Craig and Jen Harris moved to Yakima, Washington to plant St. Andrews Church in the middle of a pandemic. Here’s their story.
At the start of a church plant, there are conversations, prayer meetings, email updates, invitations, meals, fundraising requests. The list goes on. Questions abound. Are we really called to this? Will we have enough money to get the church going? Will people come? Who will make the coffee, bring the deserts, organize a nursery? The one question that was never asked (if you can believe it) was, “what do we do if there is a global pandemic?”
How do you plant a church in the middle of a global pandemic when everyone is told to “stay home” to be safe? Although I am still not sure I know the answers to that question, I can share what the people of St. Andrews decided to do and how God is answering our faith with his kindness.
Our family moved to Yakima, Washington in summer 2020 to plant a new church. To prepare for the work, I took a two-year church planting residency at a sister church in Bellingham, WA through the Northwest Church Planting Network. Residencies are common for laying the groundwork for a new church plant. What’s less common is doing one 225 miles from your target city. Obviously, we had to develop some unique strategies to gather people while not being physically present. Those efforts started months before the COVID-19 outbreak. Little did we know that God was preparing us for what was to come.
We had a two-pronged strategy for how to reach Yakima from a distance. The first part was calling and emailing various people in the community. Our local contacts connected me to many people as they spread the word about the church plant. In this phase, I emailed, called, and connected as best I could at a distance. I also started a weekly online discipleship group with some of the men where we studied Scripture and prayed via Zoom. My wife, Jen, also started a long-distance, email-based Bible study with two women.
The second part of our strategy was regular monthly trips to Yakima where I would connect with people in person and host an evening of worship at someone’s house. Our monthly Sunday evening service also gave us something to invite people to, so they could get a taste of who we would be as a worshiping community. The rhythm of online meetings, phone calls, and monthly in-person meetings proved effective. Over the year our launch team had doubled in size. But when COVID hit, we lost the most compelling part of our strategy. Social distancing and other restrictions made our monthly meetings impossible.
No one imagined challenges like this, but now that they’ve come we prayerfully decided,
“Let’s launch anyway!”
If I am honest, when everything closed in Washington, I panicked a bit. How do you gather a church when you can’t gather? As moments of trials are meant to do, this pushed me to an intense time of prayer and seeking the Lord. I prayed that God would open unique doors that could only happen in situation like a pandemic. Shortly after I began those prayers, I met with one of my supervisors. He listened and then asked, “Why not just start online services now?” I thought it was a bit crazy but reached out to our launch team. They were excited. No one imagined challenges like this, but now that they’ve come we prayerfully decided, “Let’s launch anyway!”
That’s what we did. Our original plan was to start weekly services in September of 2020. We ended up starting services weekly online on April 5th, 2020. Clearly God had given us an opportunity that we would never have imagined without a global pandemic.
We also added a weekly discipleship group for women, and a midweek book study via Zoom where 8 families joined in. Overnight, I was connecting with our growing church three times a week. I was connecting with our members and the community far more than I would have without this crisis. We ended moved to Yakima early so that we could keep the momentum going. Despite all the disruption, our young church plant had grown.
Our online services continued through the summer of 2020. When restrictions began to lift, we started weekly communion services in our backyard and grew to a max attendance of 50. As we got settled and began to prepare for weekly services, we realized that our back yard worked very well, so we launched our Sunday services in-person at our house. Our church will remember those days with fondness for generations, including the time our kittens drank from the baptism bowl and then almost took out the communion table.
By October, it was too cold to hold services outside in Yakima, but we had building, so after a chilly service we gathered and prayed, asking the Lord to provide. The following week was stressful and full of potential buildings that didn’t work out. The, on Friday just days before we’d go back online, God provide a beautiful historic church building in downtown Yakima. We have been meeting there on Sunday mornings ever since. God answered our prayers.
From outside the community it might appear like everything is going so smoothly. In some ways we are living a dream ministry year. At the same time, however, my wife and I have reflected on these past 5 years of seminary training and residency. Like everyone who serves in this way, we have had to endure many trials, closed doors, illnesses, multiple moves, and financial hardships, just to name a few. “Through many dangers, toils, and fears,[we] have already come,”. When we went to seminary, we went into the unknow with no back-up plan. We asked the Lord daily to show us the way. All the time, he was preparing us for this unique moment.
As the year tuned, we are seeing with increased clarity that God brought us here just in time for a harvest season, and of course, more sowing. We have no doubt that it is Jesus who is doing the work. The Lord continues to lead and direct as we are in the middle of pursuing the purchase of a different historic building in town, with the hope that this can be a permanent home for our church and the site of a new school we are preparing to open this fall. All of these are things that we have prayed and dreamed about. It has been a joy to see God pull these things together in his time.
The global pandemic is not something we could have ever imagined. And we know that it has brought tragedy to so many, including people we know. However, God used to help us get established in Yakima.
When Francis and Edith Schaeffer began the work of L’Abri in Switzerland, they prayed and asked God to make it obvious that He was doing this work. We boldly prayed the same thing. We see God moving families from other cities to join the work in Yakima. Christ is using His Bride across the United States and Canada to plant this new church, and we rejoice in His mighty deeds!
“All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord,
and all your saints shall bless you!
They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom
and tell of your power,
to make known to the children of man your mighty deeds,
and the glorious splendor of your kingdom.
Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,
and your dominion endures throughout all generations.”
Psalm 145:10-13
