November 2021 Update
In case you missed it, we shared an update on Sunday, November 21 about our latest progress. You can watch it here (skip ahead to the 1hr, 10 minute mark) or below is the recap of that update:
We are grateful that the picture of the future of our property is beginning to come into focus. The past several months have been spent developing a concept for a building, exploring site layouts and preparing to bring our ideas before the Town of Cary.
If you’ve been around long enough, you may remember a season a long time ago when we kept talking about how we were praying for sewer plans to come through. Anyone remember that? Man that felt like such a strange thing to pray for – but it was a really important part of our project – and it’s been awesome to see each of the pieces come together. That sewer thing has long since worked out – they barely even mentioned our sewer needs in the meeting this week since that part of the project was completed as part of the neighborhood development. Now, we’ve moved onto praying about roads!
Not only have we moved beyond that season of praying about sewers, but we also own our property (20 acres) debt free. And we’ve put in the road widening and sidewalks required for developing our property. Our cost on the road widening, sidewalks and some of the sewer infrastructure was around $1.2 million.
And that brings us to today.
We’ve been praying about roads.
As you may remember, one of our major hurdles has been the requirement for a road that connects Morrisville Parkway and White Oak Church Road right through our property.
This past Wednesday we brought our initial ideas before the Town and to be honest, we were prepared for them to say, “That’s all great, but you still have to build that entire road.”
The the meeting with the Town went really well as they gave us input on how they are able to work with us to make our plans possible.
We received specific instructions on what they expect and our engineering team is going to help us develop our plans around the requirements. This sketch shows you the general idea that we are working from and which was shown to the Town of Cary:
This was an answer to prayer! We don’t have firm numbers but we knew that building that full road would significantly impact the financial picture of this project. We also received some additional helpful feedback about other aspects of our plans and we are excited to keep moving the project towards reality.
Some of you might be thinking – okay, then show us some pictures! Let’s see the building! I need to pick out my seat!
But we aren’t quite ready for that yet. This meeting was a critical piece of our process to finally have clarity on the site costs for moving forward. As we’ve crunched numbers and talked to experts, we recognize that the budget that we are working within is going to be tight. This Town of Cary meeting was an important mile stone on our critical path for our project to move forward.
Now we can move into the next phase.
We have general contractors that are currently looking at our plans to give us some pricing estimates. We have had preliminary conversations with some financial institutions about our budget and our borrowing capacity. We are working to fine tune several other aspects of things, so we aren’t quite ready to show a bunch of pictures.
So here we are – many pieces all moving simultaneously. They can’t all move at the exact same pace but we’re trying to keep them all moving together as much as possible!
– Financial + Architecture + Engineering + Contractor + Town of Cary
– Sometime in early 2022 we’ll be bringing a LOT more detail to you along with a fundraising initiative. We’ll be sharing a lot more details about how we see this project contributing to God’s vision for our church and we’ll be asking our church family to prayerfully consider how we can make this possible together.
Bottom line: We are so grateful that we can trust God with these plans. We know he knew 7 years ago when we bought this property that we’d be here today. We know he knows what the next 7 years hold. I had coffee with a member of our church family last week and we were talking about all the seasons that we’ve been through over the years. And they made the comment that while a lot of things have changed over the years – they were grateful that the core identity and mission of the church has not changed at all – and that this can be attributed to the church not being tied to a building – a location – a person – but to Jesus Christ alone.
I’m so grateful to get to be part of a church that is known for that. I’m so grateful to get to serve alongside each of you. And I cannot wait to see what God is going to do in this season ahead of us. I can’t wait to see how God turns that corner on Morrisville Parkway and White Oak Church Rd into even more of a place of Gospel hope, into a light in the darkness. I hope you’re excited to partner with us on this mission!