Memoirs of Faith
Memoirs of Faith is a series of
events that have become the spiritual building blocks of Vineyard
Boise. As we continue to move forward, we must also look back and
remember our miraculous history. God is faithfully building our
church!
Vision is a picture of
something that could
happen. It begins in someone’s imagination and only becomes reality as
people begin to treat it as though it were real. Vision moves from
thoughts to words, and from words to plans, and from plans into action.
Real visionaries love
to dream. They want to live their lives outside of the boundaries of
status quo. They are restless when things become stagnant and find no
comfort in a life without challenges and change.
God is a visionary!
When He is the one doing the dreaming it often looks larger than what we
humanly think is possible. It takes faith not to be overwhelmed, but to
realize that God’s dreams come to pass. It is worth the challenge and
the sacrifice to participate with Him in seeing the visions of the
Kingdom become reality.
For the local church to
thrive and have an impact on its community it must embrace God’s
imagination and dreams. This is an essential ingredient. The impossible
can happen when like-hearted and like-minded people come together,
linking arms, believing for God for great things.
I have always been
fascinated with the subject of vision. There are many stories of
visionary people scattered throughout the Bible. I love reading about
people who were faced with overwhelming odds and chose to believe God
for the end result.
The books of Ezra and
Nehemiah are two of my favorites. They tell the story of a generation of
people who, after living in seventy years of exile, return to their
homeland to find it in complete ruin. When the first group arrived home
they were homeless and poor. As they gazed upon what remained of a once
great and beautiful city, they must have felt completely overwhelmed.
Life stayed this way until the visionaries turned up. It was because of
the leadership of men like Ezra and Zerubbabel and prophets like
Zechariah and Haggai, who exhorted the people to believe God for a new
life, that they began to turn the rubble into a new civilization.
We also have great
stories of God’s vision here at Vineyard Boise.
In 1994 we were a
young, growing church of about 700 people. We had already been amazed at
God’s goodness at His miraculous provision of 22 acres of land only
minutes from downtown Boise. He had graciously provided for us as we
built our first building on the property.
In just a few short
years we were again busting at the seams, especially in the area of our
children. It became evident that status quo wasn’t good enough and that
we didn’t have the facilities to house the vision that God had given us.
We didn’t want our children to be an afterthought, but knew that God had
called us to begin effective discipleship with them.
We believed it was time
to build a facility that would accommodate our desire to disciple our
children. After months of drawings and plans we began collecting the
money to build the new center. It looked huge to us – a million dollar
project.
Of course the young
families with children shared in the vision for the building, but many
of them were so strapped with the financial demands of raising their
family that they didn’t have the resources to fund the project. And as
we were a young church, some people hadn’t caught the long range vision
for Vineyard Boise. They saw the church as theirs, but didn’t yet see it
as their grandchildren’s. Because of these elements the project got off
to a very slow start.
By September of the
following year we had our final plans drawn and the permits pulled.
Jamie Wilder, one of our church members who worked in construction, had
volunteered his professional services to oversee the project. Everything
was ready for ground-breaking by the end of the month, everything that
is, but the finances!
In faith, we
decided to go ahead and have the ground-breaking party. We dug a huge
pit where the Ezra Center stands today and buried a side of beef which
cooked through the entire night of September 23rd. After
church the next day, on September 24th, we had a huge meal
for the whole church. We all gathered at the site and the kids released
balloons with notes in them (a special tradition here at Vineyard
Boise). We worshiped and prayed while Paul Taylor filled the bucket of a
D8 Cat with dirt. We cheered as that first scoop of dirt was lifted high
in the air and dumped out. It truly was an exhilarating moment in our
history as a church; one that I will not forget.
I remember standing
there wondering how God would put the vision into the hearts of the
people who had not embraced it themselves. Just then Mark Westcott, a
young man from our college group, approached me with a scripture, Haggai
2:18. As he had read that scripture during his devotions that morning he
had no idea what it was about. But when he shared with me it made all
the sense in the world.
“From this day on, from this
twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, give careful thought to the day
when the foundation of the Lord’s temple was laid…From this day on I
will bless you.”
That portion of
scripture spoke of the temple that was built in the book of Ezra. We
knew it was more than coincidence that God gave us this very scripture
on the 24th day of the ninth month.
We had
just broken ground to lay the foundation on an impossible project, one
that for all intents and purposes was too big for us to accomplish. But
it was God’s idea and He confirmed it through the book of Ezra. From
that day on we have called the children’s ministry building “The Ezra
Family Center”. The vision did penetrate the hearts of our congregation
and together with God we saw that vision become reality.
