Very soon after God called me to himself, he called me to church planting. And though this much was clear, I wasn’t expecting to plant so soon. However, in May 2008—the weekend I graduated from seminary—something changed, and God lit a fire in my bones that forced me to see the world with fresh eyes: There is work to be done, and I have no time to waste. The implications were unmistakable—the preparatory phase of my life’s work had ended and God was telling me to begin.

So I began. I went home that day and told my pregnant wife, “I think it’s time we started a church.” She considered this for a moment. “Yeah,” she said, “I think you’re right.” Now when a pregnant woman says yes to anything involving an uncertain future and enormous financial risk, God is surely at work. So we began.

It turned out God had already been at work in some other hearts in Roswell and all of the sudden we were sitting in a couple’s living room with eight other people asking, Is it possible that God is calling us to emerge as a new faith community? We decided to take all the content out of the word ‘church,’ open the scripture, and refill it only with what we found there, not because the churches in our city were wrong or even because we thought we had nothing to learn from church history. We simply wanted to start from the beginning and make no assumptions about God’s desire for his church.

So over the course of six weeks we opened scripture and asked God to speak to us, to tell us what the church was supposed to be and what he’d have us do.

We found that at its simplest the new community of Christ was marked by a single characteristic: Christ is all (Colossians 3:11). In other words, when the Christ-community interacts with one another, worships together, lives life collectively, the most obvious conclusion an onlooker should draw is that for these people Christ is all—not money, not titles of honor, not building campaigns. Christ is all.

The manifestation of that ethos is twofold: gospel and community. On one hand is the word of the gospel, the word that gave birth to and exponentially multiplied the church in Acts. On the other hand is community, the group of people created to live out the word of the gospel in the context of a new kind of society.

It’s a Christ kind of society where we love one another as Christ loved us, providing the watching world an undeniable apologetic that Jesus is alive and well; where it makes sense to sell your property to ease the burden of one another’s needs; where relationships are cultivated rather than programs; where our posture is repentance and Christ is made much of; where we are each other’s life insurance—if you die, I will raise your children as though they were my own; where kingdom work is accomplished not mainly through the efforts of an elite few (i.e., a paid staff), but through the Spirit-given gifts of the people; where we don’t seek to draw non-believers through attractional programs, but instead spend our lives as missionaries bringing the mercy and grace of Christ into the workplace and the soccer fields and the pubs and the chambers of commerce; where our lifeblood is bread and wine; and where we constantly birth new churches because the Lord adds to our number day by day those who are being saved (see Acts 2:47).

So here’s the bottom line. God has called us into existence to proclaim the Gospel of Christ for the shaping of cruciform community, and the redemption of everything.

That is why we call ourselves Redemption Church. We desire to put our hands to the plow of God’s ancient and future work of redemption, calling on him to supply the laborers we need in order to show every person in Roswell and the world the magnificence of Christ and the reconciliation of the cross.

Who can fathom the depth of this calling? But we are moving forward on our knees. Lord willing, we will finish the work given us, and some day sit at the marriage feast of the Lamb where Christ will call our names, pronouncing, “Well done good and faithful servants.”