Four Years In, What Have We Learned From Planting A Church In Charlotte?
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by: matthewhemsley
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Word Count: 548
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2011 Time: 5:45 PM
We recently celebrated our fourth birthday as a church, and it was a chance to look back and bear in mind all we have cultivated since we first came in Charlotte in 2006.
Back then, when we first set foot in the United States, we surely assumed we were bringing something modern with us. God had commissioned us on a mission, and we were going to reform the landscape of church in Charlotte.
What we didn't realize is that the thing that God wanted to accomplish above all was to reform us! That's usually the journey with the things of God. We get a vision, and perhaps it truly is from God. Then we go off on a mission, and lo and behold, the exact first thing God does is to begin to reform us. Our first response to this is frequently to protest with resentment. This is not what we signed up for. When Moses guided Israel out of Egypt, after the bliss of freedom and the passage beyond the Red Sea, it did not take long for the people to start wishing they had never set out at all. All of a sudden, the awareness that it was going to be a very difficult journey, involving not just hardship but fundamental change in themselves, put a very distinct perspective on things. It meant giving up familiar patterns of life and endurance, in spite of if those had been expressed as coercive slavery previously.at least they knew how things were and had no doubt learned to adapt themselves to survive in relative comfort. Now everything was new, nothing was certain, and they were experiencing being stretched and changed.
And that was literally what it was like for us as we began the method of establishing a plan. Everything was new, nothing was as we expected and rather than moving from vision to beginning of achievement, instead, we knew quite immediately in ourselves the pain of being reformed and challenged to the core of our very being. Everything was put to the test. The very grounds we had come to the Queen City. Who we were as people and leaders. What we knew or had brought with us from England, the models and methodologies we had anticipated would work, because they did back home.
The fact is you can't lead people into change, which is at the heart of the Gospel, if you yourself are refusing development. You can solely lead people where you are predisposed to go yourself. They don't stop being true merely because once upon a time, you had been willing to allow the course of change, but now you don't want to have to do it all over again. That's not how God works. to this extent if we have learned anything, it is simply this. This business of building new congregations starts with and comes out of who you are. And God has not finished with you. He loves you too much to leave you as you are today. And it is that very eagerness to be reformed again and again, to go on with being a follower as you are called into leadership that makes all the difference. That is what we have learned!
About the Author
To learn more about how you can find a great church in Charlotte, it's important to hear from others who have successfully found church homes. Check out the following link and you'll be taken to City Church Charlotte for helpful information from a local Christian leader, Matthew Hemsley.
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