Building a Youth Building
Our Student Ministry involves hundreds of youth in impactful weekly programming of Sunday morning small groups and Wednesday night youth worship services. We have one of the largest and most successful student ministries in the country. This summer, over 1200 youth and adult volunteers went to camp, and, among all 42,000 Southern Baptist churches, we baptized the sixth most students of any church. God is certainly blessing!
The issue is space to keep reaching more students. As far as small groups go, we have been using facilities at Beech High School for almost 6 years. Growth has continued despite the hurdle of asking youth to go back to a school for a sixth day each week! As many as 800 middle school and high school students are on the Hendersonville campus in youth worship services every week.
We have no room for growth.
From the sketch below, you can see the design of the building we are proposing. Both sides contain a multi-purpose space that can be set up for over 500 in small groups (using tables), and over 1,000 in a worship service. A creative lobby will be in front.
Our research shows that a large metal building would be even less expensive than two more domes. We would take down the existing domes we have and repackage them for future use, possibly at one of Long Hollow’s satellite campuses. We hope that we can raise over $2,000,000 through The Crazy Love Campaign for this project. Although the total cost of the building could be $5,000,000 (including furniture, fixtures and equipment) we have made the decision not to borrow more than $3,027,000 if that is necessary to complete the project. Depending on giving, we hope to be able to begin construction in June 2010 and bring our students back on campus to a new building soon after!
54% of all funds given by the Hendersonville Campus to Offering #4 will be given to the Youth Building.