Are you getting serious about church planting? You should consider the Carey Center at Grimké Seminary. It offers both a church planting residency and church planting courses. I serve on the faculty as a lecturer.
Here is the opening to one of my lectures I've prepped for next week (they aren't recorded):
There are so many ways we could consider this wonderful book. But since we only have an hour, and this is a course on church planting, I want to give you a simple grid that I think will help you better grasp the context God has called you to minister in.
There are just three Ps: people, place, and past.
These three Ps will tie into our later discussion on localism, so I want to introduce them now.
I want to tell you a little bit about my personal history with this book because it ties directly into what we're doing here this week.
I had been planning to plant a church on the east side of Cincinnati since about 1999. After graduating from a small pastor's college, we almost moved back home to the Cincinnati area. But I felt like I needed more time to grow as a leader, and we surprised everyone when I took a call as an associate pastor down in South Carolina.
That required me to go back to seminary, which I hadn't wanted to do, but it ended up being really good for me. So we moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina, intending for it to be a temporary stay before returning home to plant a church.
We had a really difficult time in South Carolina, but it was also one of the most important times of my life. I grew by leaps and bounds in all sorts of ways.
It was while I was there that I began to realize just how much I loved the Midwest.
South Carolina doesn't have much by way of corn or wheat. The soil just isn't good for it. And I had grown up surrounded by cornfields my entire life. Sometimes, when I was studying Hebrew or doing sermon prep, I would pull up an eight-hour HD recording of a cornfield that I had found on YouTube, put it on our big-screen TV, and just let it play in the background.
I recognized all the birds and the sound of the wind going through the cornstalks.
I loved the people I was serving, but I was longing for home.
And then, in either 2016 or 2017, I read two books back-to-back that helped me really zero in on my call. The first was Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, now our vice president. The second was The Man Who Moved a Mountain by Richard Davis.
These books pair well together.
In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance talks about growing up in a dysfunctional family as a poor, white, working-class Midwestern American. He describes the Hillbilly Highway, the great migration of Scots-Irish and Appalachian Americans who moved north looking for industrial jobs, particularly in the automobile industry, about a hundred years ago.
Many of these families settled along the way, including Vance's grandparents, who moved from Kentucky to Middletown, Ohio, only about 50 minutes from where I live.
These were the same kinds of people Bob Childress ministered to in the mountains of Virginia.
So when I read Vance's story, I heard my story.
I grew up white trash in the '80s and '90s, and I could relate to so much of what Vance described and what Childress encountered in his ministry.
Their people were my people. Their problems were our problems.
I understood the thick honor culture, where you do not involve the authorities. You don't do it. Snitches get stitches. That deep suspicion of authority. The drug abuse, the laziness, the pride, the violence. All of it was familiar to me.
But what struck me about these two books was that, while both dealt with Appalachia and its very real problems, neither had that sniveling, judgmental, condescending attitude you so often get from Hollywood and Democratic politicians who see that whole world as flyover country.
Instead, there was a deep love for these people.
And so, as I was down in South Carolina, suffering through endless conversations about Clemson football, being served sweet tea that you could rightly call diabetes juice, and missing cornfields, I began to understand why I had such a strong call to the Midwest.
Ironically, it was while living somewhere else that I came to better understand the place God was calling me to.
And that brings me back to you.
You're here because you're either planting a church or you want to plant a church. And I'm telling you, to do that well, you must love the place God has called you to and the unique people who reside there.
And you need to know their past. Because their history will help you understand their sins, their strengths, their potential, and the battles that lie ahead of you as a pastor planting a church.
I love Clermont County, Ohio, and the Ohio Valley. It owns my heart.
And Bob Childress loved the people of the Buffalo Mountain region. They owned his heart.
Who has God laid on your heart? What is the unique mission field He has called you to?
Let's dive into it...
Learn more about the Carey Center here:
https://grimkeseminary.org/carey/
Church Planting & Knowing Your Context
