February 08 - Downtown Dallas Church in the Making

While I could start this blog much earlier than February, more than a year earlier when our small group began, for this group really became our spiritual home from the beginning. But its February when we began to explore what it would mean for us to become a Church. The catalyst for this new venture actually came from a small, but significant challenge in my life. When I shared with everyone what that challenge was, they surrounded me like no other group had done before. A friend of mine cried. She probably won't ever realize how much those tears meant to me. Another friend fought hard to hold back his tears. He'll never realize how much that fight meant to me.

After this, I shared with them my desire to plant a church in Dallas. But the discussion was brief, and I didn't pass around a sign-up list. I knew there was still a lot to be accomplished over the next couple of months, and our challenges were many. For example, I knew that we had to begin working on our own spiritual health. We had just finished a curriculum called TrueFaced. The curriculum was OK, but the subject matter blew the lid off our group. Now, we needed to work on our spiritual condition. We began a new curriculum series simply titled: Spiritual Disciplines. This helped us work through the spiritual disciplines.

But the more pressing challenge for us was location. Due to size (we were running around 20 a week then), we had to meet at the church. Most of us lived in apartments, and if we had a house, it was so far away that it would be impractical. In order to move toward being a church, our group needed a home!

And that was what the month of March was all about.