This is what my church, St. Barnabas Broadway, looked like on 10 May 2006.

It’s not photo-shopped. Our church building was ravaged by a fire at 3:30am on that day. It took sixty firefighters around eight hours to completely contain the fire. The 100-year-old organ, the stained glass window, and the memorials to parishioners who died in WWI were all lost in the fire. 600 nearby residents had to be evacuated. Nothing could be done to save the 150-year-old building. This was a sad day for many who had celebrated baptisms, weddings, mourned loved ones, and worshipped God at Barneys. You can imagine how hard this has been for our church.

For the past few years, we’ve been meeting in a lecture room of a theological college in the next suburb over. God has been good and has reminded us that the church consists of the people, the followers of Christ, and not the building. The current 6:30pm congregation has grown to a size that wouldn’t even have fit in the old worship hall.

But the time has come for us to build our new home; not just so we can have a shiny building, but so that we can start serving those people in Broadway again. So that people can tell straight away that we’re a church, and can walk in off the street to hear about the love that God has for them. For the space to serve the public, for new memories to be formed, for God to be glorified. We still need more funds to make this vision a reality, so that we can start serving Broadway as soon as we can.

On 18 September, I will be participating in a church fundraising walkathon to raise money for our new building. If you feel convicted to help us, please sponsor me for the walkathon. Every little bit counts, even if you can only give a few dollars. If you would prefer to sponsor me using PayPal, please let me know and I can set up a donation account.

If you want more info, I’m happy to talk more about this, but I better stop before this post gets too long :)