 How's everybody doing this fine Michigan morning? You guys excited? Hey, I wanna tell you, I am very excited about this weekend. I've been looking forward to it for quite a while because we are launching two things this morning. Number one, we are launching a brand new series out of the book of Nehemiah. So wherever you are, if you want to, you can go ahead and turn to Nehemiah chapter one in your Bibles. If you don't know where Nehemiah is, look in the table of contents, peek over at your neighbor, use your phone or just fake it until you make it. So just get to Nehemiah. It's in the Old Testament right after Ezra. And we're gonna start there this morning in the book of Nehemiah. And for the next several weeks, we are going to be working our way through the book of Nehemiah in a series that is also the same title for a strategic vision alignment that we are entering today as a church family called Building a Radiant City. And I'm excited about this, not just because we're teaching something that I'm very passionate about, but I'm excited about what God is doing here at Radiant Church. I'm excited what he has done. I'm excited what he's doing here every single week. And I'm excited what God has in his heart for our future. And so when I use a phrase like strategic vision alignment, you could call it a vision campaign, whatever it is, we are gonna be talking about what God is speaking to us for our future. We've got some great plans that we believe that God is calling us to rise up and to build and to expand, to broaden our reach and to influence and reach more people than we've ever reached before. He's calling us to be an army that does this together. And he's calling us to do that in some very strategic, some very practical ways in order to reach more people and to, as we say, build a radiant city. And so I'm excited this morning because I'm gonna get to share with you in just a few moments in very specific terms what this vision campaign is really all about, this vision journey that we're going on. I'm gonna get to share with you what it is. I'm going to get to share with you why we're doing it and also why it's really important, why it is what it is and why that this is important and then share with you kind of nuts and bolts what I believe God is calling us to do as a body in the next three years. And so I'm gonna get to that, but before we get there this morning, look with me at Nehemiah chapter one. We're gonna read all 11 verses of chapter one as we set the stage this morning for building a radiant city. So go ahead if they put it up on the screen here. The word of Nehemiah, the son of Hakeliah, it says now it happened in the month of Kislev in the 20th year as I was in Sousa, the citadel that Hanani, one of my brothers came with certain men from Judah and asked them, and I asked them concerning the Jews who had escaped, who had survived the exile and concerning Jerusalem. And they said to me that the remnant there in the province who had survived the exiles are in great trouble and shame. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down and the gates are destroyed by fire. And as soon as I heard these words, I sat down and I wept and I mourned for days and I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven. And I said, oh Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments. Let your ear be attentive and your eyes be open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you. Day and night for the people of Israel, your servants. Confessing the sins of the people of Israel which we have sinned against you, even me and my father's house have sinned. We have acted very correctly against you and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, the rules that you have commanded, your servant Moses. Remember the word that you commanded your servant Moses saying that if you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples. But if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, though your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of the heavens, from there I will gather them and bring them to this place that I have chosen to make my name dwell there. They are your servants and your people whom you have redeemed by your great power and by your strong hand. Oh Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servants and to the prayer of your servants who delight to fear in your name and give success to your servant today and grant him mercy in the sight of this man. Last part, now I was the cup bearer to the king. So Nehemiah, for those of you who don't know the history of it, Nehemiah is a young man, he's a Jewish man who has grown up in the Persian empire. Many of you will remember that we just worked our way through the book of Daniel. Daniel was one of the exiles, one of the royal family that when Nebuchadnezzar invaded the land of Israel and of Judah, he took all the nobles captive into Babylon. They were there for 70 years and after 70 years, when Cyrus became the leader of the Medo-Persian empire, he conquered Babylon and he allowed many of the Jews