Growing Faith Church Plant Prayer Page

This weekend will be a big step in the path to planting Growing Faith Church. I will have the opportunity to share a little bit about how God brought us to this point and what plans we have in this Sunday’s services at PG Baptist. At the end of each service, we will be commissioned by the church to be sent out by them to plant this church. It is exciting to come out of the background and start to share publicly what God is doing.

In preparation for this milestone, there have been a lot of things checked off of the massive to-do list that comes with church planting. Our church is legally incorporated, it has an address (a post office box), and its own phone number. The first version of our church webpage will go public on Sunday at GrowingFaithNC.com and we will start the first stages of active fundraising for the project. We had hoped to have our branding done by this Sunday, but our logo is still in the design phase. I’m impatient, but trying to trust in God’s timing for everything.

Since you all have been so faithful to pray for us through the early stages of this journey, I wanted to share a couple of things with you before the rest of the church hears them on Sunday. (Sunday’s services will be livestreamed as usual and available through the PGBC website after that.) The first is a bit of news. We will be holding a “Vision Gathering” on Sunday, January 14th at 6pm in the Pleasant Garden Baptist Fellowship Hall. This will be a time to get more detailed information about the church plant’s mission, vision, and strategy and a time where those who might be a part of our mission team can find out how to apply for that. Second, here is a introductory video about Growing Faith that will be shown before the message in both services on Sunday.

We are so excited about this big next step, but we have a lot of prayer needs that we would ask you to pray with us about. First, pray that our logo gets done and that we eventually have one that we are excited about. Second, pray for this Sunday’s services – pray especially that Brian communicates well and that God uses these services to call people to be a part of this mission. We are really praying for the right people to go with us to plant this church and we have several specific leadership roles we need to fill before we launch services sometime in 2025. Pray for Brian and Jeana as they continue to figure out the logistics of forming a team, training them, and preparing them for the work of reaching the lost in Liberty. Finally, pray that God would reveal the location in the area where he wants us to meet at his church.

Thank you all for being prayer warriors! Once the church’s official website goes public, I may stop posting here. There will be a Growing Faith newsletter (hopefully monthly) that you can sign up for on the new website that will keep you informed on our progress and prayer needs.

After a period where we were waiting, God seems to be moving quickly in a few areas. Most exciting is the fact that we have a tentative date that we are setting as the goal for launching the church. Mark down April 13, 2025 in pencil (and probably something lighter than a #2!) as the goal date. This is the Sunday before Easter in 2025 (Palm Sunday for those that grew up with the church calendar) and it is also my (Brian’s) 53rd birthday. I would love to celebrate my birthday with the first service of this new church! But God is in control and we are holding loosely to that date – his timing is perfect and we want to follow him completely.

We also seem to be settling more and more on the Liberty area as the place God wants us to plant. This gives us an anchor point to start looking at potential locations to meet. That’s a big prayer request that you’ll see over on the right side. I sense that God is going to reveal a location when the time is right and that it may not be until more people know about our plans. Also on the right hand side of this page, you’ll see a place to sign up with your email address so that you can get an email every time there is a new post on this page. That will keep you up-to-date without me having to text you individually like I’ve been doing so far.

Last Saturday, Jeana and I went to an all day training to kickoff the SENDNC church planter training I will be going through the next two semesters. It was a good day and we got to meet several other church planters. I knew that God was in it when I realized that almost all of the planters I am going through training with are planting in a rural context! I thought I was the only one crazy enough to try to plant in a less densely populated area, but God is good! Here’s some pictures from that day:

I will be meeting with the guys in this cohort every week on Thursday nights. My Wednesday night series is going well – I’m about halfway through it. I appreciate your continued prayers and please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or Jeana if you ever have any questions. Glory to God!

