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Statement of Vision

Evergreen Church : Growing Together… Building in Faith

Statement of Vision

September 11, 2004

Who we are:
Evergreen United Methodist Church is a four-year old work of God – a Christ-centered family of people following Jesus, enjoying God’s grace, and seeking to glorify God in this world. We are vitalized by our relationship with our loving, holy God, and committed to the mission and vision God has given us:

• Our Mission: To know the Lord and make Him known.
• Our Vision: To experience God through authentic Christ-centered fellowship and study of His Word, so as to grow in our desire to exalt God in heartfelt worship and to extend His offer of personal relationship to those who don’t know Him.

We are a church looking to build a home:
We need a place where people are welcome to come as they are into the house of the Lord, and by God’s grace have their lives transformed. We have tasted and seen the goodness and power of God’s transforming grace in people’s lives already (as perhaps you have experienced in your own life and can certainly see in the lives of others who are and have been part of Evergreen). We are excited to see that work continue and expand. We want to project to those inside and especially outside the church some of the blessings of following Christ: a sense of welcome, stability, permanence, and life-enriching community. We are eagerly looking forward to rededicating ministry energy currently given to weekly set-up and take-down to direct life- and faith-building missions. With a building devoted to experiencing God, exalting God and extending God to others, many dreams and possibilities open up – beyond all that we can currently imagine!

Why build?
In short, so we can be faithful to the above mission and vision. This includes:

• To provide a full-time visible, physical presence – an inviting beacon for the tens of thousands of God’s children who currently live in this area and for the hundreds of thousands who will arrive in this and subsequent generations.
• To be able to exalt God in a space fully dedicated to Him.
• To open up opportunities for fellowship, outreach, compassion and Christian education ministries that can be offered at any time during the week.
• We have been blessed by God and favored by government, but our use of the school is at the discretion of elected officials; and the reality is, though we tend to take it for granted, we do not have a right to long-term use of the school.

What we are planning to do:
First, we need to be faithful to the ministry God has already entrusted to us. Our ministry budget for 2004 is $172,000, and we need to fully provide for ministry growth (and thus budget growth) through our tithes and offerings for the years to come.

In addition, we plan to build, by God’s grace and provision, a first-phase building. We envision:

• Multi-Purpose Space designed for worship and fellowship (for 300 people)
• Classroom and Education Space (6 to12 classrooms for multi-use)
• Office & Greeting Area
• Estimated Total Cost: $1.5 to $2.5 million

This is a very rough estimate of the total cost of the project. What we are able to include in this phase (overall size, appearance and amenities such as a kitchen, children’s play areas, etc…) is contingent on the amount of money raised.

How we plan to do it:
God has provided through your faithfulness, and that of thousands of United Methodist Christians throughout Virginia, several important assets:

• Beautiful 18+ acre site in a great ministry location, that has been fully paid for
• $150,000 granted to Evergreen Church from the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church
• $100,000 of savings from the first years of Evergreen’s life. (We have begun to spend this on architectural work and other building-related expenses.)

We have contracted a church architecture firm, a land-use attorney, and a civil engineer who are currently working on the preliminary drawings and reports needed to obtain county zoning approval to construct a church building on our land. The work they are doing now, including initial sketches and floor plans, will be useful to us whenever we begin to build.

We have also obtained the services of Cargill Associates, a national stewardship and consulting firm, to lead us in a capital campaign this fall.

This is a rare, once-in-a-lifetime honor to be part of the birth of a church – to build and leave a God-glorifying legacy for generations to come.

With a building devoted to experiencing God, exalting God and extending God to others , many dreams and possibilities open up – beyond all that we can currently imagine!