to go back to the land that they had been taken captives from. Some 42,000 Jews went back to Jerusalem but the vast majority of Jews who had lived in Babylon and now Persia, they remained there. So fast forward from Daniel about 140 years and you come to the Persian empire under King Art Xerxes and a large Jewish population that still lives there and among that population is a young man named Nehemiah. Nehemiah is a young man who has kept his faith, he's still Jewish, he knows the Torah, he worships one true and living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but he has the distinctive now of working in the king's courts. It describes him in the very last part of that verse number 11 that he was the king's cup bearer. Now you might not think that that means much, it's just a guy who, what does he do? He hands the cup to the king whenever the king's thirsty but it's so much more than that. You see to be a cup bearer of the king meant that you were a highly trusted advisor because one of the ways in ancient times that you came to power was by killing whoever was king and the way that you would kill him, you wouldn't use an army because their army was too powerful. There were no elections, so you couldn't do that, you couldn't invite Russian hackers in or whatever, you know, you were thinking that you would use as a way for a coup. No, the way that you did it is you poisoned the king and the way that you poisoned almost getting access to his food and to his drink, to his wine and so what a king would do very wisely was he would appoint somebody that was very trusted, loyal to him, had high levels of integrity and you would make him your wine tester, your food tester. You called it a cup bearer. So what that looked like is when they brought your food in and set it down on your TV tray, you took your cup and you handed it to Nehemiah, you said go ahead and drink and then you waited for about a minute. How you feeling Nehemiah, feeling pretty good? All right, give me the cup back and then you drank it. You knew that if he didn't die, you didn't die. He would taste your food before you ate it to make sure that nobody was trying to knock you off and this is the role that Nehemiah carried and what most scholars believe is you weren't just a tester of food, you were one of the most trusted counselors and advisors to the king. This is who Nehemiah was. He's living in Persia. He's really for all intents and purposes, culturally Persian even though in his heart, religiously and spiritually, he's Jewish, he's never ever been to Jerusalem. He's lived in Persia his whole life but on this particular day that he describes in verse number one as it happened in the month of Kislev in the 20th year of the king. Leaders and messengers, envoys from Jerusalem one of which was his brother, Hanani who came into the king's courts to give a report of what is going on back in the land that God had promised to his people back in the city that was called the city of the great king back where they're trying to rebuild the temple that had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. They're also trying to rebuild the walls to create security around the city but they keep failing and now he gets the report as he's sitting there it's just an average day. Nehemiah is getting the report from these Jewish leaders and as he's listening to it, the very last thing that they said to Nehemiah is it said that the walls of Jerusalem are broken down and his heart became sickened spiritually because as he allowed himself to hear about the condition of Jerusalem about a city that he's never been to but a city that his heart is connected to because of God's promises as he hears about the walls being broken down he allows the walls of his own heart to be broken down. As he hears about the conditions of broken walls Nehemiah becomes a man with a broken heart and it leads him to much of the rest of the chapter which becomes a prayer of intercession. A prayer where he says I spent time before the Lord weeping, praying and fasting reminding God of his promises over the city reminding God that he had said that if we would repent he would restore us reminding God that what was happening in Jerusalem was not the final word God had spoken a final word Jerusalem will be rebuilt the temple will be restored when the temple is restored God's glory will fill the temple again the promises of God will be fulfilled the Messiah will come and all of the things that God has promised in his word are contingent upon the restoration and the rebuilding of the city and as he's heard the people are discouraged the people are frustrated the people are downtrodden they've given up hope because they keep trying to rebuild the walls but their enemy comes in and stops them intimidates them they've not been able to do what they had attempted to do. And what's interesting we'll read the rest of the book we'll go through it over the next month but let me just kind of give you a sneak peek of where we're going. Nehemiah allows his heart to be moved he asks for favor of the king he goes back to Judea and he rallies the people of God in a way that they had never been able to be rallied before to do the impossible they rebuild the walls of Jerusalem in 52 days. It's a miracle. 