What if a group of business leaders that are followers of Christ pooled their money together to create a Kingdom Investment Group?  The point of this group would be to find a large local church facility and put together an offer to buy it. 

This facility would have to be siginificant enough to handle large events and related support services.  In other words, it would have to be of the quality level to become a local conference/events center/catering facility of sorts.  Did I mention that this facility would be bought from a local church that is still operational and has no intention of moving?

This might seem like a wacky idea, but think about it for a moment:  This ownership group would rent the building, at a very advantageous cost (or free) to the church that worships and operates ministry there.  And the rest of the time, it would rent the building out to the community for events, weddings, conferences etc.  I believe the church could focus more on ministry this way, leaving the management of the physical plant, scheduling, etc. up to the investor group. 

The investor group would, in turn, manage the building and drive profitable revenue for it through savvy marketing and quality event management.  And more importantly, because this group is Kingdom-minded, they would tithe back to the church that calls the facility their ministry home. 

Imagine a church that did not have to spend its resources on keeping up a building.  Imagine a community of faith that could focus fully on ministry.  Imagine a cool local venue that could reach out to the community in new ways that were not possible in the past and create new bridges to everyone in the community, Christian or not. 

It was Tom Sine that mentioned in one of his books, The Mustard Seed Conspiracy (a must read), that churches are the most underutilized buildings in the US.  The above approach, Sine’s idea found on page 176 of the same book), could do much to free up ministry and create great local businesses and opportunity to boot. 

What do you think?

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Church, Emergent Church, Evangelism/Outreach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.