What is the Light and Land Campaign? Well, it is a campaign whose time has come. We have only until the summer of 2010 to purchase an additional 7.5 acres. With an expected donation of 2.5 acres, the result will be a 20-acre campus. This purchase will allow for the growth of this disciple-making center we call Abiding Harvest United Methodist Church .
Consultants say that a general rule for facility development is that you need one acre for every 100 people you want to minister to at any one time on campus. Doing the math, if we have the foresight to buy the land, we could develop additional facilities, then minister effectively to 2,000 people at a time.
Do we need 20 acres? The Oklahoma Conference has encouraged us from the beginning to think of not doing any less.
Should we put it off? No, the land is already worth far more than the locked price in our option agreement. In time the land will likely be subdivided making it more costly, if not impossible, to purchase it in the future.
My heart is not so much for a large church, but for an effective and faithful church. But if we are effective and faithful, isn’t that just the kind of church God is going to want to get as many people as possible connected with?
I say yes. And you can too with a donation to the Light and Land Campaign. Details of how we will make pledges or collect donations will be announced in the next few months. Until then, let me also tell you about the Light in this campaign. Dirt may not be so exciting, but this really is. Pending city approval, we also want to purchase a “steeple of light,” as we have called it. Frank Lloyd Wright was the first to design this sort of thing for a Lutheran church in Kansas City . But only recently has the lighting technology advanced to the point of making it a reality.
Imagine an immovable spire of light piercing the night sky up into the heavens from the center of our campus, probably from the back corner of the amphitheater stage. This kind of light weighs hundreds of pounds and casts a focused beam several times smaller in diameter than those swirling search lights common at big events like circuses or car sales extravaganzas. For us it would be like a “bat signal!” On weeks that we witnessed fruitfully as evidenced by someone being won to Christ or joining our church, we would turn the light on to celebrate. When that did not happen and the steeple of light was turned off for the week, absent in the night sky, it would be a signal to remind us all to pray to the God of heaven and turn up the wattage of our witness, refocusing our own efforts at bringing our friends to Christ and His Church.
The Light and Land Campaign...because the light and the land are tools at the very heart of our purpose: to make fully devoted disciples of these and future generations through participation in authentic Christian community!
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