52 days they were able to do what in 140 years they were unable to do. What was the difference? How were they able to rebuild the walls creating security in the city? How were they able to restore their families? Restore their fortunes? How were they able to complete and refurbish the temple that God's presence would dwell in so that men and priests like Ezra were able to proclaim the word of God and call people back to faith again? How were they able to do it? Well they were able to do it because God sent a comforter. It's interesting that the name Nehemiah actually means that the Lord comforts or it means the comforter of the Lord. Nehemiah is a picture of believers who are filled with the Holy Spirit who get a vision from God about seeing God reverse what darkness has done in a city and bring comfort, bring hope and restoration to a place that has become desolate. God raised up a leader like Nehemiah who would go back and who would risk everything who would give up comforts who would give up position who would give up status in order to put himself in a place where he could become a restorer and a rebuilder. Literally we need to recognize this that Nehemiah was changed by what he heard. And because Nehemiah was changed by what he heard, the city was changed by what Nehemiah did with what he was hearing. When Nehemiah heard what was going on Jerusalem, it moved him. How many know that we hear all kinds of stuff? I mean, we are living in a communication era where we are inundated with information, sight and sound over and over and over and over and over and over again. From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, all you spend your time doing is taking in information. And you know what that does? It creates a certain degree of callousness in our hearts because you can't possibly deal with everything that you hear. Think about what your life would be like if you gave all of your time and all of your attention to every problem you became aware of every single day, of every crisis that you came across on Facebook, of every prayer challenge, of every political initiative, of everything. There's not enough time in the world. So what do we do in response to that? We create walls, we build walls, we build filters because if it's not affecting me, then it can't be important. And so we learn how to build walls. Here's what I think is so powerful about Nehemiah. Nehemiah heard about a city that he had never seen but he knew that there was great promise related to it and he allowed it to change him. He allowed himself to be moved and based on how he was moved, Nehemiah became changed and also became a change agent. He became a catalytic leader that God used who said, I'm willing to step outside of my comfort zone. You know, we all love comfort. Today when you go home, most of you are going to find the most comfortable chair in your house. I don't know what that looks like for you but we've got a sectional in our living room and Jane and I have our spots, so do our dogs. Our dogs, it's like how in the world did our dogs get on the couch in the first place? Some of you are very disciplined where your animals aren't allowed and we're way past that. Our dogs, like my dog will come and I'm laying in his spot, he'll come and stand there and look at me like, are you gonna move? First world probes where our dogs have couches. Most of us are not gonna go home and go, okay, let me find the most uncomfortable chair that I can find, one of those wooden dinner table chairs, you know, that you sit and your back is perfectly straight. Nobody's gonna sit there. We naturally are magnetically drawn to comfort. Do you know that that's true spiritually as well? We're drawn to comfort. But let me tell you something this morning that I know is positively absolutely true. That comfort is never the environment of change. If change is ever gonna happen, we have to be willing to give up comfort in order to become agents of change. If you're ever gonna get in shape, you can't get comfortable. No world changer, no history maker has ever been described as a person that loved comfort, including Nehemiah. Nehemiah did not gravitate towards comfort. He allowed God to move his heart. He allowed what was going on in his heart to change him and he became somebody who God used miraculously, supernaturally beyond what they thought was possible. Literally, he became a builder. And you see, when it comes to the story of Nehemiah, what you're gonna discover is that there's a choice for us to make, it's a choice that Nehemiah made and the reason that we know who he is today is because he chose wisely. We have a choice that we can either be spectators in life or we can become builders in life. Nehemiah is an example of someone who said, I'm gonna become a builder, I'm gonna leverage everything I have, all of my influence, I'm gonna pray, I'm gonna fast because I've seen what can be. I know it should be, but I'm gonna live my life to see, come to pass what must be. You see, a spectator is somebody who, if they'll put the definition, who observes what happens today with little hope of seeing what should be tomorrow. