Seeing Potential in an Empty Shell

Where is God calling you as a business owner to say, “Let there be light?”

The building had been sitting empty for almost 10 years. It served as the international

headquarters of a major American manufacturer. More than 250 employees filled it in

its heyday. Large open spaces allowed for cubicles, offices, and meeting rooms of

varied sizes.

It had “good bones,” which included

• 10 beautifully landscaped acres surrounding the facility.

• Deep underground springs interestingly keeping the parking lot just warm enough to at least mitigate snow accumulations.

• A heated water furnace system that kept the building free of the annoying hums of off and on ventilating fans.

• A basement that is the place you want to be if a tornado is coming your way.

Times changed, and the manufacturer closed operations from this location, and the building sat, for several years, as an empty shell just waiting for repurposing.

A deal that would have been a game-changer came and went.

And the building owner (Sheila Ingram) with even more fervency than usual said: “God, I give this building to you for your use). That was in 2008.

Almost ten years later, enter the local pastor.

For years he’d been carefully grooming a church “restart” that at one point showed tremendous promise. And he did the old-fashioned way---a lot of prayer, occasional fasting, and just plain community connection and hard work.

They’d grown to the point to where they could buy a small historic church in a community that had recently moved into a larger church down the road. By God’s grace, they were able to buy the building, and the first thing they did was build a connector to connect the two stand-alone buildings.

And “the connector” became a metaphor for a ministry that would not only become a hallmark of the church’s ministry, but a ministry that would survive it even after the church eventually passed on.

“ConneXions,” the pastor used to call it. “Connecting real needs, good deeds, and people from all walks of life.” It was a ministry of looking for and building connections between various service players in the community. A ministry of not only discovering those connections and making them evident, but furthering them by shepherding them and converging them into operating wholes.

The church didn’t make it. But the ministry of ConneXions was not ready to lie down and die. God was directing it into a new location, just up the street, at the empty, lifeless building business owner Sheila had given to God.

In fact three days after the pastor’s church ministry officially ended, he got a call from a Christian brother who knew both him and Sheila well.

“Pastor,” he began the call, “there’s a building I think the Spirit told me you need to call up and ask about.” “Pastor,” he said, “ you need to check this building out.”

The pastor was in the midst of legally severing ties with the old ministry he’d once been a part of. It was interesting that the call to tour the building came just three in-the-tomb days after the pastor’s church stint officially ended.

Resurrections, it seems, always come “after three days.”

THE BIBLE AND RESURRECTIONS

Karl Barth says this is the first Scripture alluding to the resurrecting power of God came pretty early in the Scripture. In the first verse, actually.

Genesis 1:1-3

The Beginning

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” So God created the heavens in the earth.

Something, as opposed to “nothing,” came to be. But the minute “something” emerged, “nothing” reared its ugly head. The earth was (or became) “formless and empty.” Darkness was “over the surface” of the deep.

But God doesn’t give in to darkness and formlessness. Where His life is, resurrection life is simply a given. He can stand up to the darkness and chaos that emerge to shut down any new creation. He can defy the death they bring, and keep the creation going even after death.

And that’s what He did in May of 2017 to Sheila Ingram’s “void and without use” shell of a building.

“In the beginning, Sheila Ingram had built a building for... but the vision for the building was void and without form...and the Spirit of ConneXion was hovering over the remnants of the pastor’s ministry, and God said, ‘Let there be light.’”

You’ll be amazed at what comes next. Maybe even for Cincinnati.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sWQYBmktwvw31t911INesYbiv9HZQ2nt/view?usp=sharing