Countdown to Year Seven: Pre-Launch Memories

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…