This is a post from Paul's blog. You can catch his current series on our 10th Anniversary here...

Let Me Take You Back to the Beginning

This Sunday we start a month long series celebrating The Journey's 10 year anniversary (I can't believe it's been 10 years)! Our actual anniversary is the first Sunday in October, but we wanted to spend this month looking back and looking ahead to the next 10 years.

So, let me take you back to the beginning. The Journey was birthed in our hearts as a dream to create a space where people could come and connect and take steps with Jesus no matter what their spiritual background was (or wasn't).

When you launch a new church a good portion of your focus is simply finding people to help bring the dream to reality. Because we had been living in the area for 5 years, we felt we had a head start on finding people as we already had built in relationships. I was optimistically praying that we would have 100 people join our launch team.

But week after week went by and our progress was slow. By the early summer of 2003, after 6+ months of conversations we still had only about 10 families, totally about 40 people (including children). My prayers went into desperation mode.

In spite of my desperate prayers, we marched through summer without adding anyone to our team. On top of that, we still had no place to meet. We had made a deal with a new conference and banquet center (before the roof was even built), but they weren't done with construction yet. So, we began meeting with our team at the Cinema.

We had no salary (only what I raised), very few people, and no clue what we were about to get ourselves into . . .

Make sure you check out the 10 Videos & the 10 Things We're Celebrating on Matt's blog.