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!