Beginning Sunday, May 15 New Life will need to have Sunday worship at 3:30PM at least for a month if not for five months. As you have noticed, there is a lot of construction going on in our church these days. Our Korean Speaking Congregation (KSC) is remodeling their worship center and fellowship hall to accommodate their growing needs. In about a month, they will need to tear down the walls of their worship center and put a new wall around it to expand their space. This process will take about two or three weeks during which they will need a place to worship. Their first worship begins at 9AM and their second at 11:45AM, and their worship usually lasts for about an hour and forty-five minutes to two hours.
The KSC has been very gracious and generous to New Life all these years and I think it is a right thing for us to have them use the gym in May so they could keep their usual worship time. This means we will need to move our Sunday worship to some other time. The team leaders gave some thought to this and realized that Saturday evening is not a good choice because there will be a lot of weddings this year. The most ideal time is Sunday afternoon. I know that this will create some difficulty for New Life members because some of us need to travel or work on Sunday afternoon. I wish we could accommodate everyone’s need but this is the best that we can do for now. Things will be different when we build and have our own facilities.
Also in the middle of May, the KSC will break the ground for our youth center, which will be built right behind the trailer house. According to their architect this project amazingly will take just about four months to finish. During these four months, the whole church will lose about 100 plus parking space because part of it will be used as a site for the youth building and the other part for all kinds of building materials. We will keep our eyes closely on the parking space situation during May to see if New Life could come back to the gym in June to worship at 11AM or we should continue to worship at 3:30PM due to the shortage of parking space until we make extra parking space on the land that we will be building our facilities according to our masterplan.
When the youth center is finished in September the trailer which houses all New Life staff members’ offices will need to be removed shortly after. The staff members are thinking about what would be the best way to do our work without our office space until our building is finished. We either need to borrow some space from the youth building or work from Panera Bread or Starbucks on 290! ?
When the worship time changes to 3:30PM, we will do our best to continue on with our regular ministries such as praise team practice, JCS, Sunday morning intercessory prayer, refreshments, greeting, parking ministry, etc. It will be a new experience for many of us who never had to come together on Sunday afternoon for corporate worship.
I rarely say anything about Korean immigrant life or culture, but allow me to say one thing about what the first generation Korean Christians had to do for their second-generation children to be where they are. When they came to America 30 or 40 years ago, they were looking for a place of worship. They didn’t have enough resources back then to be able to buy the land and build their own church facilities. Therefore, they borrowed the facilities usually from Caucasian American churches and worshipped on Sunday afternoon. Some of these churches were very upset with the Korean Christians who were using their building because their kids would run around the church and destroy their properties or they would eat that smelly kimchi and rice in their fellowship halls every Sunday after worship. But most of them were very gracious and understanding and God grew and raised up Korean immigrant churches through these Caucasian churches’ generosity and brotherly love.
Some of you have been approaching me to find out when we are going to begin our building pledge campaign. I see your sincere desire to give and participate in our building project and I truly thank and praise God for you. The current plan is the Building Committee will meet with SLI at the end of April to review their masterplan and the final cost estimate, do their best to negotiate on behalf of New Life family and then sign the contract if everything seems fine. Then we will begin to present to you in May during our Sunday worship the detail plans as to what we are planning to build and how we are going to fund the whole project. And we will ask you to begin praying to God to see how much He would have you contribute to this work. Then we will take the whole month of June to collect the offerings and pledges for the building fund.
It is an exciting time for us here at New Life! God is moving in a special way because He wants to work through us. However, our enemy Satan is also working diligently to hurt and destroy the work that is being done here. Let’s be alert and pray hard so we will not fall for Satan’s deception. We cannot afford to lose any of you to Satan. It’s not time for us to sin and fall away from God. It’s time for us to brace ourselves with God’s grace and run hard after Him!
Your pastor,
Eric
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