Four Things We Learned Waiting for a Key
On a Thursday in April, a man who once ran this city told us the truth.
He came to the meeting as a guest. Lawyer's mind, mayor's memory. He listened to us talk about our building on Mount Vernon Avenue, the one that has been standing since 1952, and then he said the quiet part out loud. Getting that chapel up to code would be a mighty lift.
Nobody argued.
That was the same meeting where the Presbytery voted yes. Yes to the agreement. Yes to our standing as a worshiping community. Yes to the property. We had prayed toward that vote for years. And the first honest word spoken over it was a warning.
That is what this year has been.
We are Church of Amazing Grace International. Kenyan roots. California address. People scattered across freeways that were never designed to keep a congregation close. Our theme this year comes from Isaiah 61. They shall rebuild the ancient ruins. Together.
We chose that verse in January. We did not know how literal it would get.
Here are four things we learned.
1. Waiting is work
We spent months doing what looked like nothing.
Reading. Verifying. Asking the same question three different ways until the answer stopped changing. There were Sundays when a member would shake my hand and ask, gently, whether anything was actually happening. It is a fair question. From the outside, patience and paralysis look identical.
Swahili has a word for this. Subira (Soo-bee-rah). Patience, but the working kind. The kind that keeps its shoes on.
We learned that waiting is not the pause before the work. Sometimes it is the work. And the congregations that skip it usually pay for it later, with interest.
2. Faith and paperwork are not enemies
I used to think documentation was the unspiritual part of ministry. The thing you tolerate so you can get back to the real thing.
Then we watched how much rests on a sentence.
Who owns what. Who authorized what. What was agreed in a hallway and what was agreed on paper. We learned to stop treating a handshake as a decision. Not because people are dishonest, but because memory is soft and buildings are hard, and six months from now nobody will recall the tone of voice.
So we write things down. We ask for it in writing. We keep the file.
This is not a lack of trust. It is how you protect a relationship you intend to keep.
3. The ruins have an order
Our renovation has a sequence. The chapel first. Then the main building. There is no version of this where we do the exciting part before the necessary part.
I have wanted to skip it more than once.
But everything worth rebuilding has an order to it, and the order is almost never the one you would pick. Marriages have it. Recovery has it. Grief has it. You do not get to start where it feels good. You start where the foundation is weakest, and you stay there longer than you want to.
The people who rush the sequence do not finish faster. They just finish twice.
4. We were guests before we were hosts
For months we have worshiped in a building that belongs to someone else.
First Presbyterian Church of San Bernardino gave us a room, a schedule, and a key ring that was not ours. Every Sunday we set up. Every Sunday we packed down. We were careful with someone else's chairs.
That season taught us something we would not have learned in our own building. Hospitality is not a feature of church. It is the whole posture. Somebody made room for us before we had anything to offer them in return.
We will not forget what that felt like. Especially now.
On Sunday, August 2, we gather at 829 N. Mount Vernon Avenue for the first time.
The building is not finished. It will not be finished for a while. There is a chapel behind it that still needs more than we currently have, and we are not going to pretend otherwise from a pulpit.
But a church was never a building. A church is a group of people who decided that the difficulty was not a reason to leave.
The keys are ours now. The ruins are ours too.
We will take both.
If you are close enough to drive, come and see. 829 N. Mount Vernon Avenue, San Bernardino.
Church of Amazing Grace International. Rebuilding the Ruins Together, 2026.