Good morning. My name is Jim Adams. I'm one of your elders, well actually an elder in training. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll be one of your elders. I want to read for you today Psalms 127. It's another one of the songs of ascent and it's generally a credit to Solomon, wise King Solomon. I think you'll understand why when I read. Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain. In vain you rise early and you stay up late, toiling for food to eat, for he grants sleep to those he loves. Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate. Thank you, Jim. I believe you got what it takes. You'll be a full elder in no time. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday. I'll just tell you right up front, off the top, this is a different Sunday than we normally have. This is really a family talk masquerading as a sermon that I'm about to do. So I would tell you this, if this is your first Sunday with us, they're not normally like this. I'm also not talking to you today. Okay, so whatever I say, I'm not asking you for anything. I'm not implying that you should do anything. I hope that you'll come see us again on a normal Sunday. But every now and again, it falls on us as a church to have a Sunday like this, because I want to take our collective focus and place it on what we believe. And when I say we, I mean the elders, what we believe God wants us to do next as a church. So this morning is going to feel a little different. I want us to focus this morning on our campaign. You've probably noticed when you come in the wall opposite the sound booth in the lobby, there's a blueprint of a church, a nice looking blueprint with floor plans and everything. And then there's a facade that you've seen, and it's our goal to build that on four acres of land around the corner on Litchford. And this morning, I want us to talk about it because, A, I haven't talked about it in over a year from here. I've written a letter about it once or twice. I may have emailed about it, but I haven't spoken about it corporately in over a year. And it's time that we do that. More than that, we started this in February of 2020. And so many of you in the room have not been here and were not here when we were talking about this as a church and why we were deciding to do it and move ahead with the pursuit of a permanent home in North Raleigh. And so a lot of us simply need to be caught up and informed on what we're doing and why we are doing it. To do that, I wanted us to see a video really quick. This video is on our webpage. The first part of the video is the video that we used to launch the campaign back in 2020. And then the second part of the video is an update that we gave after we acquired the land that came out of that campaign. So I think it'll help if we watch this together and then I'm going to kind of fill in the blank with some more of the story. So let's watch this video. to strengthen families, build faiths, and knit together a wonderful community of His people. But because there has always been a more urgent struggle or need, the dream of having our own home has not yet been realized. Now, however, we see that we are entering into a time of health. We believe that it is time for us as a church to look outward once again and dream big dreams about how God might use us to build His kingdom here. We continue to believe that having our own permanent home is a part of God's plan for us and is critical to our ministry and our community. We believe that after 20 years of hoping, right before COVID changed the world forever. And even in the midst of the uncertainty, even though we had months at a time where we weren't meeting as a body in a building, the money continued to come in and God continued to provide. And from that campaign, we were able to purchase the land that I'm standing on right now at 7600 Litchford Road. I am standing in the future home of Grace Raleigh. In a few years time, there will be a building right here where I am. And I am so excited for this opportunity. Thank you. And from the very beginning, it's not been about building a building. To us, it's about taking the next step of obedience that we believe God wants us to take. We believe that it's God's will that there would be a building right here where I'm standing, that there would be children filling the hallways, and there would be people coming each week into this space to learn more about Jesus, to get loved closer to Him. We believe that God wants to put grace here in this community to share His love and spread His love and build His kingdom right here in this community. We hope this becomes a place where people hang out and gather, that it's used every day, and that people are connected to Jesus and connected to one another more and more here. It's our ardent prayer that generations of people who call grace home would be connected to Jesus here, would be connected to one another, and that from this place, we can love on this community for decades in the future. You know, what's fun is watching yourself age in real time in front of 200 of your closest friends. It's a year later and a year grayer and a year thinner, but that's how it goes. So that's roughly the background. To give you a little bit more details, because I want you to see how God's been