A Nudge Plus Obedience

I had been serving as the worship pastor for many years at the Urbana Vineyard. I loved that job and felt like I had been called to do it. My family had been worshiping there for years before I got hired there. Several years in, part of my role was trying to help get our multi-site campuses launched. I was involved in the worship teams and the tech stuff in order to help plant those campuses and get them going.

We live in a small town called Paxton, about 3,500 people 30 miles north of Urbana. Our family traveled to Urbana for church and basically did life outside of Paxton. As the multi-campus thing was starting to emerge, we felt like there would be a church in Paxton, but we never really saw ourselves as the pastors there. We figured somebody else would do it. We already loved what we were doing; we loved the big church thing. Things were going well.

One Sunday we were going down to our Sullivan campus, about an hour and a half south of us, to help out with worship. I felt like a nudge from God, and I verbalized it. I turned to my wife DeDe and said, “I think we’re supposed to be the campus pastors at the Paxton church.” She turned to me and said the two words every husband longs to hear. She said, “You’re right.”

So, I basically realized this had to be God, because she agreed with me. We started talking about it with the senior leadership, because this would obviously change our roles that we currently had. We held some interest meetings with people that lived in the Paxton area; there were many people that traveled south for church every Sunday. DeDe was a small group leader in charge of that area. About 80 people were there and expressed a desire to have a campus in Paxton.

Once we decided, we ended up launching about four months later. So that was actually a very fast process. This was in 2010. We renovated a storefront building over a period of three months. It just about killed me. It was bad, but we got in. Even up to the Saturday night before the first Sunday, the bathrooms didn’t work. But we got started.

And God was present right from the get-go. It was so powerful right from the start to see how he was impacting the community with our little church.

In serving as a campus pastors, we learned so much about ourselves and tons about God. We saw things we didn’t even know were possible.

Four years later, in September of 2014, we began to feel a nudge from God again to go to another level of faith. So we began to feel it was the right thing at the right time to go from being a multi-site campus of a larger church to being our own autonomous church.

Again we processed that with our senior leadership and talked to our congregation. It was exhilarating, and it was terrifying. It was “cutting the cord,” so to speak. Removing some real safeguards.

So in April 2015, we made that transition as well. Our senior leadership, our congregation, everyone felt like it was a God thing. This was on April Fool’s Day, of course!

But God has been faithful in miraculous ways, surprising ways, to make sure we knew that he was in this thing and to not freak out. It has been so reassuring.

Through it all, I remember something Phil Strout said a couple of years back. He would give this equation: “A divine nudge plus earthly obedience equals the miraculous.”

[bctt tweet=”A divine nudge plus earthly obedience equals the miraculous. – Phil Strout” quote=”“A divine nudge plus earthly obedience equals the miraculous.””]

From worship pastor to campus pastor and now senior pastor, God has been faithful, and he’s going to continue to be faithful. I’m growing in my trust in him, to take big steps, even when I can’t see the ground beneath my feet.

Jimm Wood is the co-senior pastor of Hope Vineyard Church in Paxton, Illinois.