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see what's wrong with the world, right? We see it on Twitter, everybody's a spectator. Everybody, it's like in 140 characters, describe what's wrong with the world, that's Twitter. But that's a spectator's fork. It's like, well, this should not be or that's wrong or that's not how things used to be. You're probably accurate, Captain Obvious, but that's not what we need right now. We don't need somebody saying, well, our kids are under attack. Yeah, thank you, it's true. We've got racial divides in this country that need to be healed. Thank you, absolutely. More and more people are describing themselves as no longer a part of the Christian faith. Well, that's a reality, or maybe it's just a polarization to where real disciples are being defined by real faith and those who have just jumped on the cultural train and it was popular to be a Christian are now being polarized away from that. Whatever it is, we're describing that. But there's a difference between being a spectator, which means I see what is, but I don't have a whole lot of hope for tomorrow. There's a whole lot of difference between a spectator and a builder, because here's what a builder does. A builder leverages what they have today so that they can see what must be tomorrow. And that's what Nehemiah did. In the history of Radiant Church, there have been a handful of very significant pivotal moments in time that have shaped and changed the trajectory and literally the destiny of who we are. Just a handful of them. You see in the Bible, there are two different words that are used for time or for moments. One is chronos, which means the normal outworking of time, just day to day, 24 hours. Then there's another word is chyros. Chyros is a word that means a divine moment. And when I say that there have been pivotal moments, I'm talking about divine moments where God has spoken to us as a church and said it's time to rise up and build. It's time to step out in faith and do something significant to expand your reach and your influence to reach more and more people. One of those pivotal moments is this picture here. This is our very first Sunday as a church. This is the first Sunday, notice the Wingdinger, the shirt and tie there. It's the last time I ever wore a shirt and tie, I think. Jane right there, some friends of ours. These were builders. These were people who, when God spoke to Jane and I to leave the comfort of Grand Rapids, which was our hometown, we were on staff at a mega church there. It was 25 years old, had a large platform opportunity. When God spoke to us about moving to Southwest Michigan to plant a praying and a worshiping church that would reach a generation. It took a lot of faith for us to be willing to lay some things down, but God had moved our hearts. He had changed us by what he had spoken to us and what we had heard and it was out of what he has spoken to us that we got some people to join in with us. We came down, we rented the Goliath Community High School on September 8th, 1996. We rented the cafeteria, which was referred to, the door had a sign over it, it said, welcome to the Devil's Den, which is a great place to start a church. And on this particular Sunday, it was a pivotal moment because we leveraged everything that we had, some friends leveraged everything that they had and we set up in a cafeteria and we had our first church service. 72 people came to church that Sunday. The next week we had a Gideon's Revival, which is a reverse revival. We grew from 72 to 50. And it was that core group of 50 people that have been worshiping every Sunday, now known as Radiant Church. I'm so grateful for these agents of change. I'm so grateful for the people who came along, people like Dick and Nancy Wright, people like Mike and Jenny Popenhagen, Ann and Randy Betts, several others that I could name Scotland Sweezy, who said yes, who started worshiping. This was a pivotal moment. How about this one? This is another chai roast moment. This is our first service in our sanctuary on this property. This is April 27th, 1998. Through a series of miracles, a church that had owned this 20 acres property that we are on right now and had built a pole construction sanctuary, went through a series of church splits, leadership crisis. Their board approached us and said, we wanna sell our building to you. You guys are meeting in the gym. We can't afford it. Would you buy us? They started at a million. They worked their way down to 630,000, which didn't mean anything because we had a hundred people, including pregnant ladies twice. We had $5,000 in the bank. We were a year and a half old. No banks in the world would talk to us, but God said I'm gonna make a way. I went out to lunch with a banker who said I've never done this in all of my