Attending the Evangel School of Urban Church Planting imparted a sense of confidence within me to plant a church. Seeing and interacting with others who sensed a calling to plant a church shed light on the fact that although church-planting was fairly uncommon within my normal spheres of interaction, it is indeed something that God is inspiring men and even other women to do. For me this meant that God could really be leading me to plant a church and that doing so could be successful. In a nutshell, Evangel gave me courage.
Our motto at my church, the Urban House of Prayer, is “Not church as usual.” Our church is a prayer-centered community of believers in Christ who exist to empower and equip an army of disciples. Our passion is to saturate our cities with the life-changing love and power of Jesus Christ. To this end we gather several days each week for prayer and to send out our members to make disciples within our community. We also gather on Sundays for prophetic worship services, which are geared toward allowing the Holy Spirit to guide each and every aspect of the church gathering. Additionally, Sunday gatherings are especially intended to edify and empower our members, who we like to call our missional partners.
Evangel not only gave me confidence to plant our church, it also increased my awareness of operational excellence in relation to leading a ministry. I left Evangel with a list of ways that my ministries could function in a more excellent manner. We have implemented many of the strategies for excellence that I learned from attending the training. I continue to mentally look back at my experience at Evangel as a standard that I strive for my ministries to mirror – from the timeliness of the schedule and quality of the teaching presentations, to the food and the loving hospitality displayed by the staff. The Urban House of Prayer would not be the church that it is without the training from the Evangel School.
Read more testimonies from our Evangel School of Urban Church Planting from Cedric Nelms and Bernard Emerson.
