Six months ago I began considering the idea of planting a church, but this church planting story goes back decades before that. It actually began in the mid 1960s, two decades before I was born, when several couples got together in Ames, Iowa and began meeting for a weekly Bible study. That Bible study grew and soon began meeting for Sunday services. Christ Community Church was born. My part of the story starts some twenty years later when my parents decided it was time to leave their church and take me and my three older siblings to a church where we would hear the Gospel. We came to Christ Community Church when I was one year old, and it was my church home for the next twenty-three years. It was the church where I heard the Gospel in Sunday school as a kid and believed in Jesus as my Savior at six years old. It was this local body where I was discipled in the Word of God, where I grew in my faith and calling, where I was baptized, where I had my first experience of ministry an...