Four Years In, What Have We Accomplished From Planting A Church In Charlotte?

We currently celebrated our fourth birthday as a church, and it was an opportunity to look back and keep in mind all we have accomplished since we first arrived in Charlotte in 2006.

Back then, when we first set foot in the United States, we surely thought we were taking something modern 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 recognize is that the thing that God desired to carry out above all was to change us! That's usually the journey with the things of God. We get a vision, and perhaps it surely 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 object bitterly. This is not what we signed up for. When Moses guided Israel out of Egypt, after the elation of freedom and the passage beyond the Red Sea, it did not take long for the people to begin wishing they had never set out at all. Suddenly, the recognition that it was going to be a very difficult journey, involving not just hardship but integral development in themselves, put a very distinct perspective on things. It meant giving up accustomed 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 live on in relative comfort. Now everything was different, nothing was definite, and they were experiencing being stretched and transformed.

And that was exactly what it was like for us as we began the course of building a plan. Everything was new, nothing was as we envisioned and rather than moving from vision to beginning of achievement, instead, we knew quite instantly 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 assumed would work, because they did back home.

The fact is you can't lead people into reformation, which is at the heart of the Gospel, if you yourself are declining change. You could purely lead people where you are prepared to go yourself. They don't cease being true simply 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 once more. That's not how God works. thus if we have learned anything, it is merely this. This business of putting up new congregations starts 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 transformed again and again, to resume being a follower as you are called into leadership that makes all the difference. That is what we have learned!

By: Matthew Hemsley

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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.