Welcome to the Charage(Church + garage) ! plus, we need plane
The past few months have been busy, chaotic and full of change. At the end of May, the Upper Mid West experience a week long rainstorm that brought catastrophic flooding across the region. Our home managed to escape the flooding by a mere 1/4 mile. For almost a week, we couldn’t cross the Vermillion River to get to Sioux Falls without driving 20 miles north to a safe crossing. Unfortunately, our church building flooded and suffered damage. The mold in the walls was extensive enough to evacuate the building. Since the landlord decided not to remediate the mold or repair the damage, we ended our lease and have been without a building ever since.
We were already in search of a bigger building, so this situation led us to reconsider several properties. However, none of the other available building fit into our budget or building codes. We held several services at a local event hall we rented for $100 per hour; we used the local Community Hall for a Sunday service and meal; we even used a conference room at a small library in Sioux Falls. After about 8 weeks of jumping around and having service somewhere different each week, our congregation came together and decided to use a garage at our house for a more permanent, but still temporary meeting place.
The garage is a 3 stall garage, but is the size of a 4.5 or 5 stall garage. It has several large windows, two walk through doors, and a fresh concrete pad where the building was relocated back in March of this year. We spent a week pressure washing the building, painting the walls, putting up some trim, and setting up equipment. Thankfully, our entire church setup is fairly mobile and was easy to take out of storage, load into a trailer, and set up in the new garage location. You can see some photos of the process and photos of our congregation in the new church on Facebook.
We we able to install several mini split air conditioner units, and we have a wood burning furnace that we can duct into the building if we are still meeting here come winter time.
Currently we have 54 padded chairs, a pulpit, two altars, a piano and full sound system set up! And we have space for additional chairs to expand to around 80 seats. We already had several services and several fellowship meals in the building! Since our house has 4 bathrooms, we are able to accommodate everyone’s needs, and we even converted our library into a nursery. I truly believe the Lord lined all this up months ago when we moved into this new house.
In addition to all the chaos and changes over the past few months, I’ve also begun taking flight lessons to earn my pilot’s license. My goal is to get my license this year and purchase a used plane. With all the small town scattered across South Dakota, my hope is to use a plane ministry to reach more and preach more! Imagine a Sunday where I preach our morning services here in Parker, eat a quick lunch, then fly a quick 45 minutes flight to Omaha, Nebraska or Pierre, SD, or halfway into Iowa or Minnesota. I could begin a Bible study or preach an entire service and fly back home all in a days work and savings hours and hours of time spent on the road.
Our plane ministry will consist of surveying new towns to begin outreach in, transporting goods and preachers around the upper midwest, assisting other missionaries with any needs, and generally giving us the ability to reach further into the upper midwest. Eventually we hope to offer pilot trainmen to other preachers and missionaries. I am excited to see where the Lord leads us with this new ministry. Please be in prayer with us over this exciting new opportunity!
