A few days ago, I blogged about how our family is moving to Louisville, KY to start a church. (Read about that here) So I wanted to share how the Lord brought us to the decision to become church planters.
Probably a year before “everything began,” Chris commented that he thought starting a church from scratch was cool, because you were able to establish the vision that God was giving you from the very foundation. My retort was that it wasn’t that cool because church planters don’t get paid. There’s some faith for you!
You know that feeling when you go downstairs to do something, but when you get there you can’t remember what you were going to do? Or when you’re taking a test and you KNOW you know the answer, but it’s just at the tip of your brain and you can’t quite grab it? A little over a year ago, Chris and I started to get that kind of feeling. An “I know something is up, but I don’t know what it is,” kind of feeling.
Pretty much the only way to get to the bottom of a feeling like that is to seek the Lord. So that’s what we did. We prayed a lot, talked with mentors, fasted and all that good stuff. We came to a couple conclusions. The Lord was preparing us to move and it needed to come through relationship.
And we talked about starting a church. A lot.
We tried to look at options other than church planting, but when we did it felt like walking through Jello. It felt like death. But when Chris and I dreamed together about starting a church, it felt like our hearts came alive. Suddenly I didn’t care about getting paid (who really needs to eat, anyway?). All I wanted to do was church plant. I wanted it so bad it surprised even me!
Even though we really WANTED to be church planters, we didn’t just go on that. We kept praying, kept trying other options, kept asking the Lord for clear direction. The Lord spoke to us through a lot of different means: in our hearts, through the Word, through other people. But church planting is big step, so we kept weighing things and seeking clearer direction.
One day Chris just laid it out before the Lord and said, “Jesus, I need to know TODAY if you’re wanting us to plant a church or do something else.” That day he got a text before breakfast, had a conversation over lunch, and got an email after dinner: 3 different people, who had no idea what we were weighing, suggested that we plant a church.
You’d think that would have been enough evidence, but a few weeks went by and it didn’t seem like any details were coming together, so we kind of laid the church planting idea aside. One night Chris was gone and I was really discouraged, wanting an answer from the Lord. I basically spent the whole evening saying, “Holy Spirit, please show us what you want us to do.” That same night, one of our teachers from Bible School messaged Chris, saying, “If I were you, I’d plant a church.”
When we read that message, all our hopes and dream for church planting flooded back into our hearts! For us, that was the clincher, where we could say, “OK, Jesus. You don’t need to tell us again. We’ve got it and we’re going for it!”
Once we were set on starting a church, we needed to discover where and how. And that’s another blog for another day.
In the mean time, check out our site about our church planting plans: http://launchdestiny.com