Building Expansion

The Heart of Giving
Our first answer to this question is... whatever you are led to give. This is in line with 2 Corinthians 9:6-7:

"The point is this: The person who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the person who sows generously will also reap generously. Each person should do as he has decided in his heart—not reluctantly or out of compulsion, since God loves a cheerful giver.”

At the end of the day, we are far more interested in the heart posture of the Veritas family than a fundraising goal. We want to be a church full of people that serve God rather than money. As Jesus says in Matthew 6:19-21...

“Don’t store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves don’t break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

A Practical Framework
Still, you might be interested in an objective starting point, and that is a valid request! 

One helpful way of thinking about it is in relation to our general giving. We expect around $3.6 million in regular giving during this fiscal year. Our fundraising goal is $4 million, so this means if everyone takes their annual regular giving and contributes just above that amount to the Building Fund, we will be right around our goal. 

Please note that only 50% of pledged funds can be counted toward our $4 million goal. So, funds given by January 2025 are in effect twice as important as pledged giving for the rest of 2025 and into 2026. If you are able to “front-load” your giving in 2024, that will go a long way toward helping us achieve our goal.

The numbers above demonstrate how we could reach the goal largely just through our existing givers going above and beyond. However, the goal becomes much more attainable (and exciting) as new givers are able to begin contributing. If you have recently found new life in Christ, or a new church home at Veritas, we hope you will help pave the way for the next person to follow.

Our Building Team spent perhaps more time on this question than any other in the design process. We wanted this decision to be based on principle, and thus some key factors shaped the auditorium design rather than setting out to reach a certain seating capacity. First, we love how our current auditorium feels, so we were able to use it as the starting point for the orientation, stage height/shape, seating, and other aspects of the new auditorium. Second, we highly value the intimacy of the worship environment. Our staff and elders made trips to other churches and gauged how to preserve this intimacy while increasing seating capacity. They observed that factors such as making sure the last row of the auditorium reached back only to a certain distance and keeping the ceiling height from growing too high would help greatly toward this end. Prioritizing these values led to the design of an overall space that we felt good about, and it was from there that we determined that around 1,500 chairs would fit in that space. 

In the near term, we would love to keep the existing auditorium as close to its present form as possible. This will continue to be a great space for The Salt Company, Equipping, and Youth (as they are already outgrowing the Equipping Room!). In the meantime, we will be able to both assess how Veritas can best use that space going forward and also save up the funds to make changes at the proper time.

The estimated monthly payment on our loan is $75,532.88. We believe that this is a sustainable number for Veritas for several reasons. First, this number represents only 24% of our income from the last fiscal year. Second, since paying off our current building, we have been setting aside far more than this ($100,000/mo) towards a future building as part of our annual budget. We believe that it is a sensible amount both now and in the future as we see more people joining our church family and giving regularly.

We would love to have offices someday, and have especially noticed a need for places to have one-on-one conversations (both on Sundays and during the week). To this point, we have never fully finished our current office space, and a large portion of these "offices" are devoted to storage. We have a design in place to finish the offices, but we want to prioritize our ability to fund the new auditorium and kids classrooms first because of the cost and time demands of such a large project. We also want to wait for a little while to see if the offices might function better if located in the proposed shell space, the old auditorium, or even some of the existing kids classrooms. Our staff team is very understanding and they want to put the needs of the broader church body first, so we are planning to see how these other pieces fall into place first.

Yes! This can be a great tax-effective way to give. If you are interested in pursuing this further, please get in touch with our Operations Director Shane Kelley at skelley@veritascommunity.org.