot of people was we cannot wait for the new building, we cannot wait for the new building. I cannot wait for the new building.
You know, one of the things that we did not understand, I don't think we can anticipate so much, is when we left Stirling to high school in May, we were typically running about 240 on Sunday morning. About 190 of those were adults. This room can hold 115 people. Our 830 service exists for one reason, to make space in this room.
They tell a lot of times they tell you that if a room is 80% full, it feels like there's no space left for you. If you just kind of take a gander in this room right now, we're about 80% full. I think this room is actually 65% full. When this room is about 65% full, it feels like there's not much space left for you.
I know I'm seeing folks right now that I've seen still on the floor in this room before, to make space for other people. The new building is gonna see about 250. I'm really excited about that. It's gonna be a great space for us.
But we've got stuff to do while we're working alongside of that. We've got buildings to talk about in the next coming weeks. This is really awesome. The first thing that we really had to do is to have this conversation.
We needed to define what does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus Christ inside of our area, inside of our mission and our context. This is not overriding the last 2000 years of church history. But this is us prayerfully honing in on how do we define following Jesus in our particular space, in our particular time. This is what we came up with.
This is a disciple of Jesus Christ as a consistently expanding vision of Jesus and his kingdom in relation to both their personal life and the world around them. One of our core values is God's vision for this world is bigger than our vision for this world. The disciple of Jesus Christ that is increasingly growing in their life. That's changing, that they are moving more towards a vision God's world and less towards a vision for their world.
And so the two, it's the biggest initiatives that we really have to take this year are not as surprised. We've been talking about them a lot the last few weeks, but we really feel like this is the time for us to talk about student ministry and this is the time for us to talk about adult ministry. Both of those are mission critical to our life is who we are as a church right now. The challenge that we have with all of these though is resources.
The challenges of people resource and financial resources. People resources, we feel like we have the best way for us to accomplish these goals, but we cannot do it with five people. Both of these are things that will take all of us to do together. Now we feel like we've come up with some solutions and we're going to share those with the town hall that I'm excited about because they are in the middle of this mission field.
I'm so excited about it, but what we had to think about so much as the staff is me and our leadership was this, are we coming up with typical solutions? We're just throwing the answer, the 50 year old church answer as a solution? Are we stepping back and realizing that we live in a different place? That we live in a different mission field and we can come at this strategically with the design that has the absolute best chance of accomplishing this mission?
Are we willing to say we're willing to do something different here to do this? Our youth ministry with the last three years, Sarah Marshbank and Drew Wallace and Jack Lockby and Adam Rowan and a host of other volunteers have done a fantastic job and have run a youth small group program that it was what we needed at the time. It gave us the space to really think about things. I'll tell you right now, you know how many fifth graders we have back in kids' church right now today?
I think our count is 18. They're almost all boys. Buckle up, trust me. I know most of them are wild.
But we think about that, but I'm going to cross this room right now. You see other kids, other students that fit into that age bracket and we have to come up with something that scales, but we also have to come up with something that disciples them. We have to come up with something that grows them and their idea of God's vision for this world at a critical life stage that they have. I grew up in church.
I grew up in youth ministry and I can tell you right now that pizza and ping pong is not going to lead them to Jesus. But pizza and ping pong are a lot of fun too though. But I'm really excited about Alan Johnson who's leading the mission trip. He's one of the best youth ministers I know and he came up with an incredible idea that we're going to share more with you this Wednesday night.
I invite you to come to that. Regardless if you have kids or not, I invite you to come here about what the strategy is like because I'm really, really excited about it. It's something that can scale and it's something that can be used with our resources, with our people and with financial resources in a very, very healthy way and a way that can consistently get bigger without bogging down. I cannot wait for that.
From adult discipleship, we're 50-50 and people who have expectations of churches and experience with church and another 50% of people have no memory of what church looks like. We've got some really, really fun ideas. The first one to tell you right now, over 110-115 people participated in dinner clubs last fall. In the surveys we heard from so many folks, how much they love dinner clubs.
In a lot of ways, it was our final experiment to what we think could happen. If you like dinner clubs or if you missed out on dinner clubs, the new dinner clubs sign up actually opened up this morning. If you go to myfoundry.life, we're running at least one more cycle of dinner clubs in spring, we're going to try to do two cycles of dinner clubs. If you're like, what is a dinner club?
If we put three to four families together and over the course of six weeks, they agreed to eat a meal together three times. Simple, low investment, a lot of fun. There's one new thing. On that sign up, you'll see we have checked is are you willing to be a dinner club leader?
That's not to give you anxiety. Say, hey, are you willing to take emails? Are you willing to email us back and let us know how things are going? Just kind of be a point person for your dinner club.
That was our great experiment, but we're actually about to do another little experiment right now, another little survey to get some more clarification. For the last few years, one of the things that comes up in the surveys every year is we have folks that ask about Sunday school. What we're trying to figure out is is that just the only word we know to talk about something or is there a specific need and desire for Sunday school or Sunday school? What we're used to when you say that word as a kid?
