History

We are days away from celebrating our 7th year anniversary as North Creek Church! For the next couple of weeks, I will be sharing highlights from this incredible journey.

Around our 2nd year anniversary, we made a call that changed the course of our church. An old night club in Hazel Dell had shut it’s doors two years earlier and the landlord was struggling to rent one of the ugliest buildings on Hwy 99. We wanted to get a look inside.

As our team walked through that building I think we all saw the reality. There was filth, damage, and challenges everywhere. We were a church of about 80 people with no money, but something about this very pathetic old bar was calling our name. It was a mess, but then again, aren’t we all? That run-down place just needed some love, attention, and time to be used once again for a greater purpose. It echoed the smallness of our beginnings and we wanted in. Through a series of miracles, we not only negotiated a rent we could afford, but we fixed it up to working order with a lot of volunteer effort and all of the meager $2700 we had to spend. We moved in November 23, 2008.

The next five years would be a constant project to make that old building the best it could be. It’s still what I call “Funky-Chic”, but when I look around all I see is one miracle after the other. It seemed like the renovation of that building mirrored the renovation of the hearts within it. I will forever see the face of the dad that we prayed for who walked in one day and never left. I see every one of the baptisms in our portable tank. I see the tears of the people we prayed with to know Jesus. I see the hopeful faces of the people that we handed out first Bibles to. I see teenagers flooding out of there on a Thursday night. I see greatness where there once was devastation.

There is a bittersweet moment for me when I remember that this old night club is not our permanent home. It’s just a stopping point on our journey and our time there will end. Still, it will always be a season where we feel like God said, “I need you here for now. Not because it makes sense, but because there are some people I need to reach. People who look a lot like this building…abandoned, forgotten, left in disrepair…I’ve called you to look past that and see their potential. Always remember…I am the God of renovation.“

That is all we ever want to do…Go where God leads and watch Him repair what is broken. If you are feeling like your life is a mess, come on in. We believe there is greatness in you.

I wrote a blog a long time ago that is the story of one of the greatest moments of my life that happened in this building. You can read it HERE.

To Be Continued

Countdown to Year Seven: The Early Years

By stacynewell

September 18, 2013

History, Inspiration, Ministry

Leave a Comment

We are days away from celebrating our 7th year anniversary as North Creek Church! For the next couple of weeks, I will be sharing highlights from this incredible journey.

The early months of a church are interesting at best when you have a small launch team. For the first 24 months, we only hit over 100 people in church twice…Opening Day and one Easter. In 2007 we averaged 69 people every week, half of whom were children. There were Sundays when we needed so many kid’s workers to accommodate those numbers that it left only a handful in the main service to hear the message. There is something very humbling about starting worship with two people in the audience and three on stage.

On top of not having enough people to constitute a crowd, we were hemorrhaging money. Not only were we growing slowly, but our year of extra support from our fundraising ended in June of 2007. The summer of 2007 will go down in history as one of the most stressful of our lives. I can remember the day we needed thousands of dollars to pay the bills, we prayed desperately for God’s provision, and Sundays offering was $58. Five. Eight. What were we going to do?

Mark and I had both spent all of our lives at large churches, so our new reality was difficult at best. Discouragement began to set in. Could we ever get beyond this point? We limped along for the next three months. We sold everything we could to pay the next bill. As other churches offered us used equipment (which happens a lot when you are a church plant!), we took it, refurbished what we could, and sold it to survive as a church.

It was at that critical moment that we decided to lead out of vision and not devastation. As we preached the Word of God we never focused on our lack and chose purposefully not to make it a highlight in our church. We never waved the flag of desperation, but tried to stand firm in our faith that God would take care of us if we kept the main thing the main thing. I have to admit that we may have been standing, but our knees were knocking.

At the end of October we sat as a team and crunched the numbers. We had two weeks left before we would close the doors if we didn’t get at least $10,000 above and beyond our regular giving. Our average month was no where near that, so we figured we were going to close an otherwise perfectly healthy church because of finances. We braced ourselves for impact.

The first week of November, just one week before we would be out of resources, New Life, a church in Renton, Washington, took an offering to bless North Creek. We had been junior high pastors there a decade earlier and still had lots of ties to their people. The check came back at $11,200. We were just given a miraculous lifeline.

We went to our congregation to let them know of New Life’s generosity and the most amazing thing happened before our eyes…Our people matched that amount over and above their regular giving. It was as if a light bulb went off in the hearts of our congregation, “If someone else financially believes in our church, we should, too.”

We rounded the corner to our second year anniversary growing to about 80 people and no debt.

What we didn’t realize was that we were about to make a move that would double our congregation and set us on a new direction…

To Be Continued

We used to decorate our stages to match our sermon series. Here is the first year of stages that we pulled off in our mobile church!

