John Maxwell tells the story in one of his books about how once during his time as a Pastor they entered into a building campaign. He and the elders felt a strong leading from God to move forward on a particular piece of property.  They prayed and fasted and together approached the congregation with what they believed was God’s will and vision for the church.

The church prayed and fasted and together they rallied behind the vision to raise the money to purchase the land for the new building.

Shortly before they were to seal the deal and after they had already asked the congregation to participate, sacrifice and give generously for this specific piece of property the elders decided to go to the property to pray seek God one more time.

As they walked around the property, something strange occurred. Each of the men began to individually sense that God was closing the door and directing them NOT to move forward.  They gathered together and confirmed what they were sensing individually.  Walked and prayed some more and then gathered once again.

Bottom line. They were in the midst of a leadership crisis. God had firmly directed their steps to that point in time, but was now firmly leading them in a different direction without all the details.

  • That’s similar to where we find ourselves today.

As we retrace the last few weeks, God was directly leading the leadership to pursue this building and giving us a vision for the mission of Life Connections church, but in the last few days He has been redirecting our steps.

Here are just a few thoughts:

On Friday, Pastor Chris met with several people around the Village including people from the Park District.  When he explained the vision for a Youth Center, he also asked them their thoughts on this particular building. Their response was that because of Route 34, the building would be inaccessible to our target audience and therefor limiting. We should instead be looking for something more centralized and/or near the bike trails.

Being the great listener (cough…cough…) that he is, Chris took that info and some of the leadership discussed how silly that was… after all what did the Park District know.

Then on Sunday night one of the youth said something that stopped several of us cold. When asked her thoughts on the building she replied, “It’s nice but it’s not near any of the trails so there is no way for me to ride my bike here.”   Hmmmm.

By no means does our reasoning hang on that one sentence. There were several other things that came up as we continued to try to discern what God was saying, and How He was trying to get our attention, but the bottom line is that it became clear that His answer was no.

So what next?

Well, in the case of John Maxwell’s church, they took the news to the people of the church who responded by affirming their leadership for listening to God’s voice.  Then God did an AMAZING THING. Another piece of property became available that was about 10-15 acres bigger for the same amount of money.  Not only did they have more exposure, but after measuring they discovered it was even bigger than they first believed.

Then God worked out a bunch of cool things. First their were easement issues that people purchased from them.  Then there were water rights that were purchased from them. By the time it was all said and done, they basically got this much larger and much better located piece of property for free AND had enough money left over to build.

For us…

The story has yet to be written but we serve the same God!

Thanks for being a part of this journey!!

God is Good!