Standing on the Promises: Securing the Next Century
You can help us Secure the Next Century by Standing on the Promises TODAY
For almost 100 years, McFarlin has faithfully embraced and shared the life-changing, world- changing Good News of God’s love in Jesus Christ. Believing that God would use this church to advance God’s promises to redeem lives and transform the world, generation after generation has stood together. Because so many have stood on the promises of God through times of great challenge and in seasons of growth and expansion, we are part of this church at a unique moment in time when we are both meeting current challenges and advancing effective ministry with vigor and adaptivity. As we approach our centennial in 2024, we believe we are called to act boldly to secure another century of high impact ministry.
Construction Update
What is Standing on the Promises?
Our mission is to Change Lives That Change the World. We know that if we are to continue offering excellent worship, discipleship, mission, and care ministries, we must upgrade and maintain our historic building so that more people can gather together to hear God speak through Scripture, express our love for him through song, grow in our faith, and serve God and our community fully.
Alongside critical infrastructure upgrades, we have an unsolicited, donor-initiated gift that began in the donor’s heart by the initiating work of God who laid an unavoidable calling upon the donor’s heart to underwrite the construction of a new Missions Center to replace the 87-year-old house that houses the food pantry ministries.
Ways to Learn About the Standing on the Promises Campaign
Click the button below to download and read our through our booklet for this campaign. Inside you will find the projects in our vision, a lenten study guide, and answers to many questions you might have.
Capital Campaign Updates
We are excited to announce that as of July 31st members of the McFarlin family have pledged $6.17 million towards our $6.2 million Standing on the Promises campaign. To date we have received just over $3.5 million in contributions, meaning we already have 56% of our total goal, and pledge gifts are still coming in steadily! This is simply a testament to the faithfulness of God and each and every one of you! All of the progress made to date (which you will read more about below) and the developments still to come are because of our combined faithfulness to God in Christ through McFarlin! Thank you!
Since the conclusion of our Standing on the Promises: Securing the Next Century capital campaign in April, the Building Committee has been BUSY!
Working to formalize and finalize all of the agreements with architects, engineers and construction management partners, the committee has identified the work of each organization and estimated timelines for each activity to be completed.
The initial steps for the architects and engineers focused on developing conceptual designs, and then moved to refining the designs. Ultimately this leads to construction level drawings that will support permit applications and contractor bids for the work.
We are excited to report that we are on schedule and approximately 65% of the way to the construction level drawings!
Our construction manager has informed us that lead times for heating and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment may be as long as 26 weeks. We asked our engineers to adjust their schedule to provide HVAC “bid-level” drawings as soon as possible to allow us to place orders to secure the equipment in a timely manner.
We will be ordering this equipment early in August, giving us our first insight into the construction start time which we are projecting to be early in 2023. We also identified a lead time of 18 weeks for the elevator refurbishment and the order was placed for that equipment.
Construction Updates:
- Feb. 10 – Weekly Update
- Feb. 17 – Weekly Update
- Feb. 24 – Weekly Update
- March 3 – Weekly Update
- March 17 – Weekly Update
- March 31 – Weekly Update
The Mission Center, while a more straight-forward construction project, has a few extra steps to reach the construction phase. The architects met with the City of Norman to discuss the conceptual design (see rendering above) and have been incorporating that feedback in their design details. We also invited our neighbors and our Ward 4 council member to come to an informal meeting at the church to learn more about our plan and to provide feedback.
The Mission Center team has been working hand-in-hand with the architect to provide their vision and floor layout for food distribution in the new building. Beginning on August 1st we will be starting the formal process of gaining the community, Planning Commission and City Council approval of our Mission Center design. We are expecting to start construction at the same time as the infrastructure project in early 2023.
Food Distribution During Construction Currently, the Food Pantry team is dealing with the extreme heat while meeting the increased
demand of people feeling the impact of higher food prices. As a result, ideas about how to handle food distribution during the construction phase of the new building are being discussed to enable the volunteers to work in a more tolerable environment than originally envisioned, and still meet the needs of our community.
Video Stories
Snapshot of McFarlin
Use the arrows to click through the photos below
For in Jesus Christ every one of God’s promises is a “Yes” for this reason it is through Christ that we say the “Amen,” to the glory of God.
– 2 Corinthians 1:20