James:
“Our family has been church planters really since 1999. We were youth pastors before that and then in ‘99 we decided to ‘relaunch/revitalize’ a church- those words weren’t really common at that point. We realized at that point we didn’t have the tools or resources- so we had no idea. We thought if we come in & work really hard people will love us and the church will grow. Yeah it didn’t. We took the church from about 50 people to 12. So we grew it amazing. We ended up taking the resources from it & planting a new church from scratch. We were winging it. We did that for 9 years & never really got off the ground. Struggled pretty hard. Then we started making some amazing connections- Arc, Church Multiplication network, and then obviously with the church planting office at the Convention. Through all of those connections we started getting resourcing. We started from scratch in 2013/14 with Encounter. After some time, we ended up retooling everything. One of the things we started with was our values, vision and mission. We pulled our values down to: we value people and we value the local church (specifically). And our mission: we want to be a real church that takes a real Jesus to real people.”
Deidre:
“In the south you have a lot of people who are one person on Sunday & a different person the rest of the week. We wanted a place where people could be real- not real in like flaunting sin but if people are hurting & people are going through something & having a problem, this is a safe place to be like, ‘I’m struggling with this. I need help. I need some support. I need counseling.’ So we wanted to make it a place where people didn’t have to hide- not having to be this fake person at church.”
James & Deidre Turner, Encounter Church Lead & Worship Pastors
THE CHURCH PLANTING STORIES 