New Church Building

July 27, 2016

Almost exactly one year ago, we signed the papers and started moving into our church. Even then, we knew we had to leave that building as soon as possible. Because of inflation, rent increases at least 15% every six months. That means our monthly rent that was $375 a year ago became $430 in January and would be $500 next month. Would be, but it’s not. We had our last service in that building yesterday and are racing to finish the remodel on our new building this week before the Encounter retreat and inauguration of the new building this weekend. The new building is OUR building. With funds raised through alabaster offerings, 40/40 donors (you), and Extreme church fund-raising, we bought a building three blocks from our original church.

Front of the new church building

The first adventure was finding and choosing a new church. For six months we kept our eyes peeled for For Sale signs whenever we were walking through the city. We called countless real estate agents and toured a dozen properties before selecting the best option. The next adventure was physically getting the money from Boise and Buenos Aires to pay for the building. Unlike the United States, Argentina runs on cash. Instead of putting in a code or card and moving the imaginary numbers from one bank account to another, we had to send over $60,000 (Extreme’s part of the purchase) here to Cordoba. That’s some 870,000 pesos. In cash. In a currency where the largest bill is 100 pesos. I won’t bore you with the details, but you can imagine all the fun/trouble we had transferring and collecting that much money from the banks. I now know way more about Western Union’s Argentine banking policies than I ever wished to know.

This is what 870,000 pesos looks like (that's my bed).
Dear potential thieves: we don't have all this money in our house anymore. You already
missed your opportunity. Please don't break into our house. You will be disappointed.

So now we are in the third adventure: remodeling. The building is a two story home. The pastors are living upstairs, and we are transforming the ground floor into a sanctuary and classrooms. Basically, this includes installing a kitchen upstairs, removing a wall downstairs, and cleaning everything several times. The sanctuary space is smaller than the old sanctuary space, but it has plenty of room as we are still doing two services. The building belongs to the Nazarene Cordoba district and has space to grow (take out more walls/expand to the back patio) as the church continues to grow exponentially over the next few years.

Removing the wall

No more wall!

As with any challenge, one of the blessings is seeing how much love and support God provides for us in the most surprising ways. Several church members have been in the new building every day helping clean, paint, cook, move, repair, rewire, organize, giving their time and talents to prepare our new home. You don’t know them, but they are special to me. I love their hearts and their care for our church, so I want to include their names: Sol, Jorge, Erminda, Enzo, David, Laura, Luca, and Marina.

Enzo and Luca fix an exterior light while Pastora supervises.

Enzo, Luca, David, and Jorge help move the last load of furniture from the old church.

We had our first event in the church last Saturday. My mom brought fingernail polish, modeling clay, and charms to make necklaces for our second ever women’s event. We talked and created and pampered for over three hours, blessing the new building with laughter and love. God’s blessings are abundant.