“The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
Matthew 9:37-38
For Your Neighbor Initiative
When I look at the growth and development of our community, I can’t help but see a plentiful harvest. Driving down Church Street I see bulldozers leveling the ground, preparing for a new crop of houses and apartments. Each will be filled with unique individuals and families, and yet they will long for the same thing: a community. As they start over in an unfamiliar town, they will be reliant upon us—their neighbors—to invite them into a place of connection and belonging!
We are witnessing the birth of a flourishing mission field, and St. Mark’s Community Church is positioned right at the center of the harvest! What an exciting blessing this is, and yet also a remarkable responsibility. We are being sent out to serve our neighbor, to pray over their houses, and to invite them to make their home in the love of Jesus.
In 1946, two dozen families that gathered for worship here at St. Mark’s built a chapel that could comfortably seat over 150 congregants. It was a space that would easily accommodate their growth for years to come and yet they had a convincing thought: “What if God is doing something bigger here in Alamance County?” It led them to dream about the kind of impact their little church could have on the growing community around them. In faith, they laid a foundation much larger than the chapel would need and roughly 40 years later, their dreams came true. The chapel could no longer hold the harvest, and so they expanded its walls upon the foundation that had already been poured. That faithful vision of what God might do became the underpinning of a church on mission for their neighbors.
Today, I want to invite us into a similar moment. As we picture what this community will look like forty years from now, let us plan for the ones still to come. The For Your Neighbor initiative is a dream that will stretch us to imagine what God might do if we are willing to open our homes, our church, and our hearts to the mission field into which He has called us. It is a faithful vision to prepare our facility, expand our capacity, increase our accessibility, and faithfully welcome His abundant harvest!
Sincerely,
Pete Stearns
Pete Stearns
SCOPE of WORK
As we embark on the For Your Neighbor initiative, we will seek to revitalize our facility in three primary capacities while also resourcing our community through the faithful work of our mission partners in east Burlington. As you read through the following pages, you will see a breakdown of the estimated cost for each element of the project. While we believe each element is equally important, you will see thatcosts vary based on the scope of each project.
To fund these four major projects, we have set a goal to raise $5 million over 36 months. We know that this is a tall task, but when the Church walks faithfully and generously, God moves mountains and splits seas!
STUDENT CENTER
OVERHAUL
St. Mark’s Community Church has a long history of loving students and student ministry. Yet, in the 170 years the church has existed, we have not made a physical investment in a space primarily focused on middle and high school students. This project seeks to open up the Student Center welcome area, brighten the space, and cultivate an environment where students feel at home!
Our Student Center overhaul is perfectly timed with the launch of Waypoint, our revamped ministry for middle and high school students. Waypoint is a place where students can go where the timeless truths of God’s word cut through the noise—a place where students know they belong.
The improvements to our facility are an external demonstration of our internal conviction that the next generations will continue our missionof making Jesus famous. This overhaul will create spaces for students to make intimate connections with God, their leaders, and each other. We will be creating office space for our Next Gen staff to allow students to more easily access them, and the bathrooms and kitchen area will receive much-needed attention!
WORSHIP CENTER
FACELIFT
St. Mark’s Community Church has a deep value for intimate and communal worship. The connection we experience in the Worship Center reflects the living God at work through His church body! We want to make small, yet intentional changes that move our space towards meaningful connection. Flattening the slope in the “lower bowl” of the worship center will create a close-knit worship environment. This will reduce the height of the stage, bringing our congregation and our worship team closer together! Additionally, the space will become more hospitable to all those with mobility limitations.
We are also planning to introduce flexible seating, adding chairs to increase our capacity by 346 seats, address normal wear and tear accrued across two decades of use, increase the height of the balcony railing for safety, and bring our production team from a separate room onto the Worship Center balcony.
Our Worship Center is a remarkable place to gather, glorify God, engage in intimate prayer, and deepen our walk with Jesus Christ! We will physically modify this space to make the Worship Center both more intimate and more accessible to a variety of ministries. We will invite connection by eliminating barriers, expanding seating capacity for large services, and creating flexibility for community gatherings and innovative worship experiences.
An exciting and necessary element of our Worship Center facelift is our plan to redesign the back wall of our worship space to make it more visible from our lobby. This change will not only offer continuity with our lobby and illuminate our worship experience for those who have yet to enter the room, but it will also allow those who are not already familiar with our facilities to receive a welcoming invitation into the life of worship!
PARKING LOT
EXPANSION
When we evaluate our readiness for growth, we always look at creating balance across three major facets of our ministry: our worship experience and capacity, our kids and student spaces, and our parking lots.
Though they are not the most exciting ministry measure, parking lots are one of the most important resources we have in creating a hospitable welcome for our guests and congregation. In our current parking lot configuration, our parking reaches full capacity well before our worship and children’s spaces do. This imbalance creates challenges as we continue to engage the community around us.
