| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Four Families Started
00:03:36
|
|
| So you said the most powerful word in the world is what? | |
| Grace. | |
| Grace. | |
| Oh, people. | |
| God is going to do something for you today. | |
| Yes. | |
| This is going to be your special day. | |
| And we're just so thrilled to have you here. | |
| You live just down the road of peace, as they say, up here in the hills. | |
| But you're from Springfield, Missouri. | |
| We are. | |
| And you've been pastoring there over 25 years, I think. | |
| Almost 28 now. | |
| 28. | |
| 28 years, hard to believe. | |
| Wow. | |
| And so you've been pastoring there, and you were a young guy when you went there. | |
| Now, what are you saying, Jim? | |
| Yeah, I mean, you were really young. | |
| How old were you when you went to Springfield? | |
| 29. | |
| And you'd already pastored. | |
| We had pastored out in western Kansas, and then we pioneered a church in the Kansas City area, and it was a rough go. | |
| And so we really moved here feeling like a failure, honestly. | |
| Not you. | |
| And I, well, yeah. | |
| And Debbie, when we loaded up our U-Haul, we got in the truck, and before we took off from Kansas City, I said, we're going to go to Springfield and we're going to give it a go. | |
| But if it doesn't work, I want to go back to law school. | |
| Wow. | |
| Because really, I'd lost sense of my calling, honestly. | |
| And it felt like such a failure in believing God and trusting God. | |
| And, you know, Kansas City was a tough go. | |
| So we came to James River. | |
| And that's one of the things, you know, sometimes people look at something on the outside and they think one way. | |
| And then when they hear the inside story, they realize it's much different than that. | |
| But we came here. | |
| I told the leadership council because they'd been going for eight months. | |
| Yes. | |
| They had 82 people. | |
| And I told them, I said, listen, I'm tired. | |
| My wife's tired. | |
| Please don't ask her to do anything for the next nine months. | |
| But if you're needing somebody who has a vision for Springfield and can just excite people, I'm probably not your guy. | |
| And, you know, they hired me. | |
| I can't believe I don't know why they would do that. | |
| I don't know why they would, you know. | |
| So how old were you when you came? | |
| 29. | |
| And you had two babies? | |
| We had three. | |
| Oh, the boys. | |
| Two, three, four. | |
| The boy had already been born. | |
| Yeah, two, three, and four. | |
| And our youngest is a daughter, Savannah, and she was four. | |
| So they were young. | |
| Four, five, and six. | |
| And you came, the church, James River, which everybody knows James River here. | |
| You know that. | |
| I mean, and you have. | |
| We're the great church in Europe America. | |
| You have several campuses, actually. | |
| We do. | |
| We have four campuses now. | |
| We just opened one in Joplin, but we have three in Spain. | |
| Wow. | |
| So exciting. | |
| I love it. | |
| But it was in a store building or something. | |
| It was. | |
| It was in a storefront, and they were just renting space. | |
| In fact, it started next door to a tattoo parlor. | |
| Who started all of this, right? | |
| This tattoo thing? | |
| It was four families that started, yeah. | |
| Oh, but I mean, this is the tattoo job. | |
| But you know, but you are reaching the youth, and you didn't even use the tattoo parlor next door. | |
| Yeah, the Lord just said to say, you know, sometimes, and I think you understand this because of all you've seen, there's times the Lord just breathes on something, and the result is something that defies human explanation, human quantification. | |
| That's James River. | |
| God breathed on that church and raised up a church in really a small community. | |