- Gilliam Springs has always been a church
that has bought into missions,
the Great Commission.
And Jamie came to me one day, and he said,
"Hey, what do you think about us planting a church?"
And my response was,
"I can't believe we hadn't already planted one."
We said, "Okay, what we wanna do at this point
"is we just want to pray about this."
We have no idea what it looks like, where it's gonna be,
or when we're gonna do it.
All we know is this burden's on our heart to plant a church.
- I just began to wonder, why couldn't we do something?
Why shouldn't we really
was sort of the heartbeat behind that.
If the Lord's blessing here,
why would he not use us to be a blessing to Huntsville?
- Through prayer
and just other people kinda speaking into it,
realized that God was calling us to to plant
and plant in Huntsville.
I think it might be Henry Blackaby that says,
"Find where God is working and jump in."
And I very much felt like that that's what was happening.
We started seeing and noticing
what God's doing in this area,
but also,
the reality that there's still so much more to do
in this area.
There's a lot of brokenness,
and there's a lack of church presence here.
There's some great churches in this area,
but there's a need for more as this area grows.
And so, just for all those reasons,
we feel like God has kind of pinpointed this area for us.
Within the DNA of the church, at the foundation,
is this idea of training up,
making disciples that are ready to go out
and plant more churches.
And so, that's within our DNA,
and it's also within the DNA of Gilliam.
And Gilliam is a great sending church,
that has a bigger vision than just planting a church.
The vision is,
is we wanna plant multiple churches
that will go and plant multiple churches.
- I'm just grateful to be a part of a body,
a Southern Baptist body,
that's much bigger than this one church.
We can do so much more together than we can do alone.
The support from the training aspect from Alabama Baptists
or Alabama State Board of Missions
has been so important to us.
People ask the question, why plant more churches?
Because there's more lost people
than there are churches available,
so we need to be about planting more churches.
- You know, through the offering, through the givings,
we're incredibly honored,
even in the few months that we've been going,
we've had opportunities to use those resources
for the good of this community
and to share the gospel with this community
in tangible ways.
- As a pastor of a church planting another church,
you then really see
how all of this interconnectedness does work.
Those dollars,
they're not just off into nothing.
It comes back home,
and it allows us to expand our ministry
and hopefully, expand the gospel and the kingdom of God.