September 2009

In September of 2009, Jacqueline surprised me with a trip to the West Coast of Florida for my birthday. It was an awesome time, with family and a well-needed time of relaxation.  While we were vacationing, we took time to visit an area near Sarasota, called Lakewood Ranch. We spent an entire day exploring Lakewood Ranch, visiting homes and schools and generally falling in love with the area. Before heading to Florida, I had actually made an appointment to touch base with a friend of mine from college who lived in Tallahassee.  Brian Hunter is a fellow church planter and pastor who planted a church in 2003.

Jacqueline and I, along with my parents, drove over to Tallahassee to meet Brian at a TGI Friday’s – the plan was to eat a bit of lunch and get some general idea of what church planting was all about. Needless to say… we got more than we bargained for! Brian encouraged us for over two hours, sharing intimate details of his personal experience and never once got frustrated at me for the petty questions I kept bringing up. Several times during our discussion he made the statement, “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.”  It was quite simple, really… God had ordained that meeting, that day – long before either one of us knew we would be there. I remember being emotionally overwhelmed when he told me I would pastor thousands of people one day. I felt so inadequate, and so unsure; Brian, on the other hand, said things like that so matter-of-factly, it was as if he wasn’t really the one speaking. At the end of our meeting, Brian made the commitment to speak to the State Evangelism Director for the Church of God in Florida on my behalf. He said that he would put in a good word for us and do anything he could to help us make this vision happen.

As my family drove home that day, we shared the abridged version with my parents and dreamed and cried together. After a couple of hours on the road, we stopped again to eat dinner; shortly after sitting down, I received a text message from Brian Hunter. It said, “I just got off the phone with David Nitz, the State Evangelism Director. He said he’d love to talk with you and that he was looking for a church planter for the Lakewood Ranch area.” My jaw dropped, and I began to silently weep. My family was instantly concerned… asking me what was wrong. I mustered all the composure that I had and read them the text message… I had never once mentioned to Brian that I had just been in Lakewood Ranch, let alone that I was interested in planting a church there. This became a huge catalyst moment for our journey. Jacqueline and I, along with my mom and dad, knew undeniably that God was directing us for this calling.

Brian

September 2009

Quite a bit of time had passed since the initial excitement of planting a church began.  Then the busyness of summer as full-time youth pastors kicked in. Add to that layer the fact that Brian was given the charge of a huge construction project of completely renovating our downstairs facilities at Crosswind and converting them into our Children’s,   Preschool, and Nursery Classrooms.

Not forgetting to mention that we had a newborn baby boy in the mix.

We desperately needed a vacation, and Brian was missing his family terribly. So as the wheels started turning in my head, I decided to start saving some money! I remember starting in March of that year saving $20 a week… a little saved over 6 months can add up to something big – I guess that may have been the first lesson in the finances of church planting.

Let’s go to Tampa!

My thought was this… how can I keep this dream of planting a church alive while enjoying a getaway, and seeing Brian’s family?  A three for one deal!!!!!!!  I called up Brian’s family, and we did the entire planning together. They had a timeshare points system, so I asked if they could work it out for us to stay in the Tampa area. They tried to get a place in or near Tampa, but the only place they could find was in Holmes Beach.

God at work again…

In my research and statistical scanning, I found this community called Lakewood Ranch. Everything about it seemed like the perfect place for young families and the perfect place to plant a church. Holmes Beach, the only place that Brian’s parents could get to accommodate us, just happened to be only 20 miles from Lakewood Ranch.

The surprise was a huge success, and we did a lot of relaxing. But I will never forget the day when we sat in an Atlanta Bread Company restaurant near Holmes Beach with his entire family, Selina, and Wyatt… we began to map out roads, look at the lay of the land, research demographics, and began to dream out loud with others for the first time that this far-fetched idea of planting a church could actually be a reality one day. I believe it was Brian’s sister, Terissa, who said, “We may remember this day forever as the day it all began.”

And that it certainly was… we spent the majority of the rest of that day scoping out Lakewood Ranch and falling in love with the idea of planting a church on the west coast of Florida. We never really felt that it would be in Lakewood Ranch, but we knew that it would be close to there… we were moving in the right direction.

A surprise birthday trip was the beginning of the beginning… and, wow, were we in love with this beautiful part of Florida, USA!

Jacqueline

I remember all of the nights lying in bed… church planting a seemingly far-stretched thought, yet we could never get away from it. We would vision cast and bounce ideas off of each other. We would talk about the kind of culture that we could best reach, the people that we could relate to, and the kinds of activities that we enjoyed. We knew all of these things were so important regarding the location where we would plant a church, if for no other reasons than we wanted to see ourselves in a place where we could live for a long while, raise our children, and truly become part of it.

Some people like to golf, some like to hunt, but my husband likes to fish, and most of all, he likes to saltwater fish. We decided that coastal living sounded just like our speed. So on one of these late nights, we pulled out a map and decided that we would like to live somewhere between the coast of South Carolina… all the way down and wrapped around the state of Florida… to halfway over to the coastal border of Texas.

Being the research, statistical nerd that I am, I immediately began researching every major city along this coastline – population density, school ratings, number of churches, median household income, industry base, median age, educational background, and much more.

Then we started praying…

The draw came in many different ways… a random postcard to visit Tampa, a news spot about an aquarium in Sarasota, a man at Hershey’s Chocolate World who worked in the 3D Movie who was from Tampa, a phone call from a resort trying to sell us a timeshare in Tampa, an ice skater I was following was from St. Petersburg… so we had to check it out. We knew we had to somehow make a visit.

And we felt like the Tampa area might just be it.

Jacqueline

September 2008

I was sitting outside our little white house in Maryland on the back deck doing some planning for the upcoming summer when this amazing journey all began (at least my part of the journey; God began working on me long before that day). That afternoon I was checking out a website for a conference called Catalyst. As I scrolled through the guests that were going to be speaking, I came across a name that intrigued me – and until that day I had never heard of – the speaker’s name was Steven Furtick. I clicked on his name and was directed to his website.

Almost immediately, I noticed a link in the upper right-hand corner that was entitled “The Preacher’s Wife”; it was a link to his wife’s blog. As soon as I saw it, I felt the Holy Spirit say to me, “Your wife will have one of those.” It didn’t strike me at first and I continued perusing his blog, while trying to ignore the message the Holy Spirit had just dropped in my heart. After about ten minutes, I was captivated by this 20-something-year-old church planter in Charlotte, NC, who at that time had around 4,000 people coming to his 2-year-old church. After being thoroughly blown away, I went back to the home page. This time, however, when I saw the link entitled “The Preacher’s Wife,” I heard the Holy Spirit clearly say… “Your wife will have one of those, because I am calling you to go and plant a church… I have called you to pastor.” For the next 45 minutes or so, I was overwhelmed by the presence of God, and spent that time praying and crying, and crying some more.

Later that evening, when Jacqueline got home from work, I told her about my experience and expressed to her that I really felt like we were supposed to plant a church. I was afraid of the response I might get from her, but it was unnecessary… She simply smiled and said, “I know.” She said that God had placed that vision in her heart early on in our relationship, but knew she had to wait until God spoke to me. Jacqueline said she wanted me to lead. We began to pray for guidance and I entered into a season of fasting. Several times in the next couple of months, we would experience God’s confirmation in many different ways.

Brian