Imagine a place.

Imagine a place where people of all ages fellowship and share stories over a cup of coffee or a latte.  Imagine a place where children can experience the God given gift of play together; where they run and laugh and smile.  Imagine a place where senior adults can exercise their bodies on a walking track and their creativity in a crafts event.  Imagine a place where adults can stay healthy through exercise and play sports together.  Imagine a place where families can spend time together with other families doing things they love.  Imagine a place where concerts ring out.  Imagine a place where great dinners are savored and memories are shared.  Imagine a place where praises are raised to God in worship every Sunday morning.  Imagine a place where there is room for everyone to fellowship together in a common space after the services.  Imagine a place where people from the community can come to feel loved and important.  Imagine a place where God is the center of all of these events.  Imagine a place where a church is drawn deeper into fellowship with its members and the community is positively impacted.  Imagine a place.

For the last few years you have been asked to imagine a place.  This place is the Community Life Center.  It will be an incredible new part of Bonsack Baptist Church.  It will allow us to grow and expand current ministries while opening new and exciting avenues for ministry and worship.  The imaginings in the previous paragraph are just some of the myriad of possibilities that will be open to us when the CLC comes online.  As that day approaches I wanted to take a moment to share some of the larger mission and vision of the CLC.  The vision is, “At the Bonsack Baptist Church Community Life Center we want to bring the people of the Roanoke Valley into an authentic, growing relationship with Jesus Christ and allow people to experience God in a variety of ways.”  What that means is that we want all of the people in our area to be able to know what it means to be a disciple of Christ; older people, younger people, church people, non-church people.  We want all of them to be able to experience what it means to be loved by the Creator and to grow in that relationship.  The mission is, “The Community Life Center is a resource for building Christian Community through worship, fellowship, recreation, and education with the goal of enabling Bonsack Baptist Church to better fulfill its mission of ‘sharing Christ and building believers.’”  The mission brings the vision to life.  The CLC and its ministries are to be a resource for the greater mission and vision of the church.  It will be through worship, fellowship, recreation, and education that the people of our congregation and our community will grow together and grow towards Christ.

For this to happen it we will need the church to embrace the vision and the mission.  I am confident from the nearly three months that I have been living and serving among you that you will.  This church has a great heart and a great passion for ministry.  I look forward to seeing what we can do together with our great new resource.  As completion draws nearer to completion I want you to imagine not just a place, but your place.  In the coming weeks this blog will contain descriptions of the various areas of the CLC as well as what those areas will potentially be used for and what ministries may be embodied in the spaces of the CLC.  The CLC will be a place for all of us so I want you to imagine your place in it.