After meeting in the recreation center for a few years, the charm of basketballs pounding the ceiling above our heads and drowning out sermons and music began to lose its charm. So I began looking up and down the peninsula for another place to meet. Then one day Richard invited me and Belle out for dinner. During dinner, he invited our community to come and use his building in the afternoon. He would not charge us rent, but we would cover the building's utilities (a cost much greater than we were currently paying for rent). But we would be able to use the building all week.

Richard and I would meet weekly and we enjoyed talking about God and the church and the people of our city. He was a generation older than me as his people, on average, were a generation older than the people in our community. Although we seemed to agree with each other more often than not when discussing
Bible topics, I never pushed back too hard on things we disagreed on. We tended not to discuss politics. If he were younger I would have felt compelled to push back on some of his ideas a bit more vigorously.

Even though this move seemed to contradict God's direction that we reach people who would not find their way to traditional church, I began to imagine the myriad of ways we might use such a space to reach the neighborhood. So we jumped at the opportunity. Within a couple of weeks, we had made the move.