While any story like this begins in the heart of God, it became real to me in 2003. My wife and I had vacationed in Spokane since our honeymoon in the mid-90’s and had felt a growing love for its people and culture ever since. After an enjoying afternoon in Riverfront Park we were headed home to Missoula, Montana when I asked the question: “What if we started a church here?” We began to talk and dream and eventually asked the leader of our church in Missoula, Steve Valentine, what he thought about it. He asked if we would be willing to stay in Missoula so I could help train church planting teams. After more prayer I agreed and thought that maybe I would get to train a team to be sent to Spokane in the future.
I dived headlong into training leaders and specifically worship leaders at our church – Clark Fork City Church – where I have served on staff since 1998 leading worship and then serving on the leadership team as a pastor/elder since 2004. As we were preparing to launch our leadership training school Steve was diagnosed with leukemia and battled for sixteen months before God received him into heaven in November of 2006. Though we experienced much turmoil God was more than faithful to our church, and we came through the fire full of great faith, more convinced than ever of the sovereign purposes of God even in the midst of great struggle.
Fast forward to 2009 at the Newfrontiers USA national leaders conference in St. Louis, Missouri: A bold pastor from South Africa named PJ Smyth had been preaching about the exciting vision of planting churches into the one hundred most influential cities in the United States. He led us in prayer as we focused on specific cities like Chicago and New York. As we began to pray, Spokane came to my mind and I began to weep over the city. The enormous knot in my throat made it difficult to pray at all and I actually felt a little twinge of guilt because I wasn’t praying for the cities we had been asked to pray for! It was only after the prayer meeting was over that I discovered that Spokane was actually on that list of one hundred cities! God had caused an old dream to resurface with a brand new vision.
Later in 2009 I had the opportunity to talk with Terry Virgo about the possibility of planting a church into Spokane. He remembered back to his first trip to the US when he flew into the city of Spokane. He had felt then that God said we would have a church there one day and was very encouraging to me about a potential plant into the city.
We continued to pray and the next year at another Newfrontiers USA event, Celebration Northwest, we were again gathered to pray. John Lanferman, the leader of the apostolic team overseeing our churches in the US, dared us to ask God for big things and to call them right out loud in the meeting. The atmosphere of faith was high! I wanted to declare my desire for a reproducing church in Spokane but felt I should not go “public” with that until we did that intentionally as a team. I talked to Josh Yakos, the lead pastor of Clark Fork City Church, after the meeting and he said, “I wanted to ask for a church in Spokane too but thought I should talk to you first.” More confirmation.
After the meeting at Celebration NW I told Ted Hoit, a Newfrontiers leader in Idaho, that we needed to start talking about “when” rather than “if” we would plant into Spokane. He grinned and told me that he and his wife had already been praying about Spokane and us and that they were excited to see us plant into that city. I talked with John Lanferman immediately and in late August we started the preliminary work to discuss making a plant into Spokane real.
Eight months and several leadership evaluations later we’ve finally gone public and the response has already been overwhelming. Twitter and the blogosphere have seen to that. While I’m used to taking big faith steps I’m not used to taking them quite so publicly! But hey, let’s go for it!
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