Welcome to the daughter church blog!

I’d like to take a moment to give a brief recap of how God has brought us to this point. Then, I have an invitation to our first party.

I suppose it started two years ago when Kristin and I randomly (providentially?) decided to do my summer internship in California. I wanted five straight weeks without one cloud or raindrop, God wanted us to learn about the amazing world of church planting. We worked with a half dozen or so church plants and saw how even these tiny and young churches were doing astounding things in their communities. Most of all, the vast majority of these people had little to no previous church involvement. This was where we wanted to be in ministry.

A year later, Paul DeVries, the senior pastor at Brookside in Grand Rapids, bought me lunch and put the idea of planting a church in Grand Rapids in my head. Twice since then we’ve had to say, “Well, it looks like God’s timing wasn’t in it.” Then something amazing would happen and the timing looked even better than before. Email me if you want a few examples.

I can’t neglect to mention the terrific work of the many committees who’ve helped pull us along. So here’s to you Visioning Task Force and to you Strategic Initiative #5. You guys made the difference.

That last committee came up with the idea to “birth” a daughter church. This is our current model and the more time you spend with me the more you’ll hear about it. Brookside will carry the developing church within while the young church has time to develop and grow. During this protected time, we’ll gather enough people together in our launch team so that we have a sufficient “birth weight” (you have no idea how far I can take this metaphor). The end goal is to give birth to a healthy beautiful baby church weighing anywhere from 60-150 people. Just like real children, the daughter church will still need some support and protection from the mother but we’ll become more and more independent until eventually we’ll completely leave the nest (become our own church with our own staff, administration, building, etc…)

For those of you who’ve spoken with me or Kristin, you know how excited we are about this opportunity. If you’d like to read more thoughts on this church plant and church planting in general, you can subscribe to an update by dropping me a line at dirkvaneyk@gmail.com.

Now for the invitation: many of you were there at the beginning when we just started thinking about this. Some of you Kristin and I just met. We’d like everyone to get together for a big party. Here’s the plan: Everyone’s invited to come over to our house (2082 Batchawana St. SE, Grand Rapids) on Thursday, July 16 @ 6:30. They’ll be good food, good beverages, and a good time had by all. This is our way of thanking you for your support so far but frankly, we’ll take any excuse we can in order to have a party.

Please RSVP to dirkvaneyk@gmail.com

That’s all for now.

God Bless,
Dirk and Kristin