What's Happening At The Bridge--First Installment

There's a reason I've started this blog.  I'm not really a blog person, but I thought it was extremely important to write about all that God is doing in the life of The Bridge Church at this time, and let me tell you, there are some definite God moments happening in our church right now. 

As you know, The Bridge holds its services at Laurel Nokomis School in Nokomis, FL.  What you may not know is how we got to Nokomis.  When I came to Venice, I came to pastor Island Community Church--a church that had been in existence for about 4 years.  When I came, we were a church of about 75 people worshiping in the Realto Shopping Center on the Island of Venice.  We enjoyed very cheap rent, a nice sized space that we called our own, and an ambition to change the world.  About 2 years after I got there, our rent situation dramatically changed.  It was 2007, the economy was booming, and we found ourselves looking at our rent going from $3 a square foot to $12 a square foot--an amount we could not pay. 

I knew this uppage in rent would change everything.  We would now more than likely become a mobile church.  But where?  Where was God calling us to go?  If we left the island of Venice, could we still be called Island Community Church?  How much work would it be setting up and tearing down our stuff every week?  Where would we store all of our stuff?  And the questions went on an on.  As we began to pray and really seek God on what He wanted, an area of our town really began to become a burden on my heart.  I couldn't shake it.  I took this that this was God's way of telling me that the next destination for our church would be Nokomis, FL.  Nokomis is a very needy area of our city, not far from where we were currently meeting, without a large church presence.  So that's where we launched out to. 

We changed our name to The Bridge, loaded up a trailer with our stuff and we began to do church at the Nokomis Community Park.  It had a main meeting room, 2 side rooms for our children's areas, a huge covered playground right next to it, and plenty of space out back.  We were excited!  Within a few months we started to see growth.  We were actually reaching people in our area!  It wasn't long until that little room that we were meeting in (which seemed large at the time) began to be too small.  So, on Easter Sunday in 2008, we didn't hold our service inside because we didn't think all the people would fit.  We set up the chairs and sound system on the covered basketball court behind the community park.  199 people showed up that day.  We were one shy from 200 people!  I was so excited.  I knew that God was up to something great, and I also knew that we would need to find a new place.