Session on Marriage, Part 1

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm going to give you the notes from my session at the National New Church Conference. I had the topic of marriage and parenting for the church planting family.

I’ve been asked to speak to you about the DNA of the church planting family. How do we have a healthy marriage in the middle of the church planting chaos? How do we raise kids that love God and love people? As if marriage and parenting weren’t hard enough, you add a church plant to the equation and who knows what will happen! Sounds like a recipe for stress and chaos to me!

Let me start off by telling you a little bit about myself. I was born in Buffalo, NY. My mom is Catholic and my dad is an Atheist. When my parents got married they decided that the kids would be raised in the Catholic Church. It was there that I learned about God and Jesus, but I never learned what it meant to live in a relationship with Him.

I attended church weekly, but was clueless and pretty uninterested. I viewed Christians as weird and un-relatable. That is until I met Vince in 1992. We worked together in a movie theater. It was love at polyesters first sight. We started out as friends and he explained to me what being a Christian was about. He showed me evidence and taught me how to read the Bible. His joy and positive outlook on life were irresistible to me. Several months later I gave my life to Christ.

When we first started dating Vince was on his way to law school in Illinois. I thought, “This is cool! I’ll be marrying a lawyer, we’ll have lots of money, and life will be awesome!” God had other things in mind. After one year of law school Vince felt God calling him into ministry. I thought, “This is unbelievably un-cool. I’m going to have to learn how to knit and play the piano. We’re going to be dirt poor and life will suck!” Boy, was I wrong.

We moved to Louisville, KY where Vince did a year-long internship at Southeast Christian Church. After that we moved to Northern Virginia for 2 years where Vince was on staff at New Life Christian Church. After that we moved to Virginia Beach, VA to start Forefront, a church for the un-churched. Forefront just celebrated its 10 year anniversary last month. Let me just say that I was completely unprepared for the church planting life. I’ve never been to Bible College. I didn’t grow up in a church where there was an example to follow (Catholic priests don’t really have much to offer in the Pastor’s wife department). I’ve never been trained or taught on the fundamentals of church planting. I’ve never even been to assessment for Pete’s sake. I was horrified. I had no idea what was in store for me. It’s been a crazy ride, but one that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

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