Transitions – Portable to Permanent (Part 2)

This is the second part of a conversation I had with Jessie Wilson, Director of Operations for The Point Church in Charlottesville, VA, about their journey going from portable to permanent. After spending 10 years operating as a portable church, The Point acquired property and built from the ground up, opening their permanent home in September 2020. Part 1 covered their time being portable and the decision-making process to move toward a permanent home. In this post, we discuss life in their new facility.

You’re now in your new home.  Overall, how has the experience been?

As somebody who has overseen operations for the church for the last six years, it’s a whole new world. It’s definitely a mind shift to go from thinking, “Alright, I’ve got two hours of set up, two hours of teardown, with two church services in between” to being able to direct most of your focus to the service itself.

Even for our congregation, it feels like home; like we’ve arrived. And they have the sense that it’s our church–it’s not Monticello High School that we put our church into for a few hours on Sundays—it’s our church. So, it gives ownership to our people. It’s awesome. I don’t know any other way to say it other than it’s awesome.

How has volunteering changed?

There’s still some amount of set up and tear down, but it’s looks very different. It allows people to focus more energy on their specific gifts. 

We now have a building to maintain which has allowed us to start a mentorship program where we pair older members that have certain gifts or skillsets with younger members.  For example, in setting up our Kidspoint environments, there was a great opportunity for the younger guys in our church to learn from our older members and get hands on experience in building furniture. Additionally, a Christ-based relationship is formed, where later on, the younger member can lean on the older one for advice in dealing with issues that may come up in their lives. This was a huge opportunity for our church body to have a great mentorship program where you don’t even realize you’re in a mentorship program. You’re just hanging out with the guys.

Have you had any unexpected benefits from having a permanent home?

There have been a lot of things. I think the overall thing that I’ve been impressed by and have loved so much is the ownership that our church body has taken in it. 

We’ve had a number of opportunities that having a permanent building has given us. For example, a couple of months ago, we teamed with local restaurants and fed twelve hundred meals to health care workers on a Wednesday night—the building allowed us to do that.

Sometimes people will come and sit in the parking lot simply to enjoy the view.

We’ve had people come to us asking for help, which we didn’t experience before because outside of Sunday mornings when our signs were out and visible, people didn’t know where to find us. Having a permanent facility has allowed us to become more of a fixture in the community. For instance, a couple of months ago there was a lady whose car broke down. Having seen the sign on our building, she knew that we were here, and we were able to help her. So, it just expanded our ministry to another level that we didn’t have before.

What advice would you give another church that was considering a permanent home?

Do it.  I think it’s a great move. It redirects the energy that you’re using on setup and teardown and the other aspects of being portable into other areas and allows you to expand your ministry in other places.

Don’t build to accommodate your current attendance—always project for growth.

Use the move as an opportunity to build off past experience while still maintaining your identity. As a portable church, we learned to be scrappy out of necessity, and I hope we never lose that. At the end of the day, we’re still The Point.

Blueline has been honored to serve The Point and are excited to hear about the opportunities and positive outcomes that being in their new building has given them.

Mike Wittig 
Senior Project Leader | Architect