IT’S TIME is a three-year generosity initiative to fund our vision to strengthen our community engagement, elevate our ministry capacity, and fearlessly lay the foundation for our future growth. Through IT’S TIME, God is calling us to partner with Him by investing ourselves and our resources in greater levels of commitment, in order to saturate Rocky Mount and Wilson and the surrounding areas of Eastern North Carolina with the gospel of Jesus Christ!

Our goal is that 100% of our church family will fully engage in the IT’S TIME journey. We want everyone praying and participating. We will trust God for the results, and move forward in the timetable that makes the most sense. We will be financially responsible. If everyone at Eastgate commits to going on this spiritual journey together, and then responds as God directs, we believe extraordinary things will happen. It really is about allowing God to do the impossible inside each of us, so that he can do the impossible through us!

Because it’s time. In 2017, we hired a consultant to help us design a Master Building Plan for our Wilson campus. In 2018, we completed Phase One of the plan. We opened a new children’s educational wing and playground. In 2019, we began a three-year generosity initiative called “Rise Up” with the goal of raising $1 million to accomplish Phase Two. By the end of the initiative in 2021, we had raised over $1.2 million in over and above giving. Our Rocky Mount campus participated in the last half of Rise Up and started raising money for a “Future Home Fund” to prepare for the future.

In 2021, we began Phase Two by remodeling another of the theater rooms, creating a multi-purpose space that we called “The Gathering Place.” We were able to use this space for KidzFest the Summer of 2021 and launched a second worship venue in this space in November 2021. In the Spring of 2022, we completed Phase Two by remodeling the lobby, the bathrooms, the nursery, and changing the name of our Wilson campus from Wilson Community Church to Eastgate Church.

Now, it’s time again to look to the future. We’ve made room for more at our Wilson campus by enlarging our children’s ministry areas and doubling our adult worship capacity. Now, it’s time to strengthen our community engagement to fill the room we’ve made.

It’s time to address the needs of our Rocky Mount campus. We’ve been renting now for nine years. We’ve been saving for a future home. Now, a miraculous property has become available. We believe it’s time to finally purchase a real home for our church family in Rocky Mount.

It’s been three years since our last generosity initiative and we believe it’s time to stretch again! Rocky Mount and Wilson are both experiencing economic, residential, and population growth. We believe now is the time to be strong, do the work, and to be fearless!

The church is the family of God. And healthy families grow. Just as parents sometimes may wish that their children wouldn’t grow so fast, so we may cling to a similar sentiment for our church. Yet, the truth is, no parent would truly wish their children not to grow. That would be unhealthy and selfish. Neither should we wish that our church family wouldn’t grow. 

Besides, the Lord Jesus has commanded us to make disciples of all nations. As we are obedient to Christ’s command, we will grow. As a result, we will need to strengthen our community engagement, so that every man, woman, and child had repeated opportunities to see, hear, and respond to the gospel. We will also need to enhance our current ministries and enlarge our ministry capacity by adding more volunteers and pastoral staff. Of course, we also need to provide adequate space for this growth at both our current campuses, and at future campuses in Eastern North Carolina as the Lord leads us. Every family needs a home. 

Because our goal is 100% engagement in taking the spiritual journey together, not in raising $1.5 million. We will be preaching through the book of Haggai and asking our church family to respond as the people of Haggai’s day did, by saying, “It’s time to be strong, do the work, and to be fearless.” We believe that how we handle the time, talent and treasure that God gives us is a spiritual matter. So, we will be challenging everyone to prayerfully trust God by growing in their personal investment into His kingdom. Not everyone will be able to give the same, but everyone should be willing to prayerfully consider giving more. 

Radical generosity is our goal for everyone. We want to move people up the generosity ladder to experience the freedom and joy of being a generous giver and investor in God’s kingdom. If everyone fully engages in the spiritual journey together, then whatever we raise, we will be thankful. Yet, we are trusting that as our people will willingly and sacrificially give above their tithes and offerings, we will be able to accomplish the vision God has given us.

No, not if our church continues to follow the paradigm given in the 1st century church to grow big and small at the same time. Remember what the Scripture says, “Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah” (Acts 5:42). As we grow in Sunday attendance, we will need to launch new community groups that meet in homes. We will continue to follow the rhythm of the 1st century church–– meeting in the “temple courts and from house to house.”

As our church grows, you won’t get lost in the crowd. you’ll always have your community group family and you’ll have the small service teams that you serve on with others in the church.

We will add it to our new member classes, we will do regular status updates, we will offer updates on our website and other media. We are also exploring other ways to keep it before everyone for the whole three years. We want every member of the church family to be involved in this. This includes the children and youth. We will be offering special training and teaching to our kids and youth during the It’s Time initiative and even reminders afterwards. We’ve learned that generous children grow up to be generous adults.

We hope to raise $1.5 million over the next three years over and above our normal tithes and offerings. We know that this will take much sacrifice and faith on our parts, but we believe that God is calling us to fully utilize what God has entrusted to us to reach more people with the Gospel. We also believe that the God who calls us to this great work, is also the God who will enable us to do it.

We have always been a church that lives within its means. After all, we met in homes and rented facilities for 19 years in Wilson before having a home of our own. And now, we’ve rented for nine years in Rocky Mount. We support dozens of local, domestic, and international ministries. We spends thousands of dollars annually in benevolence and missions.

So no, we don’t think this money could be spent better anywhere else. Our church handles all of its finances with integrity and multiple layers of accountability. We live within our means. Besides this, the church is God’s “Plan A” for reaching the world with the Gospel. He doesn’t have a “Plan B.” The church is a better investment than the government, better than any other non-profit, or NGO.

