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Church Family,
Yesterday, on February 29th, we celebrated The Bridge’s 20th birthday, and it was impossible to not look back without awe of how the Lord has been so faithful to our church over the years.
20 years comes with many numbers—numbers that represent stories of lives changed, eternities altered, relationships restored, children adopted, and brokenness healed. To give you a snapshot…
We’ve seen 1,478 people make their faith in Jesus public through baptism.
We’ve given over $2 MILLION away to local and global missions.
We’ve seen gospel content through Bridge Online and Bridge Worship streamed in over 125 countries.
It’s all immeasurably more than we could’ve ever asked or imagined.
There are stories inside each of those stats—many we know, and many still in progress. That speaks to the faithfulness of God as we not only look back on 20 years, but look to another 20 ahead and the fresh vision God’s giving to us next as a church family.
Bring the Gospel to Every Table.
Several of you have asked, as much as we have asked ourselves as leaders, “What are we going to do about the Columbia location? When are we going to expand to create more room for our next-gen ministries?” Rest assured, we hear you—and we’re so thankful for a season of new growth.
But among our elders, there’s an increasing, heart-level burden for something much deeper than just addressing our space and facilities issues. To be faithful to our calling and maximize the opportunities God has opened to us, we’ll be launching an initiative we’re calling Every Table to provide the resources necessary to create two specific environments:
SPRING HILL: We will upgrade our current Spring Hill spaces to increase our capacity for Bridge Kids and Bridge Students, finish meeting rooms for more Bridge Groups and classes, and create a fun and safe environment for families to enjoy in between services to help with traffic.
COLUMBIA: We will lock in a permanent location that our Columbia campus calls “home”, allowing The Bridge to continue being a gospel outpost in a city we’re witnessing a move of God in daily.
How does this make a difference? Each of these spaces will function as “training grounds” that equip and send out people to Bring the Gospel to Every Table. We believe this vision we have for our church will be magnified with these spaces as tools for you—our everyday missionaries, across every generation, sent out for the sake of the gospel. Through it, we hope to see 20,000 people belong to Jesus in the next twenty years.
You’ll be hearing more about this in the next few weeks in a series of Vision Meetings (and keep an eye out for those invitations!), but I wanted you, as the key leaders of our church, to know before we take this to our entire church family.
While this letter is just a glimpse into what God is doing in our hearts as elders and leaders, we hope it begins to stir something in yours as we take steps as a family toward the next season of The Bridge. Please pray with me about how God would have you and your family participate.
We’re so thankful for how you’ve been a part of the story, and we can’t wait to share more.
Craig McKown
Lead Pastor of Strategy
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