Justice Calendaring

Finding Room = Finding Time = Finding Parking

JUC’s space dilemmas aren’t always related to Sunday mornings.  Just ask Jill Armstrong, recent Social Justice chair and current JUC CAN coordinator.

“Remember last year when we had a forum for the Jeffco School Board election?” she asks, undoubtedly rolling her eyes. “One of the candidates was a few minutes late. There were so many people crowding into the sanctuary that there wasn’t a single space left in the parking lot.  The candidate had to park on the street, practically in the ditch!”

Members of JUC have long said that they want to be a church with a civic circumference, to be a place where people know they can come to get good information on local issues.  How can that work, Jill asks, if we don’t have enough room and enough parking for major events?

In JUC’s busy world of social justice, space constraints show up in other ways. Last month, leaders were trying to schedule space for two League of Women Voters events. They hoped for a weekend night and a weeknight. Finding a Saturday wasn’t that difficult. Finding a weeknight was. (They finally found a Tuesday evening that would work). Another example came last winter.  A February meeting for the Community Action Network (JUC CAN) had to be cancelled because of bad weather. It took two months to find a time to reschedule a space to hold 60 participants.

The thing to emphasize, Jill says, is  people can look at the sanctuary on Sunday and think – no problem, there’s room.  “They forget about all the other ways we need the church,” she says. “I have felt space constraints much more in trying to schedule during the week.  That’s when we really feel the lack of capacity.” 

What does this have to do with Making Room?  If and when we find a new and larger campus, this is a BIG thing for the checklist:  more meeting rooms, more large capacity rooms and MORE PARKING!