Craig
From the very beginning, Grace Church lived up to its name. I have distinct memories of the church's early days, and they were unquestionably days of grace; days of experiencing God's favor. We began without a typical church planting team. Besides our family, only one single lady (Bev( in all of Sovereign Grace Ministries felt called to relocate to San Diego to help plant the church. This meant that we had to build a church planting team on the ground in San Diego. God graciously brought locals like Bingo and Laura and Regina to join with us in forming a core group to launch the church. I have the deepest respect for these friends who took a step of faith and invested their lives in pioneering a new church.
After moving into Rancho Bernardo, unpacking our boxes and hanging a few pictures, we began the work of officially starting the church. When I look back on it now, I realize that I was a young, clueless church planter who knew next to nothing about beginning a church, and yet I was full of faith for the adventure ahead. Just thinking about those days tempts me to fear and anxiety now, but at the time I had a deep confidence in the faithfulness of God. My only explanation is that God's grace was with us from the start giving us vision and a calm assurance of his faithfulness. It never seemed like great faith but great grace. Grace trumped every obstacle in this church start up... lack of experience, lack of team history, lack of a worship leader and lack of a facility.
We began gathering to worship God and build our team in October of 1995. We simultaneously launched a home group and a Sunday worship service. Given that the home group and the worship service included the same small group of people, we met in two different locations with two different formats to vary the feel of the gatherings. Saturday nights we met for home group at the Fierro's home in Rancho Penasquitos. Each week we shared a pot luck dinner together followed with a time of worship, discussion and prayer. We chose Saturday nights for home group because we only had a worship leader on the weekends. Our sending church, Abundant Life Community Church in Pasadena, provided a worship leader each weekend. Every Saturday a single adult, a couple, or sometimes an entire family would come down to serve us by leading worship for the home group. They would then stay overnight and lead worship again on Sunday morning. A gracious provision from the Lord, these worship leaders modeled sacrifice for our fledgling congregation.
While our early home group meetings looked much like the current ones, the Sunday morning meeting looked quite a bit different. Our living room was transformed into a small auditorium with about three rows of chairs and an area for a worship leader and preacher. Our kitchen table held the bookstore where we sold a few books, and our backyard was the children's ministry area where my wife, Ginger, taught the children every week. I remember these meetings as a time of joy. We were grateful to celebrate the gospel and eager to grow in our new relationships. We certainly didn't have much to offer people in the way of ministries or programs, but we did offer plenty of opportunities to serve, and this is what our core team was eager to do. Joyful serving marked the earliest days of Grace Church and has continued to be a very clear evidence of God's grace at work in this congregation.
One of our great challenges during the "Church of the Living Room" season was the difficulty of reaching out to new people. An invitation to a Sunday morning service that met in a living room was usually met with a confused stare. We sought to invite neighbors and even did an outreach of sorts at Christmas time. Just before the Christmas of ‘95, the core team baked some goodies and went door to door on our block carolling and giving out baked goods with an invitation to come and join us for an open house that we were hosting a few days before Christmas. I don't remember anyone but our core team showing up, but at least there was plenty of extra food to eat for the regulars.
At the beginning of 1996, we began to make preparations to meet publicly. We secured Morning Creek Elementary School near Poway Road as a meeting location. They offered us a huge "cafetorium" for our corporate worship gathering and the use of their library for children's ministry. We bought a sound system, some signs, and some basic Children's ministry supplies which were all stored in my garage and hauled to the school by a small but faithful set-up team. In late February and early March of ‘96 we did a few worship services with our core team to work out the bugs in our system. We had about 25 people in those first worship services counting adults, children, pets, the custodian and a neighborhood jogger that passed by.
On March 17, 1996 we held our launch service complete with a cookout following the meeting. It was a day of great excitement as a number of guests attended and a large group from Pasadena came down to help us with children's ministry and various other details. I think we had about 100 people in that meeting including our friends from Pasadena and a number of other well-wishers who came out to support us. Though our second Sunday's attendance was far less, we were deeply grateful to God for all that he had done in forming us as a community and allowing us to worship publicly. We really were a church.
October 1995 to March ‘96 was a season that I will never forget. For during that time, I learned more about the faithfulness of God than perhaps in any other 6 month season of my life. His grace to us was so tangible through the provision of people, finances, a facility, worship leaders, and so much more. I am grateful to have been there and witnessed God's hand birthing Grace Church. Without question, we knew His grace from the start.