A church building should never function like a retirement home for God’s people. It should never be a country club or a member’s only community center for people leading comfortable lives. A church building and sanctuary should be a point of heavenly attack in the world, a place where God’s people are cleaned and fed and strengthened before flooding out into the world like the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s vision.

 

For more than forty years, our congregation in Moscow, Idaho has been dependent on the generous hospitality of various community members and organizations to host our worship. We have gathered to worship God in auto body shops and parks, high school lunch rooms and auditoriums, old theaters and nightclubs. More recently, when local and state authorities tried to forbid gathering, we worshipped outdoors at a crop duster air strip before moving into a pasture, before defiantly returning to our most frequent home in recent years—a high school gym.

 

From all of these locations, Christ Church has been determined to engage the culture around us, to feed and strengthen God’s people before unleashing them on the world. And we are grateful to God for how much He has blessed our efforts, multiplying our numbers and our gains in the culture on local, national, and global levels—in business and ministry, podcasts and publishing, education and media.

 

After decades in the wilderness, the time has finally come for us to build a permanent home, a base of operations for our ministries that is not borrowed.

 

We want to honor God’s artistry in the world with the beauty of this new building, but far more importantly, we want to honor God with the faithfulness of the worship inside this sanctuary. We do not want this to be a memorial to our past efforts, a tombstone set over the grave of a once faithful generation. No, we want this to be a launching point for more faithful engagement with the world than we could possibly imagine. We want to build a beautiful gate house between heaven and earth, a temple, as it were, of the new covenant, where a river will flow out from beneath the threshold, joining in the flood that will cover the entire world.

 

To all of you watching this, hold us accountable. Do not let us retire. Do not let us grow comfortable. Do not let us lay our swords and shovels down until we ourselves are laid down. There is a world still to conquer and a harvest to gather before the Man comes around.

 

If you want to help us in this task, your gifts are, of course, much appreciated. But faithful brothers and sisters in arms are far more desirable than donations. Give if you feel called. But wherever you are and wherever we are—in a gym, in a body shop, in a field or in a sanctuary—stand shoulder to shoulder with us, laboring to fulfill the gospel mission given to us all so long ago.

 

We wanted to raise most of the money for this sanctuary locally, before embarking on a national campaign. And that is now the case. Our local congregation has already raised in cash and pledges 77% of the funds needed to green light this sanctuary project. That number will only be going up, and so we are now in a position to invite support from you, our brothers and sisters in arms on a national and international level—perhaps even intergalactic. 

 

If you do decide to give to our sanctuary building project, we have a thank you gift that we would like to send your way in return. Let the Stones Cry Out is a book I have written about all of this, a series of exhortations and sermons that I gave to the congregation at Christ Church.

 

From one part of the body to another, God bless you and keep you and yours as we all labor together.