Many of the people who have known me for the past few years know me as a pastor. In 2010, I decided to plant a church in the Spring Branch area of Houston. I, along with a group of about 12 people, met in an apartment complex clubroom and then at a storefront location for Sunday church services. We were intentional about serving the community and, looking back, I believe that we served people well.

On August of 2014, four years later, after a few months of seeing some challenges in our current church plant, we realized that we were faced with a few things that were foundational for a church plant and we had not developed them. So, we closed our church. You could read about those 3 reasons by clicking here. In the following weeks, we helped the church members find other churches, met with whoever needed encouragement and had voiced concern to me. It has been an amazing thing to see the majority of people plug in to other churches in Houston as they continue to serve God.

This is the short story. Now, I am in a church planting residency of the Houston Church Planting Network along with 6 other men who will be planting churches in Houston. Some may have questions about what a residency looks like and I may post more details about it at another time, but I would like to give you a gist of what the HCPN’s residency is.

For that, I will link you to a brief and to-the-point blog post that a brother resident posted a few months ago. Jacob Sweeney is another church planter in the residency who has written about what our residency looks like. As you click onto his blog post, he sums up the residency well by giving you more details on it.

The residency of HCPN is a fully funded residency that gives 7 men the time with key leaders and pastors in the city during the week to speak into things we need help in and has a system of soul care for church planters that often gets overlooked in the church planting process.

Check it out by clicking the link below:
What is a Church Planting Residency? by Jacob Sweeney