Haven’t updated this page mainly because there hasn’t been a lot of movement. At times it has felt like this process has suddenly lurched forward at warp speed but lately it has slowed to a crawl at best. This can get me a little antsy, but I am trying to rest in the knowledge that God is in control of the timing and I don’t want to get out in front of Him. My connect class is starting a study of the book of Acts tomorrow and as I was preparing to teach, God showed me how when Jesus gave his apostles the mission to be His witnesses to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth, He then disappeared into heaven and they had to wait for ten days until the Holy Spirit came upon them at Pentecost. I’m in that space between getting the mission and getting the direction and power also, I guess.

I’ve had a couple of meetings scheduled with Pastor Robert that didn’t happen for various reasons. We were going to meet back on July 5th but his dad had some medical issues and then he was in Ukraine for a couple of weeks. This past week we were scheduled to meet but the storms came through and knocked out power. PGBC had the great idea to serve hamburgers and hot dogs to the community so that preempted our meeting. So there have been good reasons that we haven’t been able to get together, which confirms for me that God’s in it. The other reason I know God’s timing is perfect is that He has changed my thinking on some future ideas and plans so that when we do get to meet, my perspective will be much different than it would have been back on July 5th (if that makes sense).

At this stage, I am working through what leadership positions I would like to fill prior to planting the church. Right now, I would identify six of these: worship director, communications director (video, audio, social media, etc.), finance director/treasurer, discipleship director (incl. small groups and children’s ministry), hospitality/guest services director, and evangelism/volunteer coordinator. These would not (all) be paid positions and the list might change as I see who God puts in my path and I think through it more. But a big prayer request right now would be that God would lead me to the people who will be a part of this team. Once this team is assembled, there will be some training and planning as we gather others who will be a part of our “launch team.” So I will be working on job descriptions for these positions over the coming weeks.

Starting this Wednesday night (or possibly next Wed), I will be preaching an eight week series at PGBC which I’ve titled, “What’s So Good About the Good News?” I’m excited about this opportunity and I’ve got three of the eight messages pretty much done already. Those services start at 6:30pm and I certainly would appreciate your prayers that God would direct what I say and use it for His glory.

So that’s the update for right now, although there isn’t much to report. Thank you so much for your prayers and support. I think my meeting with Pastor Robert will happen soon, so I might have more to report after that. Blessings!

The Growing Faith Project evolved step by step from a conversation Brian and Jeana had at their kitchen table one Saturday morning back in 2019. That conversation led to Brian traveling to Thailand later that year on a mission trip and meeting several missionaries and Thai church planters. That in turn led to Brian going back to school and receiving a Master’s degree in Pastoral Ministry from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in 2022. Right after seminary, Brian and Jeana led a mission trip to western Ukraine and that trip seemed to confirm a call Brian felt to lead or plant a church. You can read more about all of those steps over on Brian’s public blog: brianbeasley.com.

I (Brian) remember feeling so inspired and motivated on the plane ride home from Ukraine. I felt God’s call to ministry and had always been excited about the prospect of participating in some role with the planting of a new church, but I wanted to make sure that my desire wasn’t being fed by pride or narcissism. It’s hard sometimes to identify your underlying motives and so I kept praying through what God had next.

In October of 2022, not long after the Ukraine trip, there was a Sunday morning where nobody showed up for the Connect Class small group I lead at church each week. This, of course, was somewhat embarrassing but has never happened before or since. It was beyond unusual because we have 10-15 people in the class and on that day, even Jeana couldn’t be there because she had been asked to help lead worship. So God’s hand was all over it because it led to a productive conversation with the lead pastor at PGBC, Pastor Robert, which obviously wouldn’t have happened if I had been teaching. Robert asked me what I felt the Lord was calling me to do now that I had a seminary degree and I told him about my desire to lead or plant a church but also shared my concerns about motivation. One of the final things Robert told me during that conversation stuck with me: “Just because it’s your idea doesn’t mean that it didn’t come from the Lord.”

