The Baby is Almost Here

Some of you know what it's like to wait 9-months for your first baby. You watch it grow, you prepare the room, you tell all your friends, and you make some significant changes in your life to prepare for the birth. We've been doing that at Granger for more than two years--and the baby is almost here. In fact, planning for this baby has been our number one focus for the past 12-months. We are just a few weeks away, and I am so ready for this baby to be born!

• 2009 - we right-sized our staff to fit the realities of the economy; we reconfigured our Senior Team adding three new leaders; we began to find traction and unity in a shifting view of our future as a church.
• Jan 2010 - we reaffirmed many of our values and tweaked some others. Without a foundation of core values that we all believed in, we knew everything else would be futile.
• Mar 2010 - we went to every group and team in the church and asked for feedback on one key question: "When you dream of the church you would want to give your life to in five or ten years--what does that church look like?"
• May 2010 - we took an entire weekend and asked the same question of our congregation: "As you think five years down the road, what is your dream for your church?"
• Jun 2010 - we went to our community (people who didn't currently attend our church or any other church) and asked a similar question, "If this community was everything you dreamed five years from now, what would that look like?"
• Jul 2010 - we sorted and organized the dreams from thousands of people in our congregation and community--merged these with the dreams of our leadership team, and began to draft a vision of Granger Community Church in the year 2016.
• Sep 2010 - we published the first draft of the Vision, and began to disperse this through the same groups and teams who had helped us brainstorm six months earlier. We asked, "What makes your heart beat fast? What parts of this vision make you say 'Yes!' and what parts make you say 'Huh?'"
• Nov 2010 - after gathering more than 41 pages of feedback on the new draft, we re-wrote the vision. This time it was three-pages instead of nine-pages. We sent this new version back out to scores of leaders and teams asking for more feedback.
• Today - we now have more than 33-pages of feedback on the second version, and we are feverishly finalizing the vision.

The baby is almost here. Two weeks from now, we will finalize the vision during our senior team retreat. We will come back, present it to our core leaders, and then in February to the entire church.

As big a change as a new baby is for a young married couple--this new vision will significantly shape us for years to come. More on this in the coming weeks.