How Do You Have Church in a Gym?

For those of you who don’t know, The Crossroads Community Church gathers for worship each week in a gymnastics and cheer gym called Tiger Cat Tumble and Cheer. We are so thankful that God has provided us with this incredible place to meet.

However, meeting in a gym comes with some challenges. Setup and takedown are a lot of hard work, but they are also an incredibly rewarding experience. Each week, we have to come into the gym and take up cushioned mats, move chairs, set up chairs, set up backdrops and instruments and sound system, put together our coffee area and welcome center, and create a nursery and children’s area.

The net effect is that the space is totally transformed into our unique worship area. Several people whose kids take gymnastics at the gym and the owner of the gym have told us how amazed they are at how things look. They say it doesn't even look like the same place. Which is great for us.

One of the primary things you want to accomplish in being a portable church is making your meeting place your own for the time you are there. Our team is doing such an incredible job at this. We set up bistro tables in our coffee area, hang coffee signs on the wall, and put out greenery and decorations to give it a coffee house feel.

In our worship area, we put up backdrops and use whatever props we can to further the theme of the message series. We actually worship on the gym floor where they ordinarily do tumbling. We remove the padded mats each week. Under the mats is a floor of plywood (actually oriented strand board for those of you who know about building materials). This floor is over some large foam blocks. The net effect is that there is still a little bit of spring to the floor, which makes it lots of fun when the band really starts rocking.

For our nursery, we actually use the mats from the gym to create padded walls. We have folding rocking chairs and toys and mats to put on the floor. It really makes the nursery an inviting area.

Our kids' ministry actually meets outside right now. One of the advantages of planting in Texas is that the weather allows us to do this for about 9 months out of the year (that is except for when huge gusts of wind come along). This allows us to do some neat games and activities with the kids, and puts them in an environment where they can be loud and have lots of fun.

The first time we did all this, it took us over three hours. We now have it down to about and hour and fifteen minutes, and we seem to be getting better each week. It’s hard work, but it is also an incredible way for us to connect with each other as a team and with new people as they come in and help us out. We arrive each Sunday morning at about 8 AM, and with a lot of prayer and a lot of coffee, we get rolling on setting up.

Update

Lots of stuff going on right now with The Crossroads. Last week we secured a meeting place! Hurray and thank you, God! We will be meeting at the Tiger Cat Tumble and Cheer Gymnasium. It is located just west of US-75 and just south of FM 455. It is a really great location, and it comes at an awesome price. In addition, the owner has some build-out she wants to do and would be willing to allow us to help her with that and apply that toward the cost of the lease. Awesome!!

LaRissa has created a baby registry at Target for the nursery. If you are interested or you know of someone who is interested, this is a very real and practical way to help support The Crossroads.

I have been having several conversations with pastors trying to secure support for The Crossroads. So far, most of those conversations have been very positive and productive, although there have been no definite commitments yet. So please be very much in prayer for funding. If you know of anyone I need to talk to (churches, individuals, corporations) who might be interested in supporting The Crossroads, please let me know. I will be happy to talk to them and share the vision God has given us.

We are scheduling dates for pre-launch events right now. I will post those as soon as we have them in stone. If you would be interested in helping out with door-to-door surveys, service projects, block parties, or coming to a preview service, please let me know.

I have a friend who is working on a logo design for us, and I am working on getting our website up and running.

Please, please, be in prayer for our family. I will be without my current job at the end of this month. I'm kind of feeling like I can't breathe right now when I consider that. I'm serious. Pray for us. Stop what you are doing right now and pray for us.

Update on a Meeting Place

Looks like we will definitely have a place to meet, I'm just not sure where yet. I've located three different possibilities that look promising. Continue to pray for this, however.

Meetings with Anna City Manager and Police Chief went really well last week. I hope connecting with these guys will really help us to build relationships and make connections with our target communities.

Pray for a Place

We've hit a roadblock along the way in preparing for the church plant. We had anticipated using one of the schools in Anna as our meeting place. However, the school's policy about letting groups use their facilities for an extended time state that you must own property and have plans to move into a permanent meeting place within three months time.

That's a no on both of those for us. So, be really in prayer that God would either change some hearts in the school district so we would be able to meet there or that he would reveal to us the perfect place he has planned for us to meet.