with us every step of the way, this actually started. The dream of having a permanent home has been here since the beginning. It's always been the desire of the people of Grace that we would do this. Back in 2000 when we were founded as Grace Community Church. But we didn't have a time or a place where we could realize that dream. And then in the fall of 2018, we went on an elder retreat. And when we went on the elder retreat, two of our elders, Burt Banks and Bill Reith, who were here this morning, and were over there next door praying before the service like they do every week. They came to the elders and they said, hey, we've come up with a 10-year plan that we'd like to discuss. And the rest of the elders were like, okay, seems presumptuous, but what you got? And they laid out their hopes and dreams for grace. And part of that was, hey, it's high time we start to pursue a permanent home. And so out of that, we formed a campaign committee in 2019, chaired by Tom Proctor, and populated by some other people in the church to figure out how to go about this campaign. We determined that we needed to raise $1.5 million. This was pre-COVID, and so at the time, we genuinely believed that would get done everything that we thought we needed to get done to have a space. And we opened up our search. We were willing to buy another building or another church, move into a church that had moved out, anything like that. Everything was on the table, but we were tasked, the committee was, how do we raise the money? How should we go about the campaign? And we read a book by an expert who's done hundreds of campaigns all over the country and did the research that we felt like we needed to do. We talked to some other committees who had also done it. And the recommendation to the elders from our committee was that we needed to do a silent campaign first. And in a silent campaign, somebody, usually the senior pastor, sits down with the 10 to 15 most impactful givers in the church, the people with the highest capacity to give the most. And I would sit down with them and I would say, hey, listen, here's what we're going to do. I'd love for you to pray about being a part of that. And then make an ask. The book says that you're supposed to ask for three times what they give annually, which seems absurd to me. But that was the guidance. And so we go to the elders and we say, this is what we think we need to do. And the elders served us really well in that moment because they said essentially, absolutely not. That's not who we are as a church. That's not what we want to do. Let's just make an ask, one ask, and let everybody respond how they want to respond and trust the Holy Spirit to get this done. And I responded to that person by saying, that sounds great. Tomorrow, are you going to go walk through the forest and sing with the animals? Because that doesn't seem too practical. We have something we have to do here. And they kept pushing back on me and pushed back on the committee and they said this is how we think we need to do it one of the reasons I've come around to understanding that that was the exact right way to handle things is I've been very careful during this campaign to not value gifts based on amount but but we value gifts based on sacrifice. I would hate to have had a meeting with a high capacity giver and not have met with some of our young families who don't have the capacity to give like that just yet, but are sacrificing in order to do it. Who am I to say which party is making the greater sacrifice? So we don't want to differentiate the gifts based on amount. We just want everybody to participate. And so I'm so glad that we didn't go about it that way. So then in February of 2020, we had four weeks. It was a Grace is Going Home campaign. Four weeks capped off with a Pledge Sunday. And I talked about evangelism and discipleship. I didn't talk about the future. I talked about who we are as a church and what we want to be. Not in a building, but as a people. And then on March the 1st, we had Pledge Sunday. And we had sent everybody out cards and asked you to bring in your pledge card. And at the end of the service, we're going to submit them together. And we collected them in the offering baskets. The goal is to raise 1.5. I, in my prayers, was very hesitant that this was going to get done, a little bit doubtful. And I was just praying that God would make it clear. And my thought was, if we get 800,000 pledged, that'll be a pretty good indication from God that we're moving in the right direction and this is what we need to do. If we have 300,000 pledged, we'll know, well, mud in our eye, we're going to look stupid for this, but I guess we're not going to do it right now. But I wanted it to be clear. We had brought in Tom Ledoux, our wonderful finance director. He lives out of state, but we brought him in so that he could be there on Pledge Sunday and tally up the pledges. So Tom did that. So Sunday afternoon, March the 1st, he called me, and he told me that we had $1.3 million pledged, which absolutely blew me away. By the middle of the week, the pledges were up to $1.5 million. Exactly what we wanted. I couldn't believe it. March the 8th, I stood here, and I announced to all of us, this is what's been pledged. This is amazing. And we celebrate it as a