State Street 2.0 [February Update]

Last October, I was able to announce to our church community some monumental plans in the future of State Street. It's no secret that we take serious the social component to our faith (our mantra; love God, love others, and love well). Poverty, of any kind, is not acceptable to us. As we grow closer to Christ, personally, communally, and sacramentally, our passion to see 'His Kingdom come' increases. We believe that the church will continue to grow as we are faithful in that engagement.

We hope, anyway.

We also have some other core aspects to our community. These social endeavors help shape the life of those in our community and put meat on the bones of our faith. These things include our food pantry, clothes pantry, and weekly meal (think soup kitchen without soup, full meals). This summer, under the direction of Kelli Fryer, we will be starting a program to help local kindergarten students who are not prepared to enter first grade academically. We are also in the early stages of planning a community garden. We have no shortage of incredibly redemptive ideas at State Street and it's our plan to make as many of those happen as we can.

So, to help facilitate the growth in the church and our increasing vision for our social endeavors, we announced our intention to start a community center. We know to get to that point, however, we must pay off all of our current building debt. We owed the Salvation Army $180,000 due September 1, 2012. After renegotiating a deal with the S.A., they benevolently agreed to subtract $40,000 from our debt and give us another year to pay off our debt.

We've asked our community to respond by giving above and beyond our current offering to help retire this debt. We have a few budgetary priorities at State Street that has helped us to this point. We put 15% of every dollar received in offering towards mission spending. This includes local missions, food pantry, and foreign missions. We also put 10% of every dollar in a fund for building expenditures. This money accrues until we need to purchase something for the church in regards to the facility. So far, here is where we're at:

$180,000 [initial debt]
- $40,000 [S.A. gift to State Street in form of less money owed]
- $33,000 [payments from our building fund] 
- $9,000 [our monthly 'mortgage' to SA; Sept.-Feb.]
- $37,000 [collected in donations from people at State Street]
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$61,000 remains

We have until the end of July to retire the debts for our building. But, we are getting there! Be encouraged, State Street!