New Location Helps Church Invest and Reach Out 
When Within Reach Ministries needed to find a
new worship space, the church's leadership
realized that about half of its congregation
was driving 10 or 15 miles to its location in
downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan, from the
neighboring city of Parchment. After some
searching, the church purchased a vacant
building in Parchment with the help of a
$90,000 loan from the Church Growth Fund.
"People from our congregation
don't live in downtown
Kalamazoo," says Lon
Bouma, one of Within
Reach's pastors. "When we
moved into Parchment, the
general consensus was,
'This is our neighborhood!
We're going to worship
and be centered in the
place where we live, and
that makes a difference to us. We can minister
in our neighborhood. I can walk around my
neighborhood and invite my neighbor to worship.
That matters to me.'"
The church relocated to Parchment in March
2007, and Bouma says it's been a remarkable
journey. "It has been a tremendous blessing.
There are people who live in the neighborhood
who come to worship. That didn't happen
when we were downtown. There are
more new people who come in the doors of
this building; it seems like 10 times the
amount of new people come."
Within Reach Ministries now numbers around
70 adult participants, but it began in 2000
with a group of 15 people worshiping in
someone's living room. "The initial mission of
the ministry, which has stayed true 'til today, is
to love God and love your neighbor," Bouma
says. "The vision is to be transformed into the
image of Christ.
"Essentially the way we live out our mission to
love God and neighbor is through worship
and impact. We don't have programs, just
worship and impact. Worship is where we
invite the world into the church to worship
God, and impact is where we invite the
church to the world. Our hope is that we are
a people beginning to look more and more
like the Lord Jesus each day."
As the church began to grow, it
worshiped in a number of locations.
Starting in 2002, worship
services were held in the building
of First Reformed Church in
downtown Kalamazoo. First
Reformed eventually dissolved,
and Within Reach shared the building with another new church for awhile.
"Classis was helping out, but essentially the building itself was going to cost
about five or six times as much to maintain as what we were paying in rent.
We started looking around, because
we weren't going to be able to
afford that. I think that was God's
first nudge."
Not long after that, a group from the
church visited the building where
they now worship, which had
recently been used by another
church, and saw its potential.
Over the course of the next month, Bouma says, "We were in contact with
classis all the time. We didn't know exactly how we were going to do this.
It cost about as much as a house would cost, but we're still a small congregation
and we don't have a lot of
money sitting around." The classis
worked with the RCA Church
Growth Fund to secure a
loan for Within Reach.
"It was a remarkable
thing for us that we
got this loan, that
the classis could
help us, and that
all of this stuff just
kept lining up and lining
up and lining up, one
thing after another,"
says Bouma.
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