The vision of our church is Changed Lives. Our purpose is to create an environment where the Holy Spirit of God can transform lives through the love of Jesus, the teaching of the Bible, the community of faith, and the crucible of service.

Changed Lives result in more changed lives, as the ripple-effect impacts marriages, families, schools, communities and even nations. Many lives are being changed at the Tabernacle, and we want to see even more lives transformed by Jesus. However, the truth is that in some ways things have begun to stagnate.

We’ve run out of facility space. New faces keep coming every Sunday, but some old faces have also disappeared. Staff and volunteers are stretched to the breaking point. Our giving continues to increase, but we’re still operating at about 1/5^th our financial capacity. We feel like a big church, but still operate like a small church. These are all classic symptoms of the so-called church “tunnel of death.”

This “tunnel of death” is the attendance range of 300-500, where the increasing demands on staff, facility and ministry programs cannot keep pace with finances. This is why churches tend to be less than 300 or more than 500. Churches can survive the “tunnel, they just cannot live there very long. The Tabernacle has been in the tunnel for almost a year and a half.

The difference between a living thing and a dead thing is change. Living things are always changing, but when a body doesn’t change, the result is stagnation and death.

It’s time for the Tabernacle to change some more so we can see more Lives Changed. It’s time to get busy living or get busy dying.

We have faith that God is not done with us yet. He began a good work in us, and will be faithfully complete what He started (Phil 1:6). The real question is will we be faithful to do our part?

Join us on this journey, the 2011 Faith Odyssey.