You May be Wondering

Here are some questions you may be asking about the land purchase. But first, take a look at this comment to my last post from a long-term member who recently moved to Madison, WI.

How exciting! I remember sitting in the old farm house during a prayer vigil (by myself at 5 am) as the church was planning on growing into it's own building! God is so great!

Don't we have enough land already?

No, we are convinced we don't yet have enough land for what God wants to do through Five Oaks.

Currently, we have just enough land to run two concurrent services, one in the Worship Center and one in the Community Life Center. The land supports just enough space to build the additional children’s space and parking we will need for those two services.

Only eleven or so of our nineteen acres are usable. We have wetlands behind our building and another acre or so will go to the widening of Radio Drive. Our space for expansion is severely limited.

We want to be ready to grow. We are confident that God wants us to reach more people through us than our current land allows. More land gives us the ability to build a larger worship center before we go to concurrent services.

Why not just plant churches when we reach our space limits?

Church planting is one of the best ways of reaching new people for Christ, but it is not a method for making room for growth. And remember, this growth is on our doorstep! Church planting doesn’t leverage this strategic, God-given opportunity.

Why not grow to a certain size and hold there?

All churches have a life span and they all reach a size limit at some point. Every church without exception. God is in charge of that. But if a church loses its vision for reaching more people for Christ or loses its ability to bring more people in because of lack of space (due to lack of foresight or faith), it begins to die a thousand deaths. I suppose, under those conditions, we’ll be able to use the land for a cemetery!

What if we end up not needing the land?

We can sell it. Most of the land we're buying can be used for parking but not for building. But a housing development can count it toward their required green space. 

More questions and answers coming next week.

• How are we going to pay for this purchase?
• Will this project take money away from missions or compassion ministries, locally and globally?
• Aren't capital campaigns a distraction from making disciples?

Do you have any questions I can add to this list?

Location, Location, Location

“Someday the city will grow in our direction.” That’s what Five Oaks member Tom Berg told me back in 1996 as we walked the 19 acres of the newly acquired church property. Tom was leading the search team for a new pastor. I had come up from Kansas for an interview.

Two barns and a farmhouse were all that remained of what had been known as the Five Oaks Ranch. Surrounded by farmland and not a housing development in sight, I was thinking, ‘If the first rule for buying real estate is location, location, location, this is not the place to build.’ It seemed out of the way and far from all the new development in Woodbury. But at least 19 acres seemed like more than we would ever need.

That was almost 17 years ago and Woodbury was poised to grow eastward. And boy did it grow! It added 20,000 new residents to the east. Even so, as the population was growing away from us, we grew too, from a congregation of about 175 to a congregation of over 1600 who are active today. 

Those 19 acres have served us well all these years. And they will serve us well for several more.

But Woodbury will now expand to the south. It’s all coming toward us! And, get this, 20,000 more people are moving to within a five-minute driving radius of our property within the next ten years! We simply will need more land to meet our missional potential.

What was once a fledgling church wondering if it would survive the departure of its founding pastor is now an established, innovative and vibrant, disciple-making community, mobilized and impacting the world for Christ. 

What was once farmhouse and barns is now a church building where thousands of people from the community come to worship or simply to play basketball, hold recitals or feed thousands of hungry children.

It’s a place where, a couple of years ago, more people made first-time decisions to follow Christ than we had in average attendance when I came almost 17 years ago. 

And it’s a place where Tom Berg’s words will come true and this pastor can finally start singing, “Location, location, location.”