God has given us a vision to reach the people in our two cities and the people East of 95. Shouldn’t we be willing to give sacrificially so that it is used to its fullest potential? We believe that the church is the very best place to spend our generosity. We want to reach more people, inviting them to come just as they are and be forever changed by the love of Jesus.

It costs money to invest in new resident mailers, special event mailers, door-hangars, billboards and other traditional media. If people don’t know we exist, they won’t come. Just one mailer that goes out to several zip codes and households can cost quite a lot to cover printing, addressing and postage. And to reach the younger generations we must strengthen our social media engagement. Research tells us that Millennials and Gen Zers make at least 3 to 4 visits on Google and YouTube before considering an in-person visit. This means we may need to engage a social media firm to help us improve in this area. In addition, we want to look at adding other community outreach events like KidzFest and Whirligig to our annual calendar.

Yes. This is actually one of the benefits of the generosity initiative. According to current church growth research, a full-time pastor is needed for every 75-100 attenders. This means we are currently staffed to maintain who we are now in Rocky Mount, and we are understaffed in Wilson. In order to grow, we believe we need to add at least two pastoral staff, one at each campus. We plan to underwrite these two ministry positions from the It’s Time initiative for three years, at which time we believe we will have grown enough to carry the additional cost in our regular church budget.

In Rocky Mount, we need an associate pastor who can lead worship and oversee our Sunday morning ministry teams. This would free up our lead pastor to focus on preaching, prayer, and guests. The rest of the ministry responsibilities could be divided between the two pastors, according to their gifting and competencies. This would double our pastoral ministry capacity in Rocky Mount.

In Wilson, we know that we are understaffed, but we’re unsure about the next position most needed. Two of the ministry areas that we feel most stretched to fully cover are in getting new people connected to the church and in missions, both local and international. Really, these are two different positions, so we’ll be getting counsel on this and keeping you informed as we move forward. This initiative will help us fund this very important need until our church budget can grow to support it.

Because we have been advised that it is neither financially feasible nor practically advisable to do the worship center phase next. It will be the most costly phase and we want to grow in attendance and giving within our current building footprint before beginning Phase Three. This will put us in a better financial position to begin the worship center phase. But we do plan to set aside a portion of the funds from this initiative to be used for planning and design for this future phase, as well as starting a Phase Three fund, saving towards it. The time will come for Wilson to build a new worship center, but we have to fill this building first!

Having a new home of our own will definitely give us a great boost. When our Wilson campus moved from rental facilities to a home of its own, it doubled in attendance almost immediately. But we also worked really hard at promoting ourselves to the community, sharpening our ministry teams, and adding another pastor to the staff to help capture and maintain the growth. 

A new home of our own in Rocky Mount, one that has great visibility, is actually built to be a church, that offers great children’s accommodations, including a wonderful playground, and a beautiful worship space, will definitely help us grow. Yet the building by itself will not be enough. We will need to work to strengthen our community engagement, sharpen our ministries, and add to our pastoral staff. We will plan a Grand Opening as we relaunch our church in Rocky Mount. So yes, we believe that all of this together will help us reach more people with the gospel of Jesus!

First, they will be distributed according to priority, with community engagement being first priority. Then, they will be distributed according to need. We think we’ll need around 25 to 30 percent of the initiative to go towards strengthening community engagement. We’ll need 30 percent to go towards enhancing ministry capacity, and the final 35 to 40 percent to go towards establishing a Phase Three Fund for Wilson and supporting the additional mortgage payments as needed for Rocky Mount’s new building.

We don’t plan to use any of the funds in purchasing the new Rocky Mount property. The plan is to use our equity to secure a loan for the entire $1.2 million. Our loan capacity will be a determined based on our equity, our current giving, and the amount of our total generosity initiative commitments. We do plan to use part of the initiative funds to support the increased mortgage payments until we grow enough to cover it out of our general fund.

These funds will be collected into one fund. Although we keep our campus’ budgets separate, we will  be combining our It’s Time giving into one fund. This will make it easier and more strategic to budget for the three goals that we share as one church, two campuses.

First, we believe we will reach it. With God’s help and mutual sacrifice, we exceeded the goal in our last generosity initiative. So we have faith we will reach this goal too. However, we will always live within our means and we will adjust the funding of our three goals accordingly, with the priority being in the order of the three goals. This means first priority will go to strengthening our community engagement.

We love this question. It reveals a servant’s heart of unity and willingness. What can you do? Engage fully in the It’s Time journey. Let us be like the returning Jewish exiles who were challenged to be strong, do the work, and to fearlessly sacrifice to rebuild the Temple. Accept the challenge to own this vision and calling of God. We must walk this out in unity as a church. Start by praying for people in your life yet to be reached. Pray for what God would want to do in and through you to reach them.

Ask God to speak to your heart and simply respond to his leading when the time comes in 2025. Take the time to go through the materials we will provide to prepare us to hear from God. Be diligent to participate in all aspects of the It’s Time generosity initiative. Remember, our goal is 100% of our church family participating in prayer and sacrificial generosity when the time comes, so that together, we accomplish what God desires from us and for us.

Ask them. Let us know and we’ll add them to future versions of our FAQs and do our best to answer them. It’s important to us that everyone’s questions are given careful consideration. At the end of the day, we want to be united in vision and direction. We may not all agree on every detail (as is true in any family), but we want to always march together in unison towards God’s will for us.