In January of 2012, my wife and I started working towards planting a new, life-giving church in Albemarle, NC. It was a scary, exciting, and faith-filled journey. We left behind a city we loved living in, friends we loved doing life with, and a church we’d given years to build. I thought planting a church was all about church. In many ways it is. You have to understand the mission and vision of the church. You have to have a specific identity for this new work. You need to ha

During this blog series, I’ve shared what I didn’t know about planting a church when I started the adventure to plant Vortex Church in Albemarle, NC. Most guys who strike out to start a church come from a similar context to me: they were on staff at a church doing something awesome for Jesus. It’s so easy to overlook something that’s obvious: when you’re on staff at a church you’re typically surrounded with significant relationships. To be on staff at a church, the church wou

Anything worth doing is not going to be easy. That’s the truth in life, and that’s the truth in church planting. As I coach other church planters, I’ve noticed that that are a lot of us that approach this without a lot of respect for the work it’s going to take to sustain a move of God. Throughout history, all great moves of God have been a lot of work for the people involved. In the mid-19th century, the great preacher Charles Finney led revivals throughout the US in what be

When you start a journey, it’s always exciting. The first few steps of a run, the first few miles of a road trip… there’s always a sense of wonder and expectation. The same is true of the journey to plant a church. It started with good dreams: helping people find a meaningful relationship with Jesus, seeing broken families healed and the lost being found. I neglected to understand this important fact: to see all that happens we would have to gather a bunch of sinners together

One of simplest, yet most profound questions we’ll ever wrestle with is: “What’s the purpose of my life?” I believe that Jesus still invites us to follow Him, just like He did His disciples. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out where God is going. I know a lot of people who wrestle with this. The wrestling comes in the form of “calling” and “career”. We want to have a clear roadmap, and too often it just feels hazy for a lot of us. We don’t know what where Jesus is leading us or