There is an adult. That blue post-it note that you have on your connection card. I'm going to grab one of those. Shepins to.
We're about to help us clarify some things this morning. A little bit, there's a note from the screen, but there's three things you're going to write down that post-it note. We're about to give you four options. Now, you're not voting.
You're not deciding. You're clarifying today. We're going to give you four options and you're going to put that number big. Then I want you to write your age and circle it.
The third thing is if you were active in church before foundry, and we'll define active as you were there three times a month, if you were active in church before foundry, just to put check on the post-it note. So, everybody clear? So, one through four, which I'm about to read to you, your age that circled and then it checked if you were active in a church before foundry. So, these are four things that we're trying to figure out.
This is really to see when people say Sunday school or people say disciples, what are we actually meaning with what we're saying? Because sometimes we use the words of the most familiar to us. Okay, so these are four things. I said, this is just clarity.
You're not voting, deciding. First one, I'm good with Sunday morning, but don't really have the time or desire for anything else. That's a realistic expectation for people's life. I chat, I work a lot.
I just don't know what's going on. I love Sunday morning, and that's great for me right now. If you're a number one person, just right number one on there. Number two, I like a couple of flexible recurring options.
Then the summary of the meetups, the well is our mid-sized women's ministry. We had a few years ago. We're bringing that back this year. I think the first one's going to be in February.
We're also going to start a men's version. These are super low-key, very casual gatherings of 20 to 40 people that are fun. There's not a high level of expectation to them. Like, hey, I like this stuff.
I don't really feel like I need to be around like five or six people consistently. That's really cool for me. If that's awesome, this is also that means like once a month or once every other month. If that's your speed, right number two down there.
Number three, I like a highly involved weekly group with attendance expectations. That's Sunday school. That's old school with the gold stars when you're a kid or you have your register that you get checked in. I was actually offering on to London Sunday school.
You all would kill me if I did that though. But if that's you, they say, hey, this is what I would really like. Okay, that's cool. Number three down.
Number four, I like how we mix it up. My schedule varies, but I love being with people and growing with people in the church. Like the dinner club. Like, hey, things are really flexible.
I like I love to fit what I can fit in. Number four, that's your speed. We also, or when we'll talk about the town hall is we're working on a way to train other people to lead smaller casual groups that can meet at different times in different places. In a way that's scalable, in a way that's sustainable.
And so we're hoping to have more things kind of like dinner clubs too. So this is a very helpful survey for us because it just gives us some clarity about what's going on in life. And so just whatever those numbers apply, the most of you just invite you to just put that down. Like I said, this is clarity.
Thank you so much for doing that in the middle of service. But the last thing that I want to talk with you today at this meeting is this. One of the things I've spent a lot of time praying kind of like in the fourth quarter of the year is about what Sunday morning's are going to look like. And what we're doing is going to start next Sunday.
I'm excited about it. I've talked to folks about this. At first I thought it might be a little bit boring, but we're going to have the year of Jesus. And we're going to spend every Sunday in 2019 is just in the gospel passages.
And the more I kind of poked around in research and kind of thought about re-existing to the exact opposite of boring, this is actually going to be a lot of fun. If we believe Jesus here in our neighborhood, he is fully present, he's leading and asking us to do things, we can stand and take a year to listen to what he says, couldn't we? Just to think, and to folks in that Jesus is also one of the most polarizing figures right now in our culture. And I've loved really digging into exactly what he said about certain things.
And he makes me mad sometimes because he asked me to change my mind. And sometimes he makes me feel comfortable because he says what I like to say. But in February we're kicking off a series of the start-off wizzes of three things he talks about the most. And man, I'm excited about that already.
That's what we're doing in 2019 is just focus on those gospel passages. But in closing, thank you for being a church that's going to do things differently. And not different for the sake of different. I was a kid in the mid-90s.
I was at the store at Gadsooks. Everybody bought the... Like, sometimes different for the sake of different, just dumb. Gadsooks.
I tried to work there one time. That was really bad. People of my stature got the jinkos, the big pants. I'm glad the 90s gone.
But we're different because we believe we're called to something unique. And thank you for being a church that's been willing to chase that dream. And chase that call and chase that vision and chase that mission for the last four years. So let's close in prayer, Lord.
Thank you for uniqueness. God, for coming and for calling. God, just giving us a different space and a different speed. And what all we want to do is we know we've been found by you and we just want to follow them.
God, we realize that we're in space. You've given us. You've put us in relationships and environments intentionally. And we just want to be obedient in that.
God, thank you for loving us. For putting up with us and we're hard-headed. God, thank you from when we talk the most smack about you. You give us the greatest things.
Lord, thank you for loving us, for dying for us and for rising from the grave for us.