Our Story · Jul 08, 2007 - 07:59 PM
In 2001, there was a weekly Saturday night Bible study. Young and some not so young, adults met to study the Bible, sing songs, pray, and enjoy each other’s company. The people who attended the study came from several different churches in the area. A few people from this group became closer friends and started talking about starting a church. They wanted to become a family who loved God, and the Bible, and were not going to be bound by the traditions that we all had grown up with. The talk became a plan on a trip to Nashville, Tennessee.
Our small family began meeting in September of 2002. There were seven of us. We started out studying most of the topics that we had studied all our lives. This time when we studied, we were going to ignore the traditional answers that we grew up with. We were going to study without prejudice. We let the Bible speak for itself without our interpretation. We were fearless in our pursuit of truth, not our understood truth, but God’s truth.
It took a year and a few months to meet our complete our obligations to the churches that we had been part of in addition to our small group meetings. At the end of 2003 our last members left their other church that they had been meeting with. These breaks with the traditional churches were not always easy. There were meetings with friends and family from these churches, some debates, and some ties were broken.
We worked to meet each others spiritual needs by changing our format frequently. At that time there were only two men who carried the burden of preparing for Sunday talks and Bible studies. We grew very close as a family and as individuals, many times going in opposite directions in our beliefs. In the spring of 2006 we made the difficult decision to disband. The men needed to recharge by spending time in study and conversation with other men. We made individual choices as to where each of us would worship and study.
At the end of about three months we came back together to talk about how we were doing with our church search. We were joined by a family who we had not worshiped with on a regular basis, but whom we had very close ties with from before we joined as a family. Some of our group had been spending time with a church, studying with some of the men. At this time we shared our experiences, some good, some painful. We decided to come back together as a church family and were joined by some of the people we had met in the mean time.
In the past year, our family has grown to include some young singles, and a young couple. Our worship continues to change to meet everyone’s spiritual needs. We now have more of a mix of spiritual heritages which makes our community richer. We have a leadership group that meets to discuss worship duties, but also looks ahead to where we want to be in the future, and what we want to spend our time, money and energies on.
