Church Plant Update

I was 14 when a buddy of mine, Clint, and I sat outside on the church steps one afternoon in Cherokee County, AL and day-dreamed out loud about what church could look like.  The church we attended was very traditional, very stodgy, the Bible wasn’t really being taught at all, the music was not very good, and the people there were not very accepting to those outside of the regular folks, though they considered themselves “very loving.”

 

The truth is, they cared a ton about one another, but weren’t really into building new relationships.  So what if there was a faith community that:  A) was really big on Jesus and teaching Him from the Bible, B) had music that had a current sound and was fun but didn’t result in singing prom songs to Jesus, and C) was all about living out their faith daily wherever their work and commute took them.

 

18 years later and after 10 years of serving other churches in full-time pastoral ministry, Alexis, the boys, and I have been prayerfully asking God to confirm the call on our lives to plant a church.   Back in 2010, Alexis and I participated in the Acts 29 Bootcamp for church planters in Seattle, WA at Mars Hill Church.  This was a great experience for us and while we received a favorable recommendation to plant, we held off to accept a position to serve here locally in Dyersburg.

 

Three years later and having served the community in other areas, Alexis as a Special Ed Pre-K teacher for Dyer Co and I as the Peer Mentoring Coordinator for Right Choices, the educational wing of Life Choices, we’ve once again submitted ourselves to the scrutiny of a church planting assessment organization, The Berean Fellowship of Churches, to once again explore this big idea of planting a church.

 

A few weeks ago, Alexis, the boys, and I loaded up and headed out to Denver, CO for the church planters assessment.  This consisted of a psychological evaluation, personality profiles, and strengths finder tests, as well as the opportunity to preach a mini-sermon and share our philosophy of ministry with the assessment team and the other couples who were there submitting themselves to the assessment team.  There was also some preliminary work that had to be submitted such as a confidential personal financial report and if there were any areas of secret or hidden sin in either of the lives of the husband and wife applying.

 

After a grueling few days of workshops, interviews, and training seminars, Alexis and I met with the team who provided us with their final evaluation from the weekend.  They had three levels of recommend for the couples who had submitted themselves to the assessment team.  The first level is a full recommend to plant.  This includes a $10,000 startup grant for the new church plant, setup as a 501C3 under the Berean Fellowship of Churches, provided with a certified public accountant, and official licensing and credentialing with the Berean Fellowship of Churches held in their regional offices (ours is in Nashville).  The second level is a conditional recommend.  This is where the assessment team asks the couple of take anywhere from a year to 18 months or more if needed to address issues in their life, walk with Jesus, personal finances, etc. that could potentially hamstring them as church planters.  The third level was a no recommend to plant, not now and maybe not ever.  For some, church planting is something that they may have been somehow guilted into considering or somehow coerced to pursue even if they don’t necessarily feel that God is calling them to it.  There are some men who simply do not have the God-given gifts and talents needed to thrive as a church planter regardless of the resources, dollars, etc they may be given.

 

The assessment team walked through the detailed report that they handed Alexis and me.  They gave us a full recommend to plant now.  This means they are providing us with the financial support, a network of other church planters who are making themselves available to help us pray and navigate through how we should proceed so that we can do our very best with the resources and talents that God has given us.

 

I tell you all of that by way of introduction to bring you up to speed and share with you where Alexis and I are today in this process.  A couple of weeks ago, after coming back from Denver, the national church planting director, Kris Cheek, and I debriefed our weekend together and began to think through some first steps toward planting a church.

 

One of the things that the Berean Fellowship of Churches aims to be intentional about is planting new churches in cities with dense populations for maximum impact for Jesus’ kingdom.  At the conclusion of our final interview in Denver, the assessment team asked Alexis and I to prayerfully consider where we may be sensing God’s call to plant.  Kris and I revisited this point during our teleconference.  I shared with him that Alexis and I had worked through a pros and cons list of staying here in Dyersburg and planting versus moving back to our hometown, in Gadsden, AL, which is roughly the size and layout of somewhere like Jackson, TN.

