The why!

Why did we leave an established church that we loved to start a Church Plant you may be asking? Simply put, God told us to!

Earlier this year we both felt a strong desire to lay everything down and to pray for 40 days about our future. This was unusual for us as we didn’t just attend church, we lived to build the church and we loved the people who made up the church. Yes, we had taken 40 days to pray over other things before so nothing was unusual about that but this was 40 days prayer on the church! We had always been so sold out for the cause and this was scary territory for us! If we are honest, deep down we probably still had an expectation that God would speak and say ‘Ok, you just needed a rest and now it’s time to pick things up again’.

As soon as we laid everything down in prayer, we instantly felt a real sense of peace which is something that we hadn’t felt for months. It was strange because we knew that potentially we could be leaving our jobs as we were employed by the church, yet somehow there was no concern about how we would cope financially. We just both knew that if we weren’t meant to be there then it wouldn’t be right to stay.

One of the first things that God showed us during our prayer time was a passage of scripture from 1 Samuel 17. It is when Saul dresses David in his own tunic and we really felt that God was showing us that we had been trying to put on Saul’s armour hoping that one day it would fit us and it wouldn’t so it was time to take it off! Wow, that really wasn’t expected but somehow we knew it was right! We were both very much like “Ok God, confirm it! Show us what we need to do”.

There were lots of ways that God confirmed that it was time to leave and not every way came through us. We had a close knit group of people standing with us and they shared scriptures that they believed God had given them. Online sermons about how the brook had dried up for us and our provision being elsewhere spoke deep to our spirit. We started to praise God as we knew this was a God thing! We didn’t know why then but we trusted that if it was a God thing then it was a good thing! We didn’t need every question answering; we simply trusted that God would reveal more when the time was right.

We never really expected God to say anything else; we knew we had to leave and that was enough for us. All we had to do was be honourable to God, honourable to the leadership and honourable to the congregation so we decided to wait until day 40 and then we would meet with our leaders and resign.

We don’t think anybody could have been more shocked than us when words and scriptures started to come thick and fast in those final days of the 40 day prayer. Passions ignited inside us and things we had never dreamed of doing began to rise up in both of us. We had always been builders of church, it was who we were in nature but we had always served someone else’s vision. Why were we now beginning to get our own vision for starting a church? What was happening? This wasn’t us! We hadn’t asked for this; in fact this was something we hadn’t wanted to do in the past. Our cry began to be “Oh God, what are you doing? Really? You want to use us?”

We still stand amazed at the inner confidence God gave us. We thought this would change to turmoil as our last day drew nearer but all we had was excitement of what was to come both for ourselves and the church we were leaving. We knew that God was good all the time and good things awaited us all.

One thing that God really made clear to us was that we had to ‘leave light’. We knew that this was so much bigger than just forgetting all the things that we had personally bought and leaving with just the wages we were owed. It meant not asking people to come with us; we had to trust God that He would speak to those that were meant to be on the next journey with us. It also meant we could not take any previous accomplishments or any regrets with us. God was doing something new inside us and a new way of doing things would be birthed.

We tried our best to be honourable in all areas when working the last month of our notice and we really hope that we achieved that. It was our intention to leave with our hearts full of gratitude rather than with a sense of emptiness and we can honestly say that we left with so much love in our hearts. We will always have a passion to see even bigger things happen in that place; it is full of the people we love.

But for us, the page was being turned. The new journey would unfold!

Simon & Valda

July 2022