Imagine that you’re a first-time guest hoping to attend a service—and when you pull into our parking lots, you can’t find a spot. You may assume this means there’s no room to worship either, so you leave! We are growing, and while our ministry spaces are prepared to accommodate that growth, our parking lots simply are not.
We have also seen St. Mark’s Church Road experience a significant increase in traffic. This presents safety concerns for our largest parking lot, and creates long-term challenges for our growth. To address these pinch points, we will significantly expand the footprint of our parking lots on Willow Oak Drive to centralize our parking and bring guests closer to our main entrance.
EAST BURLINGTON
PARTNERSHIPS
At St. Mark’s Community Church, we recognize that our neighbors are not only those who live in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding our campus. We strongly believe that God calls us to reach across our city, county, and region with His love. In this campaign, we have a unique opportunity to follow Jesus’s example in loving our neighbors in east Burlington.
We are working with mission partner, the Alamance Dream Center, on a physical investment for community enrichment through their soccer ministry. In this project, we will come alongside the Dream Center to place a beautiful, communal soccer field in the heart of their neighborhood.
Importantly, this project will allow the Dream Center’s thriving soccer ministry to expand, while also helping to cultivate a place for teens growing up in a socio-economically repressed area of our city. This will ultimately provide an opportunity to communicate the gospel through programs in which the Dream Center is already engaged.
PRAY
God is doing remarkable things in our community. Let’s pray together about how God will use St. Mark’s Community Church to faithfully tend to the harvest!
PREPARE
Take time to humbly consider how God might be leading you to engage in this initiative as you take a bold step of faith For Your Neighbor.
PARTICIPATE
Please join us for Commitment Sunday on October 12th during our services as we pledge to boldly move forward with this initiative for our neighbors. More details will be coming this fall!
Frequently Asked Questions
(Click each question/arrow to reveal responses. Have additional questions? Click the button below.)
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Our Student Ministry staff has polled the entire Waypoint Student Ministry to gain insights into the Student Center Overhaul. Additionally, we have engaged a small group of students to work with our architects and designers to create a space that is uniquely theirs.
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No, the new addition is twice the size of the existing portico and will provide a student gathering place for connection on both Sunday evenings and throughout the week!
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The change greatly expands our worship center capacity by adding 346 seats. This will allow us to accommodate ongoing growth without needing to create more physical space.
The chairs allow greater flexibility to customize the room for worship, Christmas and Easter Services, concerts, and other events.
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Creating a worship center with variable slopes helps provide a unique and dynamic worship space. The lowest portion of the room will be flattened, which creates space for communal worship, baptisms, worship arts, and student programs.
In addition, the flat floor will help reduce the overall height of the stage and lessen the distance between our worship teams and the congregation.
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The initial renderings show the glass as fully transparent in order to help visualize the space. However, in reality, that glass will have an opaque “frosted” effect and be treated for sound dampening.
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Currently, our online services are our largest worship gatherings each Sunday. However, our production team does all of its work disconnected from the actual worship space.
We will be moving our production suite into the worship center to create a deeper connection between those online and those gathered in our worship space.
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The field is an investment in the Alamance Dream Center’s influential soccer ministry. The Dream Center Football Club has created remarkable opportunities for talented children and students to achieve their dreams.
The next step for their expanded impact is to establish a field that will serve as their base camp for future expansion and goals.
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With our strong team of volunteers, our parking lots have the capacity to handle our current worship attendance. However, there are a few limiting factors that make our parking lot a challenge.
Growth: When we push beyond our typical 800 adult attenders, we begin to experience significant pinch points, and in the past 12 months, we have had 24 Sundays with more than 850 attenders. 14 of these Sundays have exceeded 900 attenders. In order to accommodate future growth, our parking capacity needs to expand.
Safety: A second significant factor is the shift being experienced on St. Mark’s Church Road. This road has become a major thoroughfare connecting Elon to Interstate 85/40, Target, and Alamance Crossing, effectively cutting off our largest parking lot from the St. Mark’s campus. With increased traffic, this road has become challenging to navigate on Sunday morning and will likely continue to see increased use in the years to come.
Accessibility: With our current parking lot structure, we have limited parking immediately adjacent to the church property. This expansion will add much-needed parking for our seniors and those with mobility concerns.
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All project renderings are initial concepts. As we embark on the project, we will work closely with Bobbit Construction and our Facility Growth team to engineer and customize our final project designs.
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Yes. The project will be completed in phases over the next 36 months.
The first phase will include our Dream Center Investment, our Student Center Overhaul, and a portion of our parking lot expansion.
The Second Phase will address the Worship Center facelift.
The Final Phase will complete the additional parking lot expansion.
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The church currently carries $400,000 of debt from the prior Reach campaign. This debt is being paid aggressively at a low interest rate.
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We plan to cash flow the projects over the 36-month commitment period. Debt is a tool that may be used for short-term construction loans with a commitment to pay them off prior to beginning the next phase of the project.