church of what God was doing for us. March the 15th, we didn't meet again for two years because of COVID. And there was a lot of financial uncertainty at the beginning of COVID. It's the last thing in the world we're going to do while the stock market is spiraling and everyone's going to Walmart at five in the morning to try to get bread is email you and be like, by the way, you pledged $10,000. How's that coming along? So we didn't, we just let it lie because we didn't want to be obtuse and ridiculous. And even though we did very little to keep our focus on it during those two years of COVID, $1.6 million came in, not 1.5. What those campaign experts will tell you is you do the silent campaign, you do the silent ask, you do it strategically, then you just need to know your operating budget is going to suffer and you're only going to bring in about 80% of what is pledged, not grace, by not paying attention to it at all God brought in 1.6 million dollars we finished in the black every year once we had the money we assembled our building committee with a commercial banker to commercial real estate agents and some. And me, because I'm highly qualified for that. And we started conducting a search. We looked and we looked and we looked. And finally, Wes Ward, one of our elders, said, hey, I found some land. It's three slots of land put together that's being sold as a chunk. But it's not showing up on any commercial real estate sites. So the land that we have on Litchford is three individual homes. So it's three different plots. But a realtor bought the largest home or the largest plot and then convinced the other two neighbors to sell with him. And then he listed it. But he didn't list it commercial. So all the people that would scoop in and outbid us didn't know it was there. It's like God just gifted us this perfect parcel of land, surrounded by a new neighborhood that's going in, across the street from Northridge, surrounded by another neighborhood on our left, literally surrounded with homes. We are in the middle of a neighborhood. It's perfect. On a road we all know well. And we were able to acquire it in a whirlwind process in the summer of, I think, 22. It was amazing. And then we began the process of meeting with an architect. We formed another committee, because we're churches. We like committees. We formed another committee. It was important to me that we would get voices from every corner of the church, trusted people who wanted to speak into this, and we began the design process. And the building that you saw is the result of that process. And obviously my picture in that building is a really stupid joke because if I ever tried to actually do that, they would fire me that day. Okay, so that's not, we're not, if this is your first time with us, we're not that kind of church. And all along the way, we believed that God was with us. We believed that he was encouraging us to take this step as a body of believers. That this is what he wanted to do. We talk a lot at Grace about being step-takers. It's one of our values. It's one of our traits. It's the way we talk about discipleship. Everybody has a step of obedience that God wants them to take. It's our job to identify it and have the faith and courage to take it. We believe that this is the next step for grace to take as a body, as a church. This is our collective next step. We believed it then in 2018. We believed it in 2020 when we shared it with everybody, when we shared our dream. We believed that God was with us and it was what we were supposed to do as the money came in, even though we didn't ask for it. And we've believed it since we had to come back to you and go, hey, listen, the plan didn't go like we thought it was going to go. We need to raise an additional $2 million to be able to get this done, but we think we can do it. And so last fall, we launched another campaign and said, let's try to give this a two-year horizon and get over the hump. You've got your bulletins. On the back of it is just a little bit of financial information that basically tells you for all intents and purposes, we're about halfway home on that. But I'm talking to you about it this morning because just like we believed then that this is what God wants us to do, we continue to believe that now. We continue to believe that establishing a permanent home is the right thing for grace to do and that this is the right time to do it. If you were to ask me why, I think the most succinct, honest, compelling reason to me is the inadequacies of our current facility. You've never brought a single person to this church that said, you know, I don't know about the service and the people weren't very nice, but you got a beautiful facility. How many weddings do you do here a year? I've done two weddings here. Both of them happened whenever that hurricane came through about four or five years ago. It was, how long ago was it? It was your wedding. 