years of being a VP, but I'm going to stamp my approval on your loan. I'll give you $500,000. And if you need more, let me know. All you have to do is over the next six weeks raise $22,000. I came back to our hundred people huddled in our little cafeteria and I said we need to raise $22,000. People sold cars. People had bake sales, garage sales. They forgone their vacations. And on a Sunday, the Sunday before this Sunday, we took an offering in church and needed to raise $22,000 some odd dollars and we raised $100 more than we needed. We closed on Tuesday. Praise God. We closed on Tuesday. This was Sunday and we praised God like you can't believe. On Thursday, we cleaned the whole building. We had 30 extra people show up to church. We thought we had revival. But it was because we were willing to take a risk to build an environment for people to experience and encounter the living God. One of our next pivotal Kairos moments was September 8th, 10 years. Our 10-year anniversary was our first service in this Richland sanctuary. You see in 2005, we recognized that we were running out of room. In the old, what's now the Student Ministry Center, we were running three, sometimes four services in there, about 800 people. We just didn't have any room anymore. And we were trying to figure out what we were gonna do and so we heard God say it's time to build a bigger sanctuary. Almost did not build it because of the economy. The Lord gave us a word, said the harvest is coming, prepare at the storehouse. So we built it. A year later, it would have cost us 40% more because the price of steel went up. But we responded to what God said to do and we built the sanctuary. We invited our entire church onto a spiritual journey called chapter two. We said, church, it's time for us to rise up and build. It's time for us above and beyond our regular ties and giving to sacrificially give to this vision, this alignment, so that other people who are not now a part of radiant church, who are not now a part of the kingdom of God, who right now are far away from Christ will have a seat when they come to church to experience the presence of God. And you know what we did? We rose up in 36 months. We made a commitment to raise, I think it was $1.5 million and we built this current sanctuary. And this is the first Sunday, September 8th, 2006. We moved into the sanctuary and had 1,300 people that joined us on that Sunday. Now I wanna do something right now, wherever you're at. If you started coming to church after 2006 at radiant church, I want you to raise your hand. I want you to look all over the room. I want you to put your hands down for a moment. If the people who built this sanctuary had not responded in faith to the command and the call of God to build, there would not have been a seat for you. They would have been comfortable, they had chairs. There would not have been a place for you. Since we moved into this sanctuary, 8,000 people have received Christ in this room. This was a Cairo's moment. Let me share with you one more Cairo's moment, Portage. 2009, God spoke to me and he said, Lee, future strategy of radiant church is not just building a bigger building on one location, it's having multiple locations across the county so that you can reach people in their own community so that they can go to youth group and kids church with kids that they go to school with so that people can be no further than 10 minutes away from a radiant campus wherever they are so that you can literally surround the city like gates of a city wall, just like Nehemiah. And you can build a structure in a framework and not just one location, but a multiple locations. And in 2009, we knew that that was our strategy. God had spoken to us about our first campus. He said, I want you to go to the west side, I want you to go to Portage. We tried in 2009, we went to Moors Bridge Elementary, we did it for six months, it grew a little bit, but we realized we weren't ready, so we backed off, consolidated everybody back and we said we're still gonna go to the other side. In September, 2017, I was casting vision in September about what God was calling us to do and I almost did not say anything about the west side campus because to be honest, I've said it so many times, I didn't have anything new to report, I felt like people were just gonna think, hey, whatever, that's never gonna happen. But God said, write the vision, make it plain. So I did it anyways and unbeknownst to me, on the other side of town, there was a church in crisis. Its elders were watching our service and heard me say, God's gonna take us to the other side, he's gonna open up a building, he's gonna make a way. Well, they reached out to us and said, we heard your message and here's the situation. We have a building, but no leader. You have leaders, but no building. Well, you adopt us and we said, yes, we'll bring you in. And through a series of miracles, Portage came in, we did a $2 million renovation of that building. We had people in our city, people outside of our city who said, hey, video campus is not gonna