This content has been curated from an interview with Dan Brubacher – Executive Pastor at Harvest Bible Chapel in Barrie, Ontario.

In 2001, Pastor Todd Dugard and his family moved to Barrie, Ontario to start Harvest Bible Chapel with a small group of friends.

The church grew quickly and managed to maintain its growth throughout the next decade despite never having a permanent facility to worship in.

It wasn’t until 2015 that were able to find a place that could serve as a suitable home for Harvest Barrie.

They found a 40 year-old veterans hall that was structurally sound but needed some major renovations.

After 15 years of meeting portably, the leaders of Harvest Barrie knew that this was their time to finally build a permanent home for their church.

So in January of 2016, they took a major step of faith and put an offer on the building for $3.35 million.

The offer was accepted, but now the real work began – they needed to raise money to fund the massive amount of renovations the building required.

However, there was a challenge because only one pastor on staff had ever been through a capital campaign, so they realized they needed some expert coaching to help them get the campaign process right.   

So in February of 2016, the leaders of Harvest Barrie made the decision to attend Capital Campaign University.

After attending CCU, they followed “the binder” very closely in setting up their campaign.

Based on their projections from INJOY Stewardship’s Financial Analysis, they set a goal to raise $1.8 million in order to complete “bare-bones” renovations of their facility.

This number scared the leaders of the church a bit because it was one and a half times their annual budget, but what they didn’t know was that these projections would be far exceeded.

Before they ever unveiled the campaign’s “Made for This” vision to the congregation, the staff and elders at Harvest Barrie committed over $400,00 to the building project.

Then they presented the vision to an inside group of bought-in leaders and influencers at the church – that group of 100 committed over $1.7 million dollars.

Before the campaign vision had ever been cast to the congregation the church had already exceeded their commitment goal of $1.8 million by $300,000.  

So, the staff and elders at Harvest Barrie decided to set a new goal for the campaign – $2.9 million to fund more complete renovations at the church.

Well, as you may guess, once pledges were totaled from the entire congregation, commitments amounted to over $3.2 million dollars – over two and a half times their annual budget.

Harvest Bible Chapel in Barrie, Ontario has seen God do some miraculous things in their church through the capital campaign process, but according to Pastor Dan, there’s nothing too special about their church, they aren’t in a wealthy community, and they did not receive any large gifts over $200,000.

They are, “just an everyday church with a lot of people slugging it out… there’s nothing too special about us, so there’s no reason God can’t do this for everybody.”