God Speaks... (or we're completely crazy.) | Kara

We are often asked, "How did you decide to plant a church in Philadelphia?" I've told this story before - but in case you haven't heard it:

Josh and I both knew we were called to professional ministry since before we were married, and our home/our tribe/our people is the Vineyard, and church-planting always felt right. It makes sense with our gifts and our personalities. Plus, we think it's the most effective way to do the most important thing - and we feel like our place in this noble cause is calling others to follow us as we follow Christ.

But why Philadelphia?

Since we knew we were called to planting, but we didn't know where, we were counseled to find a place we liked full of people we liked.  So we started going places. At the National Conference in 2007, this person made the following announcement: "If you know you are called to church planting, but you don't know where, come have lunch with us!" That was exactly the way we'd be talking about it - we know we're called to planting, we don't know where.  Plus, free lunch! (Or so we thought - it only cost us our hearts - that we have gladly handed over to the city - and inspired the riskiest financial adventure of our lives.)

We show up to lunch hosted by a motley crew all wearing tee-shirts that asked, "Why Philly?" Their answer was that this city is awesome - their leader, Mark Tindall, was probably the most enthusiastic person we'd ever met. Lunch was great, and we were invited to come out to a "Why Philly? Week-end" in which the pastors in the City of Brotherly Love would put us up, feed us, show us around, and join us in dreaming about what God might be up to in this beautiful and ancient city!

(Okay - "ancient" might be a stretch - but have you ever heard the Eddie Izzard joke about how Europeans mock Americans b/c we say we're going to remodel something to make it look JUST like it looked FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFTYYYYYY  YEEEEEEAAAAAARS AGOOOOOOOOOOO! - Well, our hometown did that. Literally. Spent tens of thousands restoring the city square to is original design - from 1970. So see? It's all perspective.)

We came out for the week-end and had a great time!

When we went home, we tried to calm ourselves down about the whole thing. I mean - Brad, Becca, Jerry, & Justin won't be coming to our church if we planted in Philly ... they already have churches to go to. We tried to fight the "high". We failed. We visited other places and nothing measured up, nothing clicked.

Then - in September of 2008, everything changed. One of our closest friends was diagnosed with leukemia. What would Jesus do? Tell his friend to tough it out and then leave to plant a church? Seems unlikely. So we waited, and we walked through cancer with them as best we could, and we learned a lot about friendship and love and the brokenness of the world.

A year later, that friend - Nathan - was with us at a prayer training. The training included a time to listen to God and everyone shares anything they thought of - no one gets a pass on sharing. It's an exercise to help us all over the huge hurdle of "is it God? or is it just me?" by answering "Who cares? Just try and we'll see." First - our friend Ty shares the he, "saw a Phillies hat." He didn't know we were thinking about planting in Philly, in fact, he didn't want to share the picture. For months after the fact he would still say that he didn't really think that he had heard from God. We're pretty sure he did. (And we bought him one of those hats! Looks great on him!) I think he might finally share our point of view. :)

Then Nathan shared - he said he saw an image of roller skates - white ones with pink wheels. I had a pair of roller skates like that when I was little (although, the lining was also pink, so I could only say that they were "similar" to what Nathan described). Nathan, an experienced and confident listener said he felt God was sharing this picture to convey the idea of a dream, once a cherished pasttime, that has been shoved in the back of the closet, and that it's time to pull out that dream again.

This was too much for me and Josh - we felt strongly that these images were for us and that we were supposed to dust off our old dream and start pursuing planting a church in Philadelphia.

A few months later, Nathan passed away - 2 days before his 26th birthday. The second anniversary of it was this last Tuesday, January 29th.  Around that time we also discovered we were pregnant, and life turned into a whirlwind - walking through the transition to widowhood with Nathan's wife (my best friend) Renee; getting ready to have a baby - named Bolt Nathan Goeke; getting our church plant application in; actually having the baby; asking God to tell us if it was Philly for sure; and coming out here for our Assessment - at which time, God did tell us, for sure, it's Philadelphia.

We moved here in September of 2012, and we get evidence all the time of how God is providing for us. Our best Philly moment happened on Wednesday. In preparation for our first ever Church Plant Vision/Prayer Meeting, Josh went to the location of the meeting to take a picture of it for the facebook invite. Across the street where our friend Megan lives - and where we were going to provide childcare for the meeting - guess what was sitting on the stoop?

White rollerskates. With pink wheels.