We're all so excited about moving to a venue which has room for us to triple in size before we move on again. It's another temporary home, but one we're very much looking forward to using! On Sunday we had another Life Vision Sunday where we presented the goals for 2008, which includes growth of our Sunday mornings meetings to about 200 people. That means our current venue is too small, so we need to move. The dream is not to move to a better venue, it's to build a massive church in the centre of Southampton which will serve the wider area.
Church planting and dreams are interconnected for me in more ways than one. Obviously there are the dreams in your heart which form your motivation for going to a new city in the first place. But Life Church Southampton first grabbed my attention via something dream-like from God. And that has led to an amazing experience so far, and I know I've only scratched the surface of what God has in store! I can see myself still being here in twenty years time, except in a church of over a thousand rather than edging into the hundreds. Excuse the pun, but it may be a call for life.
In 2003/4 it was a dream which first led me to consider being part of ChristChurch London. A dream sparked off about 6 months of pressing into God for the future, and wondering what exactly he was saying. I just found a video ChristChurch made in 2006 which shows me doing some exciting things:
1) Eating
2) Talking to Andy Tilsley
3) Listening to David Stroud speak
All this took place at some of the early lunches ChristChurch hosted before they officially got started. I can honestly say I really enjoyed the process of getting to know what ChristChurch was all about. But this was a stage in my life where I only felt permission from God to do one thing, and that was to go to Sheffield. So Bournemouth and London both got put to one side to pursue university in Sheffield. Here is the video:
So during my second year at university I started to ask God again what he would have me do next. I felt that there were still only three options that grabbed my attention:
1) Staying in Sheffield to be at City Church.
2) Going back to Bournemouth to be part of what's now called Citygate Church.
3) Re-visiting the possibility of London, and ChristChurch.
As told here, God directed me very clearly away from any of these three options - partly through a dream and partly through my friend Andrew Lawrence ("why not consider going to be a part of a Southampton church plant?" he said... even before Winchester Family Church had been told they would be planting a church). Obviously I resisted until I felt God speak to me about it. So here I am in Southampton, and loving it. And it could well be for life. And tomorrow, Andrew, the person who started this all off for me, is coming to speak at Life Church. I'm very excited about it!
Church planting is so exciting, and I hope I'm involved in it for the rest of my life, whether that's through sending teams from Life Church to plant more churches, or whether I 'go again'. You could do much worse than to commit your life to see strong churches established!
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