The Vision

Vision is the fuel that powers our aspirations. To create and maintain forward momentum you need vision for inspiration. Vision evokes self-sacrifice for a cause or result not yet seen. It keeps an athlete or anyone for that matter willing to pay the price in determination and discipline to achieve and reach beyond what is expected. It keeps you motivated when you least feel like doing something uncomfortable. It’s the reason you get up in the morning with expectancy and hope for the new day.

Wow! So, how grandiose does it have to be to produce this kind of effect? It doesn’t have to be that spectacular to grip you. In fact I think spectacular often paralyzes people from doing anything. If it’s too big and grandiose, they like to talk about it but don’t do anything about it.

Vision has only to grip your heart with what could be. Once it’s in the core of your being you can’t shake it. It can grow and become clearer with each step that you take. But it requires a step; you must act for vision to be effective. Action is like turning on the key in a car full of petrol. Without that simple movement all the potential languishes unfulfilled in all its gloriousness. Talking alone does nothing. We must put wheels to our words.

I had a vision for a church in Kensington. It wouldn’t let me go. I couldn’t shake it or rebuke it or renounce it away. It stuck in my soul, causing me to pray for its birth, to worry if I had really heard God, and to meditate on what it would look like. Then things started to happen.

Although I loved church as it was, I started to have a holy discontentment. I remember listening to some new worship music by United, Hillsong Church’s youth. It wasn’t what I was used to or what we normally sang at church services. I used to wonder how we could attain intimacy with this intensity of rhythm. To me intimacy came with slow, gentler music. Yet, I didn’t want to be lost in space. You know, where people come to visit your service and say, aren’t they cute, still doing those old songs from 20 years ago. My wife and I had thought that way about older friends whose church service didn’t have a song newer than the early 80s. If we could think this way, I didn’t want someone else thinking that about us. I wanted to be current with the creativity that the Holy Spirit was releasing to His Body worldwide. I told Bonnie that we needed to do whatever stretching was required for us to grow. Growth in the Spirit is more about our attitudes and how hardened they have become. We do stretching exercises to stay limber and loose physically, so why not spiritually? I didn’t want to be stuck in the 90s but I did want something that was marked by the Holy Spirit and could be reproduced by anyone willing to serve the Lord.

This discontentment continued to grow as I continued to pray. A dear friend of ours who has mentored us over the years said once that the church in North America grew through discontentment and division. I thought at the time how sad that was. But an edge of discontentment is necessary for church planting otherwise no one would ever leave or start anything new. We need to feel we want to do something different, even if only slightly. It tips the balance in favour of change over remaining the same. I thought I wanted to do a church with less emphasis on Sunday services and more on being the church, whatever that looked like.

Discontentment always creates an issue with timing. If you stay too long while discontentment is calling you on, you become bitter, critical and self-righteous. You judge everything in your home church out of this state of spirit. Discontentment is like a runner getting set in the blocks. It puts you in the starting gate with your body gearing to explode forward. Too long a delay causes false starts and sometimes even a sense of disqualification. Leaders need to be sensitive and alert to timing for the benefit of all: those who are staying and those who are leaving.

As I continued to pray over the vision I started to feel the Lord’s heart for the city. I found that statistically 29% of London’s population were in their twenties. My heart started to ache with His heart for His children. These are the young people who have not known fathers or mothers. Their lives have witnessed divorce and separation. They desperately want friendship, loyalty and fidelity, all of which they have not seen displayed by the generation that birthed them. I felt they were looking for fathers and mothers in the faith who would nurture them by example and teach them His ways.

Bonnie and I would walk the pathways along the edge of our estate and cry out for these young people. How we would reach them was beyond us. We just knew that His heart was for them and He desired them to know His home.

At the time of our release my vision was to plant a church in Kensington. It grew fueled by discontentment with what I had led before, but the vision didn’t clarify what contentment would look like. Accompanying all this I also had an ache for reaching 20s that would not go away.

The Father’s House

Beginning the Journey

I would like to share the journey of the Father’s House with you. The perspective is mine and mine alone. I am sure all the other great people involved in the church will have different thoughts on what happened but I can only tell you what I see.

The whole thing started on November 23, 1999. Our family had just arrived in England with plans to work with a new church movement and specifically to found a leadership training college. I awoke at 3 am with what I think was Holy Spirit inspiration. I felt I was to plant a church in Kensington.

I had no idea where Kensington was. I also knew I couldn’t share this with my wife. Imagine moving with your two young school aged children from the west coast of Canada to Chelmsford, Essex so you could initiate a bible college, then telling your wife you think you should start a church somewhere you never heard of before. Right! My wife is calm, cool and able to handle stressful situations but this would have brought about a self-induced colonoscopy.

So, I prayed!

At the end of a year I mentioned casually and briefly the possibility of a church plant. She never looked at me. Her only response was to hold up her hand (talk to the hand the face isn’t listening).

So I prayed some more.

A year later she was a little more civil. She said NO! No discussion, no nothing.

So I prayed some more.

By this time I knew where Kensington was. It happened to be the richest borough in London with the most expensive houses and rental rates. I started to debate with the Lord that maybe He meant Kennington as it was only one letter out and I thought possibly I could handle that. What a funny thought! I’m negotiating with God over the location because I think it’s cheaper. It was still way beyond my means. Some how things that are expensive look more reasonable once we have spent time looking at something even more expensive. I lost the debate.

So I prayed some more.

At the end of year three of praying she said it was a possibility but she didn’t know how it could possibly happen. A light at the end of the tunnel, there was hope. In May of 2003 we brought the subject up with the couple we were working with in the church movement. They were open to it, I think. Sometimes I think we don’t really give people a chance to say no by the way we put things to them. They said I should be looking to gather a team over the next year to go with us. Everything seemed a go at this point.

The home church was struggling by the autumn. Unfortunately two great opportunities happened almost at the same time. The first was a revamping of the small group system from a nurture base to a very evangelism focused structure that was not well received. The second opportunity was acquiring a building for full time use. It is strange how people can pray for a facility for years, and then when it comes about, they get upset and leave. The church was feeling very shaky and uncertain. We felt to take a team out would be misperceived and a tipping point to disaster for the church. We asked if the other couple would prefer it if we postponed the plant until the next year. They accepted the offer.

So, we prayed some more.

In October of 2004 it was announced that we would be gathering a team to plant a church in Kensington in the spring of 2005. We started to meet in our house in Chelmsford to pray and plan. On April 10, 2005 the church had a commissioning or sending service for our team and we were released to start the great adventure.

So, we prayed even more!