Four Years In, What Have We Accomplished From Planting A Church In Charlotte?
We recently celebrated our fourth birthday as a church, and it was a time to look back and bear in mind all we have accomplished since we first came in Charlotte in 2006.
Back then, when we first set foot in the United States, we truly assumed we were bringing something contemporary with us. God had commissioned us on a mission, and we were going to change the landscape of church in Charlotte.
What we didn’t comprehend is that the thing that God desired to carry out above all was to reform us! That’s frequently the pathway with the things of God. We get a vision, and probably it surely is from God. Then we go off on a mission, and lo and behold, the actual first thing God does is to begin to transform us. Our first answer to this is often to protest with resentment. This is not what we signed up for. When Moses led Israel out of Egypt, after the euphoria of liberty and the passage over the Red Sea, it did not take long for the people to begin wishing they had never set out at all. All of a sudden, the recognition that it was going to be a very formidable venture, involving not just hardship but integral correction 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 reconcile themselves to survive in relative comfort. Now everything was dissimilar, nothing was sure, and they were experiencing being stretched and reformed.
And that was exactly what it was like for us as we began the method of building a plan. Everything was new, nothing was as we expected and rather than moving from vision to beginning of achievement, instead, we knew quite quickly in ourselves the pain of being reformed and challenged to the center of our very being. Everything was put to the test. The very purpose 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 assumed would work, because they did back home.
The reality is you can’t lead people into transformation, which is at the heart of the Gospel, if you yourself are refusing change. You could purely lead people where you are ready to go yourself. They don’t stop being true merely because once upon a time, you had been inclined 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. thus if we have accomplished anything, it is simply this. This business of putting up new congregations begins with and comes out of who you are. And God has not finished with you. He loves you very much to leave you as you are today. And it is that very willingness to be changed again and again, to continue being a follower as you are called into leadership that makes all the difference. That is what we have learned!
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.
Processing your request, Please wait....
