it’s official: we are planting a church in Tulsa!

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: church, church planting, family, Gospel, missional, missional church, post-Christendom, Tulsa, vision
• Date: Apr 19,2010

I have been waiting a long time to write this post…

For the last four years, my wife and I have been on the most exhilarating and faith-stretching journey we have ever been on in our lives.

In the spring of 2006, God sent a holy “interruption” into my life and called me to plant a church as the lead planter. In October 2006, I attended an boot camp to be formally assessed by an international transdenominational church planting network and since that time, I have been in a church planting internship and mentoring relationship with a local church here in St. Louis, The Journey. And I have needed every moment of these three years to prepare for the work God has for us.

At the beginning of our journey, we began to pray that God would create a burden for a people in the urban core of a mid-size Midwestern metropolis. God used our prayers and some providential conversations to lead us to a city with a unique personality and a unique set of challenges: Tulsa, OK. Specifically, He has led us to strategically land in the Cherry Street District which is set near downtown in the northern midtown area, defined by a portion of 15th Street dubbed “Cherry Street.”

I have been to Tulsa 8 times in the last two years to “exegete” the culture there and God continues to provide us with many providential relationships, a burden and love for the people of Tulsa, an emerging core group, and an overwhelming vision to plant a Gospel-centered, missional church in the urban core called mercyview.

Why share now?

Well, for the last four years as I have pursued this call, I have been working at Missouri Baptist University in St. Louis as professor of emerging trends in the church and worship. I’ve also had the privilege to intentionally disciple around 25 students that are a part of a paraministry of MBU. I was upfront with the committee that hired me at MBU about my future plans but I wanted to honor their commitment to me so I’ve tried to keep things discreet. Now that things have come together, I gave my notice to MBU last week and now I’m free to shout if from the rooftops.

All that to say, it’s official:

We are moving to Tulsa on Saturday, May 1 to a home on E. 16th Place, a block south of the Cherry Street District (the exact place we have been praying we could land as a family for the last couple of years) to begin the process of planting the gospel in the urban core of Tulsa.

Over the next few weeks, I would like to share more of my story with you, as well as our hopes and dreams for mercyview in the urban core of Tulsa, the High Plains region of the U.S., and beyond.

Our heart for planting in Tulsa can best be summed up by professor, author, and blogger David Fitch:

The landscape of post-Christendom demands we think about church planting with a new eye for faithfulness, truth and integrity. Church is the name we give to a way of life, not a set of services. We do not plant an organized set of services; we inhabit a neighborhood as the living embodied presence of Christ. Missional leaders now root themselves in a piece of geography for the long term. We seek to plant seeds of ministry, kernels of forgiveness, new plantings of the gospel among the poor of “all kinds” and then by the Spirit, water them, nurture them into the life of God in Christ.

We gather on Sunday but not for evangelistic reasons. We gather to be formed into a missional people sent out into the neighborhood to minister grace, peace, love and the gospel of forgiveness and salvation. If the old ways of planting a church were like setting up a grocery store, now it is more like seeding a garden, cultivating it, watching God grow it amidst the challenges of the rocks, weeds and thorns. [1]

Amen and amen…

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[1] David Fitch, “On Those Ones Who Would Go and Seed Missional Communities,” Reclaiming the Mission. Available from http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/on-the-ones-who-would-go-and-seed-missional-communities/. Internet.