work in Kalamazoo. And Kalamazoo, Michigan, it just doesn't work. You guys are, you're wasting all your money, you're taking too big of a step. And I said, well, God has spoken to us. On Easter Sunday, 2017, we moved into it and we had 2,300 people show up at our Portage campus. Between Richland and Portage, Portage is actually the faster growing campus. Come on, Richland, get in gear. This was a pivotal moment for us. Today, right now, you can't see it, but Portage, we know you're there. What we would say to all of our radiant church family, either online here or at Portage, raise your hand if you started coming to radiant after the Portage campus launched. And what I will tell you here in Richland is there's about 1,300 people in the last three years that have discovered Christ, found a home and a community in our part of the radiant church family. Come on, can we just put our hands together for all of Portage? So building a radiant city, here's what I wanna say to you and I want you to listen to me. I feel this with all the weight that I can. Radiant church, we are once again at one of those pivotal kairos moments in time. This is a divine moment. You're in it. Just like Nehemiah said, it came to pass or that it happened, it just happened. It seems like a normal season of life, but I want you to know in the spirit this is one of those kairos moments. God is calling us once again. Take a big step of faith as a people. And we're calling that step, that vision, building a radiant city. It's time for us to rise up and build once again. Here's what we're facing. Our attendance growth since 2007 shows you our attendance growth. 3,400 people is our average. That was last year, we're already surpassing that. On Easter last year, we had over 7,000 people. This Easter between both campuses, we will have 10 Easter services and over 8,000 to 9,000 people in church. Easter is not a whole bunch of guests. It's when the whole family shows up. It's when people say, well, Jesus got up, I guess I can too. And go to church. So that's our attendance. Here's our salvation rates. Look at 2007, 71. In 2019, almost 2,000 people received Christ. We've got growth things that are going on. God is moving in radiant church in a powerful, powerful way. It's important that we recognize that it's time for us to build. And what we are calling our entire church to is a 36 month campaign. Over the next month, we're gonna be going on a journey together. We're gonna be praying together. We're gonna be listening together. We're gonna be looking in the scriptures together. And we're gonna be aligning our hearts around this vision called building a radiant city. And the radiant city vision, what we believe God's calling this to has three legs to it, three phases. Phase number one is we are going to complete our downtown city center that we have acquired on the Mall in Kalamazoo. It started with us buying the second floor so that we could have a prayer room. And we love the prayer room. This is what it's gonna look like. There will probably be aisles, so it's easy to get in so we don't have to air drop you from the top there. But right now it's under construction and we're gonna finish it up. By the middle of April, we are gonna have all of our prayer meetings happening downtown three times a day, lifting up the name of Jesus from the heart of this city. It shall come to pass. It's happening right now. But after we got into the second floor with the recording studio and some office space, then without realtors, without anything happening, the main floor owners of Monge kitchen came to us and said, would you like to buy us out? And we said, let us think about it. I had already been prayer walking it, praying an Italian, Lord, give us this land. We bought it on pennies on a dollar and when the city, when it went public and everybody found out about it, the realtors knew that they didn't know anything about it. Developers didn't know anything about it. I'm sure that they were all shocked and surprised but heaven was not. God had prepared it for us. We have three levels now. The lower level, we have the main floor and the top level. We have almost 25,000 square foot of space on the downtown mall with a great big, radiant sunburst on the outside. We believe it's strategic from the heart of the city, a mission base, a city center that lifts up the name of Jesus and here's what it's gonna do for us. We're gonna finish it. It's gonna have a 240 seat prayer room during the week. On the weekends, it is going to be a radiant campus, our third campus in the heart of Kalamazoo that reaches city dwellers, people in downtown and western and K college students who will be able to walk right to campus and be a part of a small venue, a small community. It's gonna be multi-use. We're gonna put our offices there, recording studio there. We're gonna open up a coffee shop on the main floor. Somebody said, I don't get the connection with a coffee shop. Well, number one, Jesus loves coffee. So do I, but we need to understand that coffee shops in our culture are the modern