Saturate Austin

One Year into the Life of a Church Plant

Tim Birdwell and Michael Dennis’ North Village Church (www.northvillagechurch.com) is nestled in the north central core of Austin.  This is what a church plant looks like after a year.  After much hard work and labor in the gospel, a church begins to emerge out of the good work of their missional core.

Hill Country’s Church Planting Missional Paradigm Shift

Paradigms are the mental maps we create over time.  The neural pathways in our brains have created ruts of faulty assumptions that will not foster the kind of church planting movement we wish to see in Austin.  Alan Roxburgh suggests that we become “cartographers in a new terrain, shaping churches in which map-makers multiply in local contexts.”  In other words, we must stop planting a church in our head before we discover the one that makes sense to those to whom we have been sent.  That shift in thinking rejects a franchise model of planting and demands a shift in strategy that results in a high risk venture with fewer resources and fewer of the “already convinced” on our team, all of which creates...pressure.  Listen to one of our current church planters, Russell Johnson, as he describes the pressure cooker he stepped into as a church planter.  Interestingly, he says it’s the hardest, yet most wonderful journey he has ever traveled.  This is the new reality, and this is why the kind of man it takes to do this is a rare breed!

Josh Cagle, Lead Pastor of Summit Community Church stopped by to share a little insight into his experience with the Hill Country Bible Church Church Planting Residency Program.