With no partners, no financial support, no congregation and no advertising money, Chad & Lacy moved to
College Station,
TX to launch
Lighthouse
Bible
Church. By faith, they took out a $30,000 personal loan and paid one year of rent for the old Grapevine Restaurant. After a month of renovations, they held the first service on September 10, 2006 with 23 people in attendance. As the church began to grow, the building was becoming to small and the church began to look for a new location. In May 2007, the owners of the Grapevine building decided to sell and offered the building to the Lighthouse, but Pastor Chad & Lacy declined as there was no room to expand.
By the leading of the Holy Spirit, on May 16th, Pastor Chad & Lacy emptied the bank account and sowed a $10,000 seed to
RHEMA
Bible
Training
Center towards the purchase of their new building; the only problem was, there was no building and Lighthouse had four months to be out of their current facility.
In July 2007,
Lighthouse
Bible
Church again followed the leading of the Lord and signed a five year lease on a dilapidated grocery store in downtown
Bryan. The building was basically a skeleton needing approximately $50,000 worth of renovations simply to get it up to code…but God had better things in store. Two months later, Lighthouse was contacted by the city of
Bryan about possibly selling their newly signed lease which led to months of negotiations.
The second to last service at the Grapevine building, a gentleman approached Pastor Chad and began telling him about a church building that was available…but there was no for sale sign. The next day, Pastor
Chad called the mortgage company in
Florida who owned it and they met with him that week at the property. The building was on almost 5 acres and was approximately 14,000sq feet. The building was great, but the only problem was…two year before, it had been appraised for 1 million dollars. Pastor
Chad had favor with the company and they began negotiations.
After many months of negotiations with many different parties,
Lighthouse
Bible
Church received a large settlement from the city of
Bryan for their lease and was able to purchase the 14,000 sq ft property.
In only 1 ˝ years, Lighthouse Bible Church went from a church with no building, no money, no assets and no people… to a church owning a 1 million dollar building, money in the bank and people from all over the Brazos Valley in attendance….and we are just getting started! God is good and He has good things in store for those who will simply believe Him!
