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 and evangelism, where I first served as deacon, where I met my wife, and where I began to discern my calling into the pastorate.
To this day I still remember the moment I learned that churches are born. I was eight or nine years old sitting in the Sunday morning service. Our pastor, David Staff, was talking about the history of our church. To me, the 60s where ancient history, but then he had an older couple—Bob and Evie—stand up in the service. I didn't know them well, but their presence in the foyer and the pews was a familiar part of my Sunday morning experience, Bob with his cane and smile and Evie always at his side. The next words our pastor said broke through my youthful ignorance: "Bob and Evie are one of the original founding members of our church." Suddenly ancient history was alive in the flesh right there in the sanctuary with me. And more importantly, I realized churches, the local gatherings of believers who commit to worshiping and serving the Lord together, all had a starting point. I knew when the Church was born, but without thinking about it I assumed my local church was just there. For my entire lifetime and memory it had always been there. But that wasn't the case for everyone. It wasn't the case for Bob and Evie. They remembered a time when there wasn't a Christ Community Church. And, in what turned out to be incredibly impactful in my life, they, along with the other founding members, decided to start one. They took a step of faith. A church was born.
Today I wonder if they ever thought about the future impact in those early days of birthing the church. When it was a dozen people gathered in a living room, did someone ever bring up the possibility of a one-year-old growing up knowing God's Word from farther back than his memories? Did any of them imagine this church would be the place where a young boy would meet his Savior, and a young man his wife? I think about it. I think how vastly different my life would be if those living room Bible studies hadn't taken place, or if the Bob and Evies of the world didn't have the faith and perseverance to follow the Lord's calling in their ordinary lives. And I could tell a similar story of my wife Keysha and the churches that have shaped her faith, life, and calling (including, significantly, Fellowship Church where I am currently serving).
This is the seed. It is the Faith, once-for-all handed down by the Apostles to the saints, passed on and embodied in the local church. "That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures." It is the truth that a group of believers who commit to one another and follow the Lord can birth a church by the power of God that can redeem and shape lives from now until eternity for the glory of God.
Who will it be twenty years from now? Who will hear and believe? What church will exist and shine light in a community that would dwell in darkness otherwise? What child may be born or what adult may walk into that future church and be transformed forever, if we follow the Lord together?
And it will be said among the nations, "Surely the LORD has done great things!"
-Stephen Anderson