day wells that people gather around where conversations happen, meetings happen, first dates happen, small groups happen. We wanna create a front porch for radiant church right in the heart of our city that people can go and experience, have conversations. Our people who are gonna work there are gonna be trained and equipped to be able to start Jesus in the Samaritan woman type of conversations and minister to people. They will be 20 foot as the bird flies from a prayer meeting that is happening and the presence of God is gonna permeate that coffee shop. It's gonna be a powerful, powerful thing. We're also gonna be putting our RSW and RSM students down there. RSW is Radiant School of Worship. RSM is what we are launching this fall in September. We are proud to announce we are starting Radiant School of Ministry for people that feel called, young people from all over this generation in the nation and the nations who feel called to prepare to be trailblazers, revivalist, church planners, missionaries, and marketplace ministers. Here's what I wanna say to all of you that are watching me. You might think of yourself like, Nehemiah, I've got a job, I'm just a cup bearer, but God wants to use you as an agent of change. Part of the Radiant School of Ministry is gonna be a full-time track. Part of it's gonna be a part-time track in the evening for people with jobs who will be able to grow and understand scripture, prayer, ministry, theology and culture and missions. And you'll be able to participate in that. That's gonna be housed down there. And then in the lower level, some Radiant Kids Space as well as a wide-open class type space and staging for local outreaches. So all of that is going to cost us $2 million to finish that downtown building. That's phase one. Phase two is what we're calling the Richland and the Portage Campus Optimizations. What does that mean? It means this campus in Richland is almost 14 years old and it needs some TLC and some updating. And so we wanna make sure that we steward what God has already given to us and we maximize it to its full potential. One of the major areas that we wanna do is we want to recalibrate our children's space to be engaging, to be entertaining, to be secure and safe so that we can raise up next generation to love Jesus from birth all the way to maturity. Think about our kids' areas looking something like this. So that our kids when they come to church are not just being discipled, but they're fully engaged. Some of the other things that we need to do at Richland is we wanna reduce them. We have to paint everything like in a lobby and just freshen that up. Sanctuary 2.0, we're gonna, those big sound boots in the back of Richland campus here that have formed a wall. We're taking those out. We'll be able to add 100 more seats in this room. And that is gonna help us drastically. And we're also gonna redo the carpet. I know you all love this carpet decorated in coffee stains, but it's time for us to redo it. If you got down on your hands and knees and sucked that carpet in prayer for any length of time, you would taste really stale coffee. And it's time for us to redo that. We need to update our parking lot. Our parking lot has some potholes. We need to expand some of our parking lot so we can add more spots. We need to reduce some areas. We need to put a roof on the Student Ministry Center, match up the siding, just some things here at Richland. And then also at Portage, at phase two at Portage Optimization, we want to create the same kids space experience over there as we wanna do here. So when we took that campus, the one thing that we did not update was the kids space. We weren't able to do that. Well, we need to go back and we need to do that. Portage has almost as many kids ministry as we have here at Richland. And that space just needs to be optimized. Listen, how many know that if we don't reach our kids today, we're gonna have a hard time reaching them when they're adults? David said, how does a young man keep his heart pure before God? It's by getting the word of God into his heart. We wanna partner with parents on a whole new level in the next decade to help you make radiant disciples of your kids. And we want church to not be a drag. We want church to be a place where kids wake you up on Sunday mornings or Saturday afternoons and say, I wanna go to church. So we want that place to be engaging. And then on the exterior of Portage, we wanna build a community engagement piece. Here's what that is. We wanna put a big playground out there for kids when they come to church and for the neighbors in the community that when they think of radiant church, they don't think of it as a traffic problem. They think of it as a park that they can go to and their kids can play and be engaged. And also it sets us up really well for the future when we launch radiant preschools at both of our campuses. So stay tuned. So that's phase two, Richland and Portage Optimization. That also is $2 million. Phase three is this. Are you ready? Plainwell Otsego campus coming in the fall of 2022 if