Joy Initiative - Joy Pitch 1.0

Arrival (Greeting by Anne Geiger)

Welcome

Instructions on dinner and table talk:

Tell where restrooms are located.

Share how you got to MVPC and where you see God at work right now.

Pray for evening.

Dinner

Five Minute Call

Formal Opening

Welcome.

Would anyone mind sharing a story of where they see God at work right now at Moraga Valley?

Please, stand, introduce yourself, and we’d love to have you share.

Thank you for sharing that. I love hearing little bits and pieces of what God is doing in our church and our community. Where I’m excited right now is that we’ve had several people slowly come to faith, almost under the radar, and where we’re praying right now is for entire households to come to faith. Share Kondo Story from last week.

What many of us are feeling, we’re starting to see God uniquely at work.

Actually, someone just described it to me like the movie, Freaky Friday, like the transformation they experienced feels like they’re living in someone’s else’s body. They feel so new, so transformed, that it’s hard to figure out what the new “them” feels like, or what it should look like.

One of the comments that sticks out to me is their renewed perspective on life. Encountering Jesus for them was a circumstance defining event. One of the gentlemen, who was a soccer player at St Marys from Scotland, just kept talking about how much his life had increased in joy. His prayer is that His family comes to know Jesus and the joy they could find in Him.

That’s really why I’ve gathered us all here this evening… God is doing a work of transformation, in the lives of men, women, and children. God is restoring the joy of His children, and I think we’re living on the verge of something beautiful and historic.

We want to live into this new thing that we feel God is doing. I get the sense that God is just getting started.

Our Vision + Mission isn’t detached from what I see God doing: we see a vibrant and diverse community that joyfully surrenders all of life to making disciples for the glory of Jesus.

We are seeing people say yes to Jesus in being His disciple, and their lives are becoming remarkably different from where they were before.

As we step into this new season, celebrating what God is doing, I want to invite you to join me.

We are entering a new series that we’re calling “Joy” or the “Joy Initiative” and we want to see God bring about the

Joy of the Next Generation

the Joy of the Community

and see God work anew the Joy of Our Place.

This is a multi-year, 2-3 year, generosity initiative that will fund our Vision as we partner with what we see God already doing.

You can easily look back at the last six decades of the history of Moraga Valley, and see God’s hand at work.

We’ve had people give generously and sacrificially for the building of our Worship Center and the Family Ministry Center.

We’ve had generations praying for their children and grandchildren.

We’ve witnessed the sacrificial lives of great people who have made indelible impacts on our lives.

Tom McIntosh, Phyllis Parrill, Tad Slocum, Jim Reub, Valerie Bigelow — I’m sure we could list a hundred people, living or no longer with us, that have impacted our lives forever.

I think you’ll agree that the Lord has given us a tremendous track record to go off of. He’s been incredibly faithful to us at every turn.

And we’re anticipating His faithfulness to us as we make the next turn. God will use the sacrifice, the generosity, the prayers, of our church now as we make a big leap in faith in the next couple of years.

In short, the Joy Initiative is a 2-year generosity initiative to raise $8-10M dollars to partner with what God is already doing.

We have two primary goals for this season:

100% Participation

$8-10 Million Dollars

The 100% participation is every person engaged in this season of, what is really, discipleship. Growing in our trust in what God will do.

And 8-10$ Million dollars will help us with our three priorities:

First, we want to focus on the Joy of the Next Generation. We’ve made the decision to focus on families in our community as we step forward.

Currently, our community gives around $2 Million dollars to the church, and we want to completely fund our ministry commitments for the next two years. 2x2 = ? That’s a total of four million dollars.

Second, we want to focus on the Joy of Our Community and we want to launch into a mental health and mental wellness initiative and move in the direction of providing a counseling ministry through our church.

This is one of the biggest items that are facing students and their families. We are raising a generation that is living through the most anxious time in human history, and Lamorindans just accelerate that with our high-achieving attitudes.

While we’re still unsure if it would be onsite, or off-site at another place in our Lamorinda community, we do want to be courageous about stepping into that.

Third, we want to focus on the Joy of Our Place. We want our campus to be inviting to families. Our physical place should reflect the joy that we have in Jesus. We’ve got some great ideas that will likely be an overwhelming chunk of the remaining 4-6$ million dollars.

We want to modernize our sanctuary, update our Fireside wing of our campus, plan for updating key family spaces, like potentially turning our Fellowship Hall into a 2-story Youth Center.

I want kids to walk on our campus in such a way that leads to them begging their parents every day of the week to come back.

Could you imagine if a kid showed up to church, and when their parents went to check them in, they could take a slide from the upstairs level to the downstairs level to their classroom? We want to make changes like that!

Dallas Willard said that God is the most joyous being in the universe and I think our church should feel and look like that.

This initiative is different from what we’ve done in the past. In the past we’ve done Capital Campaigns that have been geared towards specific projects, but we really want to invite our whole church into taking ownership of this next season.

Because this is different than anything we’ve done before, we know we need to treat it differently.

We want to make sure our budget for the next two years is completely, 100% funded, and not only funded, we want to invite our church to consider increasing their gifts because they believe God is doing something remarkable in our community.

We just didn’t want to get up on stage and say, “Hey! Be more generous!” We wanted to think strategically about what it means to be the “non-ignorable presence of Jesus in our community…” Think about it like this, if aliens came and picked up the church, or we burned up in a fire, would our community miss us? We want to be so important to our community that they’d be devastated if we ceased to exist. This is how we got to meeting a mental health need for our community. We feel like the long-term impacts will outlive us as people come back to Moraga to raise their families.

And we knew that God was calling us to steward our campus a little differently because of who He is bringing to us — more and more families!

We’re planning on launching this initiative in mid-January and we will be asking the church to consider giving to that vision to make it happen. A commitment would eventually be a combination of:

their Current Giving (what they currently give to the church in a year, tithe, offerings, missions, benevolence, building, etc…)

Expanded Giving (What is their next step in expanding giving).

And you Add those together for a two year working total.

We also want to invite people to trust God sacrificially, and invite them to think strategically about their Stored Resources.

Stored Resources (considering what stored resources God wants them to give… stocks, investments, etc…)

We’d add all those up with a Total that is made up of: Current giving + expanded giving X two years + stored resources = Total Commitment.

We would be taking those commitments and contributing towards what we’re calling our ONE FUND. Out of that ONE FUND we will focus on the JOY OF THE NEXT GENERATION and fund the next 2 years of our budget, we’ll focus on the JOY OF OUR COMMUNITY and step by faith into launching a mental wellness initiative and we’ll look at the JOY OF OUR PLACE, and refreshing our campus as we focus on those who aren’t yet with us!

We are planning for a Commitment Sunday for Sunday, February 23, 2025.

I wanted to bring you all together so we could think and pray about the future together. Here’s what I want you to do now, you’ve got some cards on your table, that I want you to answer 4 questions I want your feedback on.

Feedback

1. What excited you about what I shared?

2. What was missing?

3. What was confusing?

4. What are some key questions that needs to be answered in order for our church to embrace this?