2018. They got hurricaned out of their venue and so they came here that weekend. Those are the two weddings we've done in this space. This space and this location, God forgive me, we're grateful for it, stinks. It does. We all know it. Our location's terrible. We are not positioned geographically to reach the people that we're best equipped to reach. None of our neighbors come to church here. When we go to Litchford, a bunch of our neighbors are going to come to church here. This facade is awful. We're across from a big lot that I think is going out of business. Lord knows what's going to be over there now. We now have new neighbors. We had a fish store for years and we always laughed about walking past the aquarium store to get your children. And, and that was a big joke. Well now jokes on us. Cause you know, who's there now? Trim carpenters. You know what they do every day from 7.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m.? They fabricate. They run a planer and a saw, and Aaron complains about it. Because you can't concentrate. And you can't even hear anything in the one meeting room. The large room that we have, that's our conference room slash children's space. You can't hear anything in there when they're fabricating. And when we are here, we're beholden to our landlord. Raise the rates, charge what they want, kick us out, sell to someone else who doesn't want a church as an occupant. We are not in control of our own future here. And when I think about the inadequacy of the space, I think about it for two groups of people. I think about it for us, for the grownups, and then I think about it for the kids. For us, I don't know if you know this, but every night of the week, Sunday through Thursday, people are meeting here. We are now full of small groups. We've had to ask favors of some small group leaders. We've had to rearrange some things. We've had to ask groups to change nights or to change times so that we can accommodate everybody who wants to use our space. And I was told that there's a large group that meets in here in the evenings and the lights are so dim that a lot of people have a hard time reading their notes and writing things down. And frankly, I don't want to dump several thousand dollars of money into an auditorium that we're leaving. So we're just going to let it be dim now. Use your phone like old people at a restaurant if you have to. I don't know if you know this, but I can't see Jason Ashburn anymore because I just moved behind the pole. How about a church without one of those? Does that sound nice? Every week we hear our kids. If you're on a committee, you know we have no place to meet. White tables, fold-out chairs, that's fine. We're not highfalutin around here. And that's not going to stop us from making disciples. But it does highlight the inadequacy of our space. I just mentioned about eight different committees. None of them had a good place to meet. I get really concerned for our kids. We are bursting at the seams with children now. One of the things that's so striking to me about Grace is going into COVID, February of 2020, about 12 to 13% of our Sunday morning attendance consisted of children 10 and younger. Do you know what it is now? 33. Last year, it was 25%. Now it's 33%. We'll have 130 people in this room, and we'll have 44 kids spread out throughout the rest of the church. We are out of space with our kids' ministry. If you have a toddler that you dropped off this morning, you dropped them off in what was a storage closet a month ago. See all this stuff? See all this junk over here? Look, have you ever noticed it? All this crud under sheets so you don't see it. We have no storage. We have tables tucked in things. We are crammed in every nook and cranny of this place. And we still have to throw things out left and right. Our fourth and fifth graders meet in this back room across from a dirty kitchen with chairs in the hallway and tables jamming things up. There's like this much space that you can just get in and then go to the door. If you have a child in second or third grade, they don't even have a space. They meet in the copy room. It wasn't until Facelift Sunday in September that we were able to move some things out of there to make more space for them and actually put a stinking decoration on the wall so it felt like they were in their own space on a Sunday morning. You know what's next? I'm not kidding around with this because we keep getting more kids. You know where they're going to start meeting after the next time we grow? When we can get some more volunteers. All we're waiting on is volunteers and then we're going to split a class and put them there. My office. My desk is against the wall. I have a whiteboard. I have a lot of space. We're going to start using the senior pastor's office for children's space. That's fine. I do not care. But here's what I know, is we don't want that experience for our kids. We want our children growing up in spaces that feel like they belong to them. We want enough space for our kids to be able to run around. Did you see in the video the playground on the outside? Do you think that they would like that more than this? Because right now, the auditorium doubles as a playground after church is done. They can't wait to come around and run in circles and smile and knock each other over. And it's awesome. It's one of my favorite things about Sunday morning is watching the chaos in here. But man, I'd love for them to have a playground. I would love to be able to do a Grace's Big Night Out at Grace. Did you see that outdoor space where there's going to be, there's a kitchen. And there's going to be a slide-up window for the kitchen so we can prepare things, bring it outside. There's going to be TVs. Small groups can gather there. People can hang out there. We can have parties there. We want people coming from the community to come play on our playground and sit there and talk to one another, even if they don't go to grace. We want those spaces. But the space that we have here is inadequate for who we want to be. It's inadequate for where we want to go as a church. And here's why I chose this psalm. Because I think it's a good thing for us to reflect on as we consider establishing a permanent home together. Here's a big reason why. Verses 3-5 of Psalm 127. Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from Him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in court. Grace, our quiver is very full. We have a whole generation of kids that we're bringing up, teaching to be kingdom builders, to connect to Jesus and to connect to one another. I believe we have a responsibility to them. I believe it's solemn and sacred. And I know that many of us, we've already raised our kids. But this is an opportunity for those who have adult children now to leave a legacy here too. I want my children's children playing on that playground. I want people who never knew us and never met us to come together and worship God there. I want it to be a footprint, a stamp in North Raleigh where God's kingdom goes out from and comes to. We have an opportunity to do something really special. And I hope that we'll do it. Here's another reason why. When I say our facilities are inadequate for what we want to accomplish, I also mean that they actively turn people away. We have friends, Jen and I do. Not a lot, but we have some. We have friends that we invited here. Come to our church. And they came. And they loved it. They loved our people. They got involved in a small group for a short time. But eventually, they stopped coming. And we didn't know why, and I never press. When people come and then they don't, I have the hardest time reaching out to them. I don't want to make anybody feel bad or awkward or weird. But we were able to talk to them. Jen was able to talk to the mom. And the mom just said, yeah, I love it. I wish we would go, but my husband just says it doesn't feel like a church. He just doesn't want to be at a place that feels like that. And listen, I think that's stupid, okay? I don't accept that as an adequate reason. It's immature. However, we can never mature him in Christ if our building prohibits that. This space is a hurdle for people that have to, they have to overcome it to want to be a part of grace. And I know that you have friends too that you've invited that have said to you because you've told me, yeah, great people, incredible pastor, okay worship, but it doesn't feel like church. Let me know when y'all get a building. Those kids, listen, my friends' kids should be in church every week. They should be making friends with other people who love Jesus, whose parents love Jesus. They should be getting discipled. They should be taught by our wonderful volunteers. That couple should be getting Jesus poured into their life every week. They should be coming and worshiping with us. The Holy Spirit should be working on them, making them more like Christ in character and sanctifying them. That family needs a church. Every family needs a church. I don't think every family needs grace. I'm not trying to make that point, but I think every family needs a church. And that family doesn't have a church right now because the one that they feel closest to and most connected with isn't working for them because our facilities are prohibitive for them. This space is causing us to not do all that we could, to not be all that we can be. It's keeping us from walking the path that we believe God wants for us. So I think it's time for us to get this done. And here's the thing. I've been very passive about this campaign. I was passive about it in COVID. Didn't put it in front of us. We don't have a thermometer in the lobby. I'm not sending out emails. We're not saying, hey, you've pledged this much and given this much, just letting you know. We're not putting it in front of people. I don't talk a lot about the campaign, even in Discover Grace, where we still continue to grow. I know we have a lot of young families, but if you come to Discover Grace, what you'll see is we continue to maintain this generational diversity that is wonderful and characteristic of grace. But you don't hear me talking about the campaign a lot. I have people who care deeply about it that get mad at me and tell me that I need to talk about it more. Why aren't we talking about this? Why aren't you asking people, what are we doing? I have to get it. I have to get the business about three times a year from some folks. The passive approach to the campaign has been intentional. It's not because I'm scared to talk about it. It's not because I forget. It's not because I don't think it's important. There's two big reasons why I've been passive. Well, there are three. The first is when we did the campaign, when we launched it originally, we chose a passive tact. The Holy Spirit did it. It worked. And so I learned from that. And thought, that's what we should continue to do. But two bigger reasons are one, me. I've never wanted it to