Great day in Southern California yesterday. Hung out all day with Mel McGowan, President of Visioneering. We did some architectural reconnaissance at Club Nokia, the House of Blues, and the Hyperion Theater in Disneyland. Amazing spaces that generated lots of ideas! For what it’s worth, we also rode the Tower of Terror. Why not? Even that experience, and the way Disney stages their rides as a pre-show experience, gave us some ideas. All in a day’s work!

Part of our DNA at National Community Church is doing church in marketplace environments. Our long-term strategy is to meet in movie theaters. We own and operate a coffeehouse that will become a chain of coffeehouses. For what it’s worth, not only are coffeehouses third places where the church and community can cross paths, we also give every penny of profit to missions. And we’ve even got a history of utilizing clubs for a variety of events. So we love meeting in marketplace environments for the purposes of reaching the unchurched. But we also feel called to create marketplaces.

As we think about our new property, we don’t just want to build a church building that serves our purposes. We want to build a marketplace that will serve God’s purposes, first and foremost, but accomplish that purpose by serving community purposes as well. That’s why were trying to envision a variety of marketplaces. How can we design a sanctuary that is also a high-end performance theater that incorporates elements from Club Nokia or the Hyperion or the House of Blues? Can the space we build for our kids bless families and generate revenue during the week? We’re trying to figure out revenue streams that will help NCC continue to expand His Kingdom. And I think churches will have to ask and answer these questions with greater frequency in the years to come.

We want our campus to be a 24/7 facility that gets as many people thru our doors on a daily basis as possible. We also want to generate revenue for kingdom purposes. Our 2020 vision isn’t just 20 locations by 2020. It’s also to be giving $2 million to missions annually. And it’s missions that is really the driving engine! That is the reason we’re trying to think creatively about this campus.

Praying for God ideas!