10 Years of “Love Moving”

My mentor says, “In ministry, you want to put yourself in places where if you don’t trust God, you’ll look stupid.” While that may seem extreme, it’s always stuck because it highlights the Spirit-led wisdom and faith required in doing God’s work in a broken world. When I think about planting Phoenix Bible Church 10 years ago, this has definitely been our story. In normal church planting ways, we needed wisdom: i.e. learning the culture, finding a location, preaching God’s Word, and overall leadership in the heart of a city. But our story in particular has taken some wild turns that without wisdom, we would have thrown in the towel or just fallen flat on our faces.

For starters, we were coming out of a megachurch that imploded in unprecedented fashion (there’s a podcast about it :)). In addition, just four years into PBC we were evicted out of our meeting location with six weeks’ notice. And just two and half years ago, after getting to a healthy and stable point, we entered into a nine-month process of a merger with a 70-year-old flagship church in our city.

By God’s grace, through all of that, Phoenix Bible Church is thriving! Our church has grown to 900 and we’ve experienced over 90 baptisms in just 20 months. More than the numbers, we have a beautiful diverse church family coming together in unity and discipleship.

While it hasn’t been easy, wisdom from God’s Word and God’s people has made it possible. We spent countless nights in prayer as leaders and as a church and looped our congregation into the process. We like to say, “We don’t just want to give you a peek behind the curtain, we want to tear the curtain down.” This helped bring collective wisdom from our body.

In addition, I met with a multitude of leaders across our city to get their wise counsel, and one of the best things we did was bring two seasoned pastors in to speak into our elder teams during our merger. I am grateful for God’s gift of wisdom and can testify that He gives generously to all who ask, we just have to come to the place where we’re desperate enough to truly need it.