 

The pros of staying in Dyersburg for Alexis and I are things like the jobs that God has blessed us with.  We both get to work out of our strengths: her with special ed pre-k, and I with Right Choices speaking at high schools, training student leaders, and leading the peer mentoring program.  The boys love their school, and God has also blessed us with a home here that we really enjoy living in.  Another thing that we don’t take for granted is our daily routine.  We love our lives here in Dyersburg!  There’s not a crazy commute to deal with, traffic, or the reality of some who have to eat out most nights because they don’t get home till late evening.

 

On the objective side of things, the con for staying in Dyersburg is that it’s not a densely populated metropolitan.  What is the real potential for growing a very large church here?  I want to add as a caveat that while the point of growing a church isn’t to focus on numbers of people, I came to the conclusion a long time ago that I really can’t think of one person that I don’t want to go to Heaven.  So, if I want to be apart of winning as many as we can for the kingdom of Christ, then that should result in a healthy number of people regularly attending worship and plugged into a community group where they can grow practically in their faith amongst fellow believers.

 

I shared all this with Kris, the networks national director, and he agreed with me that it seems like God is leading us to plant here.  Alexis and I would actually describe it this way: We feel that God has planted us here!

 

Kris asked me to take 2-4 weeks, let the dust settle on the idea, and continue to pray and seek God for His leading and direction.  So that’s where we are right now.  To be totally honest,  I want to go ahead and get going, but we feel like it is prudent and wise to let a little time pass, seek Godly counsel, and ask others around us to be praying about this as well.  So that’s what I’m asking you to do, to join with us in prayer as to where God would have us plant a church.

 

A practical thing to be praying about also is location.  If it is Dyersburg, the question comes up, “Where do we meet?”  I have some ideas for this and am currently pursuing some options.  I’ll have to leave it at that for now and hope to share more later on.

 

We’re looking at Sunday nights, starting at 5 or 6pm and going for roughly an hour and a half.  We’re not looking at doing a big launch service because we’re not really interested in drawing a crowd that is event driven.  Now you don’t have to look any further than some video content that we have uploaded on my youtube channel, www.youtube.com/jonathonwwilliams, to see that I really love pulling out all the stops for corporate worship!  But the aim is building a faith community that is brought together by the big idea of who Jesus is, what He has accomplished, and what His life, death, burial, and resurrection means for the believer and the unbeliever alike by consistently looking at God’s word.

 

Our corporate worship may or may not include a worship band at first.  We may do worship with an acoustic guitar and a couple of voices to start with.   As I’ve been praying and reading through my Bible, I’m starting to think that the Book of Acts is the place to start.  Acts is the telling of the movement of the first church after Jesus ascended into Heaven.  Acts deals with everything from church leadership, being on mission as individuals for Jesus in the community, and the saving work that Jesus accomplished on the cross for all of those who call on His name for salvation.  It seems like the place to start.

 

That’s where we are for now.  I appreciate you all for taking the time to pray for us and for the work of Jesus’ kingdom in our community.  The truth is, a year and a half ago, I argued that Dyersburg doesn’t need another church and that it’s not the best place to plant because everyone already goes to church here.  Today, I’ve learned that’s just not true.  We’ve met so many people who are simply not plugged into a church.  It’s very similar to what happened in Acts 8 with the Ethiopian eunuch.  Phillip stumbles up on him reading Isaiah and asked the guy if he understood what he was reading.  He didn’t, so Phillip explained it to him and then baptized the guy on the spot!  That’s Dyersburg.  The people we’ve met here aren’t belligerent to the Gospel or disenfranchised with the church, they’re simply not connected to consistant Biblical teaching plugged into a faith community that encourages them to look more and more like Jesus.

 

Thank you all and may God bless you as we search this thing out together for Jesus kingdom!

 

John