be about my ego. I've never wanted it to be about what I got done. I don't know if you know this, but a big notch in the belt of a pastor is to take a church from a non-permanent facility to a permanent facility. A big notch in the belt, a big career milestone for guys like me and women is to take a church into a building into its very first one. That's a big accomplishment. And I abhor the idea of making this about me, of asking you to give your money to the kingdom of Nate. And so I have stayed intentionally as far away from it as I can because I don't want my ego involved. I don't want it to be about me. I don't want it to feel like something I am doing. I want it to be something that we are doing. I want it to be something that the Holy Spirit has stirred in us to do. I want it to be something that we come together collectively and don't make it about our egos either. Make it about what we believe God wants us to do. The biggest reason I've been passive is because I didn't want us to take our eye off the ball. I felt like as a church, we had bigger fish to fry than building a building and getting a permanent home. We needed to make disciples. We needed to grow in our youth ministry and our children's ministry. We need a strong small groups ministry where people grow and spiritual health flourishes. And I didn't want for a second for us to start to think that building a building is the most important thing that we can do as a church, not with all this other hard work to do. And so I didn't want us to take our eye off the ball and make it something that it's not. But here's what I think now, and here's why we're talking about this. In light of our health, we have a healthy staff team. Our staff team's great. I love every one of them. I think they love me. They tell me they do, just like my mom. We have a very healthy staff culture. We have the right people in the right places, and to my knowledge, no one's going anywhere for a long while. We have a healthy elder board. We disagree well. I won't say what it was about, but a few months back, we had the most contentious elder meeting I've ever been in. We were voting on an issue that was important to us. There was disagreement there. It was the most fractured vote that there's ever been. And let me tell you something. You should like this. My team lost. The senior pastor did not steamroll the elders. They are unsteamrollable. They're healthy. And they push back. And then we left that contentious meeting where we did not agree. And we agreed. And we were fine. And there was no calls to be made afterwards because someone got upset or their feelings hurt. We're healthy on the elder board. Our student ministry is flourishing. Finally. Kyle, God bless him, he's at home visiting his nana or baba right now. One of the two. I don't know. And so he's not here this morning. But y'all, he worked so hard over COVID. And we have a youth group now that's growing and flourishing and thriving. I've already told you we're bursting at the seams with our kids ministry. Aaron's done a phenomenal job with that and with our volunteers. We have healthy small groups. Our discipleship pathway is in place. We know that we're supposed to be disciples of Christ. We know that we're designed to be kingdom builders. We've installed our five traits. We've reminded you of those. We are ready to go. And so in light of all that health, I think now is the time to take our collective focus and put it on getting this thing done and getting into this building. It's time for that last half of the two million to come in. So here's what I'm going to ask of you. If you have been faithfully giving towards the campaign from the very start, you filled out your pledge card in 2020, or you made your donation in 2020, and you've been doing end of year stuff, and you've been hitting your pledge. Just keep doing that. Just keep it up. We're so grateful. We're so grateful. I'm not asking you for another thing, okay? I would ask us all, as we think about end-of-year giving this year, I know that many of us are in the habit of giving money at the end of the year for different reasons. I would love for you to consider the building campaign as a target for your end-of-year giving, whatever that might be for you. I also want to talk to another group of people in the church and do this as delicately as I can. I've had some of you, and I've heard from other people that have taken this posture. We're going to give to the campaign. We believe in this. We're going to do this. I am going to do this, whatever your case is. But I'm going to wait until we get a little bit closer to the finish line because that money is parked in a place where it's making eight or 10% right now. And it's best for everyone to just leave it there to accrue as long as possible. Fine. Fine. I understand that. I do not have a financial mind. I'm not going to advise for or against that. I have no idea. But if that's you, I want to ask you a favor. The first time we did the campaign, somebody from the church wanted to meet with me. They met with me and they said, hey, listen, we have decided that we're going to give X amount of dollars to the campaign. We're're gonna give it at this increment every year for the next three or five years But if at some point you get close to the finish