In November of 2023, the Lease Agreement between OKC First Christian Church and the Disciples Center comes to an end, and the Disciples Center will revert back to OKC First Christian Church. This has been a long-held relationship between the two. For sixty years, the Disciples Center has been the home of the Regional Church, Oklahoma Disciples Foundation, Oklahoma Conference of Churches, and Oklahoma Interfaith Alliance, working together to share space, collegiality, and oftentimes collaboration.
As this Lease Agreement comes to an end, that means that all four entities will be transitioning to other locations some time in 2023. This does not mean that our collegiality and collaboration will go away, just the shared space!
Over the 60 years, the Regional Church has collected many, many, many paper files such as Official Board Minutes, Financials, Clergy Files, Congregational Files. Over the summer, the fabulous staff has been going through files, cleaning them out, in preparation for all of our files to be scanned and digitized into a database. It has been and still is an overwhelming process.
We have secured the services of eFileCabinet for our digitized filing system, and plan to do the scanning in three to four phases. Last week, the first phase began. We boxed and shipped to the scanning company in Utah all of our active “clergy and congregation files.” The team there is in the process of scanning our documents and uploading them into the system so we can have access. It is a remarkable process and also requires us to re-imagine our thinking and workflow processes! All of the Regional Church files should be in the new system by the end of 2022. This will allow us to significantly reduce our square footage for a future space.
After the first of the year, we will also need assistance in packing what we need to keep and selling the remnants. The Regional Church Board is on task to help! After the first of the year, there will be a sign-up schedule for volunteers!
We will keep the Region posted here on our ongoing office transition! Thank you for your patience and your prayers as we continue to do our work in the midst of all of this.
