pat loughery

One of our folks is in commercial property management. My sister-in-law, actually; she’s been in this racket for 12 or 15 years and has recently left the company whose office she ran so that she can start up her own business.

With the wide variety of building space for lease in our area right now, I’ve asked her to check out the available properties for one of two possibilities for us:

1. An office space that I can set up as my afternoon hangout spot, so that we can have a publicly visible presence in the community. Ideally this is a room large enough that we can do our Alpha course, couples workshops, 101 class and that sort of thing in – and be available for things like Mothers Of Preschoolers, addiction recovery groups and other community services. Even more ideally, what I really want is a space that we can drop some couches, beanbag chairs, foosball/pinball/pool/darts type stuff that the local teenagers can come to hang out in. There’s no third place in our town – not a thing – and if we could get a chill zone set up for these folks, it’d be a nice service to offer.

2. There are several larger facilities available, and if we can stumble into something that we could use for all our gatherings (i.e. Sunday stuff for adults & kids, PLUS the above ideas), for not much more than we’re paying for our facility now, that’d be fantastic. I’m doubtful that we can find such a spot right now, but who knows. There are a lot of spaces in town available for lease, so the market might be soft enough for us to try it.

We have a nice, and beneficial, releationship with the facility that we currently rent – the senior citizens center. It’s a well known location, has two large rooms for us to use for the adults and kids’ gatherings, we get the room for whenever we need it Sunday plus a couple of evenings a week, we have on-site storage, and it’s a sweetheart price as well. But we also have scheduling conflicts, double- and triple- bookings, and we’ve heard from several of our younger people that their friends just don’t want to come to a church that gathers in a senior center – no matter that the church itself is young, the space sounds weird to them. So at some point, we’ll need to move. I’m just not convince that the time is right, but we are putting out some feelers just in case God’s up to something…