Countdown to Year Seven: Pre-Launch Memories

By stacynewell

September 16, 2013

History, Inspiration, Ministry

Leave a Comment

We are days away from celebrating our 7th year anniversary as North Creek Church! For the next couple of weeks, I will be sharing highlights from this incredible journey.

So, let me take you back to this day in 2006…

I can remember sitting in the dark, quiet house just six days prior to our Sunday morning launch of North Creek Church. It was about 2:00 am and I was in a rocking chair cradling my three month old baby. I could feel her breathe heavily against me in her deep sleep and I remember looking down at her little hands in the dim light that was pouring through the window. The creak of the chair against the hardwood floors was the only other sound in the house.

A panic shot through me…What were we doing? The flood of fear that I could easily hold back during the day seemed to be relentless in the dark. We were living on a faith that seemed to lack any practicality whatsoever. Everything we had learned about what we needed to start a church in conferences, books, and mentoring was not our reality. Were we about to fail?

We didn’t have enough people to start with…just 39 and 20 of those were little children. The infant in my arms was included in that count. Granted, the 39 we launched with are some of the most passionate, hard working people I’ve ever met, but the numbers were against us.

We hadn’t raised anywhere near enough money. We had $10,000 for all the sound equipment, rent, advertising, and children’s stuff we needed and we had an additional $1600 in monthly support for one year. Anybody who has started a church would be shocked by those numbers. Experts would have told us to wait another year…they might have been right, but the advertisements were out, the bell had been rung, and we were going forward no matter what at this point.

I pleaded with Jesus to make this work. A flash of people’s faces that believed in North Creek was constantly running through my mind. I saw the Yonkos and the Grays and knew what was riding on this. Jeremy, Jeff, and Angela had given up paying jobs to move to Vancouver for this. The Christie family had given up their friends at their former church and their kids’ youth group….and on and on the faces scrolled. The weight of it all came crashing down on my very frail and very tired shoulders that night. It seemed that people had bought into a vision that made no earthly sense and the ONLY way that it was going to work was if Jesus Himself showed up….

What if he didn’t?

The breath of my daughter in the night shocked me back to reality and actually reminded me that I needed to breathe, too. I inhaled and exhaled a few times and looked back at that child.

He had crafted her against all odds. He was ultimately responsible for her well-being, and although I was given the privilege of taking care of her, so much was out of my hands. I was just asked to lead her to the best of my ability for as many days as I was given.

Hmmm…just like this little baby church. It was HIM crafting it all along, against all odds. He was responsible for growing it, and our job was just to take care of it to the best of our ability. Just love it, just feed it, just nurture it…don’t worry about how meager it looks right now. It is His Mighty Church and it cannot be stopped. What looks as helpless as a baby may turn into greatness if you give it time…

To Be Continued

Just a few of our “Church Plant Kids

A Promise Fulfilled

By stacynewell

March 28, 2013

History, Inspiration, Ministry, Team

2 Comments

Seven years ago we met Kim Goodrich. She was helping with kids at the church we were at and got wind that we were starting North Creek just a block from where she lived. She had expressed interest in being a part and we were pretty excited to add someone to our small band of brave people embarking on a crazy journey.

At first glance all those years ago, we weren’t even sure what to make of Kim. She’s a relentless go-getter and as feisty as a trapped cat. However, we quickly realized that she’s smart as can be, kind to her core, has an unwavering determination, and will never let the world get her down. In other words, she was made to start a church.

Through a series of events that we would never have expected or foreseen, God made it clear that our first Children’s Pastor was this very unexpected surprise sitting in our midst. So, with a bit of trepidation, we brought a Pepsi (her favorite drink) to the office and asked if she could come for a visit. We slid the Pepsi across the desk and asked her to take the job with a paycheck of $100 a month. She said yes.

Over the last seven years she has literally bled, sweated, and cried for the mission of this church. She’s taught the Bible, baptized kids, and loved them through elementary school turmoil. On top of it all, she took on the task of being our bookkeeper for the first six years of our existence.

We vowed that we would someday pay her full time.

Five years ago we all went on a devastating journey with her as her husband was suddenly diagnosed with MS. Kim, mother of two elementary kids, was faced with the impossible task of a daunting medical situation, needing a full time job to support her family, and helping her children understand this new reality. And to make matters worse, we were in no position to hire anyone full time. So, we watched as she navigated her life outside of the walls of North Creek. We cried with her on her first day of work.

But a promise is a promise…sometimes with a slightly different timeline than we could ever script.

With Wayne’s resignation last month we were faced with the fact that we needed someone to keep our finances afloat….and we had just the peg for that round hole! So, it is with great joy that we are officially announcing that Kim has been hired full time as both our Children’s Pastor at Hazel Dell and our Financial/Administrative person for all three campuses and the Learning Center. Yes, it’s a big job, but trust me, Kim will fill it well!

Kim – Thanks for sticking through this dream with us. We are humbled by your heart and inspired by your perseverance. We are grateful that you have loved our kids for seven years and look forward to many, many more. Let’s change the world!