everything goes well. Come on somebody. Plainwell Otsego campus. We have somewhere between five and 600 people from Plainwell, Martin, Shelbyville, Otsego, Allagan that attend our Richland campus. And so we look at that and we say, you know what? A lot of people from Plainwell, Otsego will drive to Richland but I'll tell you who won't, Allagan won't. Dor and Hopkins won't. South of Grand Rapids won't necessarily even though we have people from GR. By strategically going to Plainwell and Otsego, we are going to be able to draw Allagan, Goebbels smaller communities, Martin, Shelbyville, as well as Dor, Hopkins, Wayland, and even 84th Street, 76th Street off of 131, which is only a 20 minute shot. And we are able to move about 500 people over to that campus if all goes well. And that actually opens up seats here at our Richland campus. And so in the future, what that gives us the ability to do with all three of these, with Richland, with Portage, with a microsite downtown and with Otsego Plainwell, it enables us over the next several years to reach on an average weekend 10,000 people worshiping together under one Lord and under one vision and under one banner building a radiant city. This is maybe what it will look like. Who knows, it might, that's the artist rendition but what we're talking over there is five to 600 seat sanctuary, 25 to 30,000 square foot. It'll cost us $6 million to build it and we're hoping to raise 50% of that before we ever start, which financially positions us very, very well without huge debt loads. And if we reach more than our goal over the next three years, then maybe we can pay cash for that thing and have it paid for by the time we move in and reach thousands of people in that community. All three of these phases together are gonna cost us $7 million over 36 months. That is what this vision journey that we're going on is all about. It's about, okay, Lord, I wanna build a radiant city. This is a chai-ros moment. You're calling us to something very significant. And we're asking everybody over the next several weeks to do three things. Number one, we're asking you to join the prayer journey, which means pray with us. Just like Nehemiah did, pray. Second thing that we're asking everybody to do is listen for God's voice about what he would speak to you and your family about the part you will play in sacrificial giving to make this happen. Jane and I have already heard from God. We know exactly what we're gonna be doing. Several of our leaders are already on this journey. We've cast this vision to those who are leaders at both of our campuses and there is such momentum, such prayer that's going on. We want you to join this prayer journey and begin now to be asking God, God, what are you calling me to do? I don't want us to be a church of spectators. I want us to be a church of builders. And then when, at the end of this journey, in about five weeks, when we get together and we bring our commitments before the Lord and we say, God, this is what I'm believing that you're calling me to do in order to build our radiant city. And over the next 36 months, above and beyond my ties, I'm gonna give this amount, we're gonna give this amount sacrificially. We're gonna ask you to obediently give sacrificially. Your sacrifice will look different than somebody else's. Some people, $1,000 is very sacrificial. For some people, a million dollars is sacrificial. We're not asking for equal giving or asking for equal sacrifice. And I will never tell you what to give. That's not my job, it's his job. Here's what I'm gonna ask you to do. I want everybody to stand up with me, if you would, both campuses. I'm gonna ask you to right now not just say, okay, I think I can give this. Don't lean on your own understanding and all your ways, acknowledge him. He will direct your paths. I'm gonna ask you to go on a journey. Nehemiah went on a journey to Jerusalem to a city he'd never been in. He inspected it. He heard from God, he got a vision. And then he presented it to the people of God that had been discouraged, that had been exiled, and he said, this is what God's calling us to do. And in Nehemiah chapter two, verse 19, the people responded, the favor of the Lord is on us. Let us rise up and let us build. Over the next few weeks, we're gonna be digging deeper into the why of this. Today is informational. Next few weeks is gonna be a journey where we pray, we look, and I'm gonna ask you, let what you hear, let what you pray begin to change you so that God can use you to change our city. I wanna pray and I'm gonna invite the campus pastors to come. Lord, today, would you speak to us? Unite our hearts, align us around your vision, not my vision. We're not building a radiant city so our brand is everywhere. We're building a city that is radiant with the knowledge of Jesus Christ. We want your glory to fill this place. We want your glory to unite us. Jesus, I pray that as we go on this journey together, you speak to each and every one of our hearts about the part that we play in building a radiant city in Jesus' name, amen.