line and you want to call on it to get us there you can and so once we got within that range of money I Text texted him a GIF of someone from 30 Rock, or from Parks and Rec, saying, money please. And they wired it over. If that's you, if you have an amount that you know you want to give, you guys have talked about it, you've prayed about it, but you're just holding back until we're a little bit closer because of where it's sitting. I understand all of that. But if that's you, would you have that conversation that my friend had with me? Would you have that with Tom Ledoux? Would you email him? He's our finance director, finance at gracerolly.org. If you need to know how to get in touch with him, I can help you out with that. But if that's you, would you just tell him that so that we know once we get close, we have X amount that's going to get us there? The other group of people I want to talk to are the folks that have come since 2020, since we started the campaign. You weren't here for the beginning. You've never pledged, nor should you have. But you've started coming here now and now Grace is home. I would love for you to consider getting involved with this campaign. I would love for you to consider partnering us and letting us walk together to do this because I believe that the whole church needs to galvanize around this. Even if we had somebody who said, you know what, I want to give it all. I would say, I don't know that that's a good idea because I think that we need to come around this as a church and as a body together. So if you're newer to grace and you've never given, I would love for you to consider doing that. And if you've never given to grace, and I know all the different reasons why we might hesitate to do that, and it takes a long time to believe in a place enough to start giving that part of our resources to it, that's fine. But if you've never given and you feel compelled to begin, what I would love for you to do is begin to give to the building campaign. Get in the habit of giving. And then once we get there and we're going and we're building, keep giving that but give it to operational. So that's the ask that I'm making of you. Pray, please, about what you might do at the end of this year if you're inclined to give in that way. If you have an amount you want to give, can you kind of flag that for us and let us know? And then if you've never given to grace, maybe this is a good time to start. But now is the time to get this thing done. And I want to end it this way. I love the beginning of this psalm. 127. Because it says this, What Solomon says here is if the Lord's not in it, what's the point? If we build a church and God's not in it, what's the point? It's why I took the time to walk you through the process that's gotten here because I want you, like me, to be able to see God's hand in all of these things and to have confidence and faith that he continues to remain with us. So what we're going to do is we're going to pray, but we're going to pray differently than we have since I've gotten here. I've never done anything like this, so I'm just going to ask you to trust me and go with me. But I want us to pray together. I want us to make a statement of unanimity as we believe this is our focus. So I'm going to come down here and I'm going to invite up a couple of groups of people. The first group I'd like to join me up here are current elders. So if you're a current elder, if you'd please come stand with me, I would appreciate that greatly. The next group that I'd love to come stand with us is former elders. If you've ever served the church as an elder, if you've ever been asked by your peers to lead us, would you come join us? And now I'd like to see the people who were here in 2000 at the beginning of this dream. If you were here in 2000, would you come up, just stand around the perimeter. We'll expand out. Stay right here. And now the rest of us who call grace home, who believe in this step, I'm going to invite you to stand, find somebody, touch people on the wall. But I want us to hold hands together. Can we do that? Stand up, find someone's hand to hold. And let's have a moment where we pray together. Wonderful. Please pray with me. Father, we thank you for this church. We thank you for what it means to us. We thank you for the people that you've brought here, for the love that fills this room and the lobby and these hallways every weekend. We thank you for a rich community that you've brought us. And we thank you that we get to be the light that shows Jesus to other people in our community. God, we pray for grace. We pray for your blessing on us. We ask God earnestly that you would galvanize us around this goal of getting into this building. Bring in the last million dollars, Father. Bring it in quick. Let us go. We're itching. God, may each one of us consider in our hearts and in our families what you would have us do as we seek to accomplish this together. And we know, God, that if you are not in it, it doesn't matter. So show us your presence in this process. God, help us to do our part as you promised to do yours. We pray all these things together in your son's name. Amen. All right, guys, thank you so much for coming. Have a great week. We will see you next week for a normal service with a sermon and everything.