Dear Midcurrent Church,

I put “land ahoy” in the subject line of this email after looking up an explanation of what exactly that phrase means. Here’s what I found. “Land ahoy” is a traditional nautical exclamation shouted by a ship’s lookout to announce the first visible sighting of land after a long journey at sea.

Well, we’re not out at sea, and we haven’t necessarily been in search of land for too terribly long. But I am excited to announce the first visible sightings of possible pieces of land for a permanent home for Midcurrent Church. So, it felt fitting….land ahoy!!

If the prospect of us even searching for land in the first place is news to you, let me back up and fill you in.

Four years ago, we moved into our current facility after our first five years of being a so-called “mobile church,” meaning we didn’t have a space of our own, we stored pretty much everything in a trailer, and we set up and tore down every single Sunday.

Needless to say, this home in downtown Hudson has been an incredible asset and has allowed us to exponentially increase our ministry to this community. And yet, as we have shared at various times in the last year or so, we are already starting to outgrow this space. We have one office for six full-time staff members. We’ve had to add a third Sunday morning worship service to accommodate all of our guests and church members. We host over 100 kids in MC Kids every Sunday morning, as well as about 100 teenagers every Wednesday night. And we’ve gathered as many as 100 adults on Thursday nights for 8-10 weeks at a time for various discipleship video series.  No matter the day of the week, we are discovering that extra space, extra parking, and extra elbow room is getting harder and harder to find.

As a result, we have been casually searching for land in the area that might fit our future needs.  Nothing is imminent as we recognize that building a future home is likely a 5-6 year process from start to finish. Within the last couple of months, however, a few pieces of land have really caught our attention. Their locations are nearly perfect, but their price tags include a few more zeros than we were hoping for.

This has sparked some thorough discussions with our Leadership Team. Those discussions have been fruitful and exciting, but it has become quite clear that this next step, and some of these pieces of land in particular, are significantly out of our reach at the moment despite the fact that these will be the kind of steps we have to take sometime soon. And so the one thing we have agreed upon is the reality that this is too big a step to even dream about taking without first getting on our knees and asking God to be involved in every single detail.

That is why I am reaching out to all of you today, to ask you to begin praying regularly and specifically for this new endeavor. At the moment, acquiring the right piece of land almost feels like it will require a miracle. And yet here’s the hopeful news: we love and serve a God who is capable of performing one. He has performed miracles all throughout history, and I have firsthand knowledge of Him doing so for churches across the country who have prayed for land and buildings to be used for the expansion of God’s Kingdom in communities just like ours.

So my request to you today is simple: will you join us in praying for God to make a way where it seems like there is no way. That is where He does His finest work. And we want to follow His leading at every step along the way.

Thanks friends!

Hope to see you this Sunday as Sam Yang leads us in worship and we wrap up our exploration of wisdom in the book of Proverbs. It’s our last Sunday at 9:00 and 10:30. See you then!

Sten