This post is about The Orchard Church moving from Portable to Permanent. For more details, see my video explanations, and hear my podcast about it from Sunday.
I’m sure you know that The Orchard Church is trying to raise $90,000 in just 90 days. We are doing so through one-time gifts and 3-month pledges. I hope you have already been praying about how you will contribute.
Sunday is pledge day, and everyone is eager to see how we all respond. My Lifegroup was all buzzing about this tonight, and they asked some good questions that I thought you might be asking, as well….
How/When will we know pledge & giving results?
On Sunday, we will have our “pledge response” as part of our worship service. This will happen earlier in the hour so we will have time to tally those with online pledges and gifts. You can help us out a lot by submitting your pledge or your gift online prior to Sunday. The results will be announced toward the end of the Sunday morning service. We hope to have a really good idea about our total amount by the response we see on Sunday morning.
What about other fundraising ideas?
(Will we need other ideas?) We are open to any good ideas at this time. Not sure exactly how we will implement, since this is such a short-term thing. There are already several good ideas out there.. Car wash, group garage sale (those seem to be popular options in our area)
My favorite so far is to have a silent auction/dinner where we can not only auction off valuable items, but we can have a raffle for a nice firearm. (If we raffled an AR15 or something along those lines, I’m sure we would be able to bring in lots of money!
Why haven’t we already put a contract down?
As far as our board And partners go, we are ready! We have met with an attorney, and we think everything is looking very positive. This deal is just plain extraordinary.
The problem is, we have to put a big ol’ chunk of cash up front. (Our realtor says $10,000.) We don’t want to put that kind of money on the table till pledges come in, and we see where we’ll land in December. Once we are confident that we will be able to come up with the ash, we will proceed immediately.
Do we have some kind of right of refusal?
Nope. Since we have no contract, we have nothing like this.
They are still showing the property to other groups. In fact, just this week another organization was shown around the property. We don’t know if they are interested or not at this point. Yes, it is possible that another individual or group could swoop right in and snatch it right out from under us. It is a REALLY REALLY good deal, so we should be ready, and we should move as quickly as possible.
How much prayer has been put into this?
That is a really good question… Our elders have been in prayer about this for over a year. We asked our VIPs and partners to spend last week praying and fasting about our response. How much prayer have you invested into this?
If the pledges come in on target, when will we get the keys?
We are pledging to respond within 90 days. As quickly as we can, we will propose a 90-day contract to hold the property, and to give us the time to get the cash in hand. If accepted, that would put our closing date somewhere in the middle/end of December. I can see us meeting up there on that hill the first week in January!
Do you have other questions? I would love to answer them. Hit me up on my email, or in the comment section.