We planted Midtown Vineyard on February 9, 2020 which was 5 Sundays before COVID. My wife and I had moved to our neighborhood 7 years prior while I was co-pastoring another church.

I was working 35 minutes away, and while driving to work I could sense God saying, “You’re driving away from where I’m calling you to plant roots.” This feeling kept happening and in 2018 I knew a shift was coming, but didn’t know what it looked like. Over the next several months, many prophetic things started happening, I started talking to Jay Pathak to hear more of what the Vineyard was up to, and then my old Vineyard pastors reached out and asked if I was thinking about church planting. I really didn’t want to but I kept having this sense, so we went to a church-planting conference in Miami in January 2019, and were planning to use that week as confirmation for what we had been hearing.

We received a number of words from the Lord during this time that really helped encourage and direct us. For example, my wife and I go away in February every year for our anniversary and take some time to separately look back, look ahead, pray, and then come together to share and process. We had been battling infertility for seven years at this point and felt like we were not to formally plant until after we had a child. We had been working with a holistic doctor, which was really helpful, but we were also starting the adoption process. We adopted our daughter at nine hours old and brought her home, and then two months later found out we were pregnant. So we had two girls 9.5 months apart, and then church planted in February, so our joke is that we had three kids under one. It was a very deep experience for us.

Another time, I was at a church with my mom that I hadn’t been to and didn’t know anyone. The pastor paused in his message, looked at me, and then asked her, “Is that your son sitting next to you?” Then he said, “I don’t know what it is, but I see you starting something new and stepping into a season of preaching that you’ve never experienced before. It’s going to be a place where you have space and the capacity to lead leaders. I just see something unique in you man, and I’d love to hear more about it when we wrap up today.” He didn’t know that I was thinking about church planting, or even that I was in ministry.

Then right before we went to the conference, a man I’d never met before walked up to me in the lobby and goes to shake my hand, but has an open hand with a $100 bill. He said “Hey the thing you’ve been thinking through and aren’t sure if you should do it or not, you should go for it. I think it’s of God and he’s with you, so go.”

While all these things were happening, we kept meeting people who weren’t connected to a church, and we started meeting with about 20 of our neighbors in our living room. After a year of meeting and connecting to local organizations, we started meeting at our local elementary school. Then COVID hit and we went online for a year before moving to the building that we’re currently in.

We are definitely rooted in Place. Our church sits right between Old Fig, which is old money and million-dollar homes, and our downtown, which has low socioeconomic status and high crime rates. Our district is between the two, and is very diverse socioeconomically. We see ourselves as a bridge built through our district and believe Midtown Vineyard can bridge that gap.

When we set out as a church, there were 3 distinctions that we felt we could hold in tension: We want to be relationally authentic, spirit-dependent, and others-centered. We have found that we best connect with a psychographic of professional people who are seeking a place to be vulnerable enough to have a spiritual experience. The professionals we have are very socially conscious and committed to service, so they’re not waiting around for a place to contribute. They want to partner with the church, but they are already busy doing amazing work in our city. Our goal is not to determine how people serve or require everyone to commit to the partnerships we have, but the partnerships are great onramps for people who are new to faith or the church, who need a next step in giving themselves away.

We have community partnerships with an elementary school, a human trafficking organization, and the second-largest employer in Fresno for those who have barriers to employment. We do literacy mentoring at the local elementary school with an organization called “Every Neighborhood Partnership”, which is motivated by the third-grade literacy metric, which shows that those who are not reading at a third-grade level by third grade have a higher likelihood of ending up incarcerated. We also partner with a group called Central Valley Justice Coalition, which does a lot of preventative work. We run a lot of things to help broaden their reach, and we helped remodel a safe house for women who are coming off the streets.

In October of 2021, we had a woman in our church who had done long-term overseas Missions in the Middle East. We had a number of refugees from this area come to Fresno, and were connected to a few families. We were able to come alongside to help navigate things like housing and jobs, and some people built enough relationship to invite them over to share holidays together. There was also a tragic death in the community, and we were able to be with them during that time to share the grief. Some other women started a group called “Learning Conversations” where a group of women come together and practice their English. It has been a stretching opportunity, but really rich.

Our goal with our church has shifted with COVID, when we lost our crowd, and the ability to take on the traditional models of church growth all fell away. It has shifted my imagination of what I want this church to be, and I now see it more as a skyscraper approach, where the higher you want the building to go the deeper you have to dig down to build the supports. If we’re inviting people into the Kingdom and wanting to experience a new way of being with other people and God, we have to worry less about evangelistic programming and instead become healthy enough to be attractive.

We also don’t want to lose intentional outreach, and want to continue to help our people think through why their relationships matter. I think we have something to offer our city, and people who want to find Jesus in a unique way. We have done the work to dig down, and now we are looking to answer the question of “Now who’s it for?” Our goal is to be more relational than attractional, which is slow growth. We love our city and want to introduce people to Jesus in a powerful holistic way. We are Vineyard.