A couple of months later, Robert told me that if I still feeling led to plant a church he wanted to connect me with “SendNC,” which was a partnership between our state Baptist convention and the North American Mission Board for the purpose of planting churches. SendNC is currently working hard to raise and train planters from NC to see churches multiply all over the world. In January I met with Mike Pittman, the Director of SendNC, and agreed to go through a planter assessment program to measure my and Jeana’s readiness to plant a church.

While going through the application and pre-assessment process, I had the opportunity to meet with Pastor Robert and PGBC’s executive pastor, Pastor Marty, to discuss what it might look like to partner with PGBC and plant a church. Jeana and I had been feeling drawn to focus on northeast Randolph County because of the growth that was expected there from the Toyota megasite that was currently under construction. We knew there were people in that area that drove a long way to get to PG every Sunday and the population would grow substantially in the next few years. It also didn’t seem that daunting to plant a church close by rather than have to move to some faraway land. I realized in speaking with Robert and Marty that the leadership at PGBC had also been discussing being part of planting a church in that same area for many of the same reasons. They realize that there is no more room to expand on the current church property but didn’t want to miss the opportunity to spread the gospel to the people that God would be bringing to a nearby area. So a church plant made sense and God had been drawing us separately to the same desire.

Jeana and I were still not sure of God’s call but had completed the pre-assessment process and the next step was to attend a two-day assessment retreat conducted by SendNC with several other potential church planting couples. This assessment consisted of us being interviewed multiple times by multiple people on multiple aspects of church planting, family life, emotional health, and a few others. I was also asked to preach for 15 minutes on Luke 15 (they had to cut me off – how do you cover Luke 15 in 15 minutes?!). Robert and Marty were also participating in this retreat and receiving some information on how to operate as a sending church. By the end of the assessment process, Jeana and I were confident God was calling us down the church planting path.

There were several confirming details during the retreat. At the beginning of the retreat, they told us that based on the process, we would be given either a green light at the end of the retreat signifying that we were ready to move on to church planter training, a yellow light if there were some things we needed to address first, or a red light if they believed that God was calling us to something other than planting at this time. Jeana and I joke that once she heard that we were going to get a “grade,” she was going to do everything she could to “win” and get the green light! One of our first exercises was to draw a picture of our journey and how God had called us to plant a church – here’s Jeana’s drawing:

One of my concerns was (is) the feasibility of planting in a relatively rural area where people are spread out more than they would be in an urban center. Another confirmation God provided was that the planting couple we happened to sit with in the main sessions (who were 100% sure they were called to plant from the beginning, unlike Jeana and me), were planning to plant in Siler City – a rural area nearby – and were coming from a successful church plant in Pittsboro – also a small town. That made me feel a little better about the location God had put on our hearts.

At the end of the assessment retreat, we received the green light to keep going through the process. I will be going through some training with a cohort of other planters starting this fall. Since the retreat, Jeana and I were obsessed with trying to come up with a name for the potential church. I wanted it to be somewhat unique (just about every significant word in the Bible already has 100 churches featuring it in their names!) and not too “Christiany” so that unchurched folks wouldn’t understand it. I don’t know how many possibilities we worked through but it had to be in the hundreds. One morning Jeana suggested “Growing Faith” and both of us liked it, so we think that’s the one. You’ll notice that I’m calling this process the “Growing Faith Project” for now. That’s because I want to keep my focus on the fact that we aren’t doing this just to plant a church. Our priority is to minister to the people in this area and share the good news of Christ with them regardless of whether we create an actual church or not. Our prayer is that we would be forced to start meeting as a church because of all the people who are coming to know the Lord.

So when is all of this going to materialize? I wish I knew. When I started down this path, I was expecting God to accomplish this in about three years when I retire from my current legal career in the fall of 2026. As I write this, everything seems to be moving at warp speed, but we still have a lot to do and even more to figure out. We just want to follow one step at a time as God leads. So you’ll see the timing of all of this is one of our prayer requests on the side as well as the prayer that God starts to bring people alongside us who share in this vision. We can’t do any of this alone or in our own power and resources and that’s ultimately why we need your prayers!