Well, if you have looked around on Sunday morning, you can see that God is bringing more and more new folks to Crossgate and of course, we are thrilled to have each one.  What a blessing it is for us to be able to provide spiritual nurture and encouragement to more and more people – and to be able to provide a real church “family” for people to be a part of.  But as a result of this growth, things are beginning to get a little bit snug in our Worship Service.  We’ve definitely reached the 80% capacity mark – the point where the experts say, you will begin to lose folks because it will be more and more difficult for them to find parking and seating.

Well, the Session has looked at the situation and determined that if we are to continue growing, we need to take some steps to address this “problem.”  There are really only a couple of viable alternatives:   go to a second service and split up the congregation (which I don’t think anyone wants to do)  or  go to Phase 2 in our building master plan which entails building an educational/office building and knocking out the walls of our existing sanctuary (which would seat around 400-450).

The Session believes the latter alternative is the better of the two, and so we have put together a Building Committee that will be working with Signature Architects and Trehel Corp. (the designer and builder of our current facility) in order to ascertain our immediate needs and what steps we need to be taking next.  Michael Thorsland will be chairing this committee and Mike Benning, Scott Coffman, Teresa Bruce and Debra Andrews will serve on the committee with him.  Let’s be praying for them as they work on this – that God would give them great wisdom and discernment, and that it would be very clear what God would have us do next.

It is possible that before we are able to build we will have to go to a second service – at least temporarily.  Once we begin having 200 people come consistently on Sunday morning, we will need to look at this.  But our desire is that we be able to stay together and continue worshiping as one body.  So even if we have to go to two services, our goal will be to get back together as soon as possible.