The Announcement

If you have not read my previous posts, let me catch you up on what has happened on the previous episodes of From My Table.

• God has been stirring in my heart to plant a church for well over a decade. 
• My church, Heritage Park Baptist Church, has been wanting to plant a church for well over a decade.
• Through various avenues, God has shifted my heart and also opened/closed some doors to allow me to have the space to dream and think about planting a church soon.
• March of 2019, God took what was a dream and began to make it a reality both in my heart and in my pastor's heart.
• In order to make sure that we were ready, I have gone through various assessments that have evaluated me as a church planter and I have received a recommendation to be a church planter.

Up to this point, the only people who even know about my desire to move forward with planting a church are the pastor staff at Heritage Park, our personnel committee, and a few of my closest friends. We have not been able to talk about it with our small group or anyone at the church, because we wanted to make sure that we had all of our ducks in a row before the rumors began to spread. I am grateful for this time, but also would have loved to have our small group walk with us through this crazy part of the journey.

After my assessment, we knew it was going to take a couple of weeks to hear back from some of our partners with some wisdom on the path that we should take moving forward. One of the things that were revealed to me during this short process is that I know a lot about being a pastor of an existing church, but there is a lot of basic things that I still need to learn as it pertains to church planting. The answer we were currently waiting for was which path should we take on this journey. The first path was a shorter one that had us launching a new church sometime in the Fall of 2020 and resigning from my current position as student pastor in order to pull that off. The other path was a slightly longer one that had us planting sometime in 2021 and allowed me to continue serving in student ministry until the summer of 2020 when I would transition into a full-time church planter. Both of these involved doing some sort of residency program with an organization called HCPN (I will have a post dedicated to them later).

The assessment was over on Thursday, June 20th and we leave for Youth Camp on Monday, July 1st. We are hoping to present something to our church on Sunday, July 7th, but do not know what that will be at this time. A week goes by and we have a few conversations with some different people, but there has not been a final decision made. Because we are so unfamiliar with church planting, we have handed this decision over to some people at HCPN and will take their advice on our path. So we continued to wait. The Sunday night before camp comes and still nothing. As some of you may know, I am the director of the camp we take our students to, so it is a pretty busy week. It would have been really nice to have all of this figured out prior, but that was not the case. Monday comes and goes, and then we hear nothing on Tuesday. It was about 10:00 on Wednesday that I get a call from Chad Clarkson, the executive director of HCPN. He informs me that it is their recommendation that I enter into a 2-year program with HCPN. The first year will be something called functional residency and the second year is called finishing residency (more later on HCPN). Perfect! That is what I was really hoping for, knowing that a longer on-ramp would be better for me.

Right after that, I call my pastor and we get the ball rolling. He sends an email to the leadership of our church, letting them know all about what has been going on and informing them that we are hoping to make an announcement on Sunday. A few other emails go out on Friday to another level of leadership and we are going to tell the church on Sunday morning that we have a very special announcement about church planting that we will be making at church conference Sunday night.

-DRAMATIC PAUSE- Pan the camera back to us at camp.

We like to get the adult leaders from our church a sonic drink on Wednesday to say thank you for all the hard work and offer a slight pick-me-up to finish off the week strong. My lovely wife always goes into town and picks them up. This time she asked me if she should bring someone with her to help her carry the drinks and whatnot. I said, "You should take Lauren." Her response was, "I already asked her! Do you think we should tell her about church planting?!?!" Lauren and her husband Cameron are rock stars and Cameron grew up in my student ministry. They are in the process of building a house down in the area that we want to plant. So my answer was, "YEAH!"

Kacee and Lauren are having a little small talk and then she begins to set up the announcement. "So, God has been doing a lot of really cool stuff in our lives over the past few months. Kyle has been doing student ministry for 13 years now and..." Lauren interrupts. "Are you about to tell me that you and Kyle are going to plant a church? Because if so, Cameron and I have already talked and prayed about it months ago. And we are in!" WHAT?!?! 

When Kacee told me this story, tears began to come to my eyes. Those people who know me would not be surprised; I'm a crier. But it is really affirming to know that God has already been putting in other people's hearts the desire to go with us to do this amazing work.

(Here is Lauren with Rowan at camp that day)

SUNDAY:

You know when everything in your life seems to be happening in slow motion? That is kinda like what Sunday morning was like. Some of our leadership people who knew what was going on came up to me and hugged my neck and said that they were proud of me. We had students telling stories about what God did in their life at camp this past week. It was a good morning. The plan was that the deacons would meet at 4:00 to talk about the news, then we would have our church conference meeting at 5:00 where we would share the news, followed by our student ministry swim party at 6:00 where I will tell them what was going on. 

The 4:00 deacons meeting went by super smoothly and everyone seemed excited to see me taking this step. Now to share the news with the entire church, but there were a few teenagers who were also there. UGH. I didn't want them to find out like this. So, I pulled them aside and took them down the hall. You could tell on their face that they knew something was up. I have been their only student pastor ever. I have been there since many of them were born. Telling them this was going to be hard. No one is dying, but it sure does feel like it. We sat in a circle and I broke the news to them first. They were shocked and they had a lot of questions that they could not articulate. I sat with them for about 10 minutes and assured them that this was a good thing and that I was not going anywhere right away. Then I got to do the same thing with the adults of the church. The way I have explained to people what happened at that meeting has been like this: We made the announcement that we have a place that we want to plant- Mid-Galveston County and we have a person who we want to be the planter- Kyle and that we are looking at a time of sometime in 2021. The response from our church was somewhere between, "well obviously Kyle will be the planter", to "its about time". So, that was good. 

But it was 6:00 that I was the most afraid of. Telling the students that I call my kids. Teenagers can be pretty brutal at times. So at the party, I pulled aside some of our leadership students and I shared with them the news. There were a few tears, some excitement, but mostly confusion. We then walked outside and I gathered everyone around the pool. I took everything out of my pockets because I was not sure how this would be received; I may be thrown into the pool. I shared with them about what God has been doing in my own life and how God had been preparing our church for this for over 10 years. I told them that we did not know how all of this was going to play out, but what I promised them was that I was not going anywhere. I would be here for this next school year and I would fight for them to get the best replacement possible- someone who would love and care for them the same way that I would. I fielded many questions that night, but this one made me laugh. "Will Becca still be here?" Becca is our associate student pastor. When I told them that Becca would not be going anywhere, the group was like, "Okay, we are good. Can we go back to swimming?" HAHAHA! I love it!

The announcement could not have gone any better. I am grateful for a God that goes before me and has a plan that is so much bigger than mine.