For LCC 2025 will certainly be a true new year of a New Year’s. We will be celebrating our history and also crafting new ways forward that build on the roots and strengths of our church. So as this new year starts, let’s take a peek at what will be happening that is new and a return to the old as our church enters its sixtieth year.
Speaking of anniversaries, we will get to relive the LCC memory lane as we reach important milestones in our history. July of 1965 saw the first church services on our campus and Lutheran Church of the Cross was officially organized on Reformation Day in October of that year.
Last year we raised money to upgrade our office windows to hurricane windows, get new window treatments and some new office furniture. The new windows were in place at the time of the hurricanes and may have helped keep the flooding in the offices to only 2-3 inches (though the outside waterline was over a foot!) The small amount of new office furniture that had been bought survived and window treatments and other parts of the upgrades had not been done by the time of the flooding. This 60 for 60 campaign was meant as the start for our renewing our facilities for the next sixty years.
With the rebuilding currently going on, we have had the opportunity to make some adjustments in our building that would have been cost prohibitive before. We are saving money by not replacing everything as it was, making better use of our space as our needs have evolved. In new improvements, there is now a door between the Fellowship Hall and the Youth Room to facilitate our use of both spaces. (This was in the original plans but never realized.) We are also adding a sink to the Nursery Room so that we can have our baby changing area in the nursery and not in a separate room a ways away.
In the economizing mode, we are not replacing many built-in cabinets that were in the office areas. Instead, we will be purchasing mobile stand-alone storage units that can be placed where necessary and moved to higher ground in case of a flood! We are also opening up the main office area to be a more flexible work space with more work areas and additional meeting space. We have also rebuilt with the idea of surviving future floods with less damage. Wall outlets are now higher up the walls in our low-lying areas. Carpet squares will be used in the Fellowship Hall so that we can do area replacement if necessary for minor water incursion.
We hope to be able to reopen our water damaged areas in late January. With God’s help we are using our current challenges to make even more opportunities to build on what the Holy Spirit planted here sixty years ago. We plan to continue the mission of the original charter members: To provide a faith community and place for spreading the gospel in Shore Acres, Venetian Isles, Snell Isle and beyond. This will truly be a new, New Year.
