the first post of the rest of my life

by D.O.

Most of the posts I publish here on odfm take somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour to compose. This post has taken over 7 years to materialize. Consider yourselves warned.

In college the Good Lord saw fit to surround me with a group of boys-becoming-men on a street called Luther. So special did these men become to me that I gave them forevermore the title “Roommate,” regardless of the fact that we would no longer be living together. Among the countless enjoyable activities we found ourselves participating in during those four fateful years, one of my favorites was the time spent on the Luther House’s front porch, where many of the world’s greater problems were nearly solved.

It was on that porch that we first began to dream about what it might look like for us to live together after college. Because let’s face it, why would anybody want to rid themselves of such glorious community? The plan was to spend 5-10 years working and getting married, at which point we’d all move to a small town in the northwest and take it over: one of us would be the police chief, one would be the mayor, one the school board president, and so on. The beauty of this dream is that some of us were more serious than joking in discussing it. As time progressed, our dream shifted from small-town domination to simple, communal, missional, sustainable, non-cult living.

Fast-forward to June 2009 and the handful of us who were “more serious than joking” decided to start meeting as close to weekly as the distance between us and our busy schedules would allow in order to pray and discuss what pursuing our dream would look like. It was during these meetings that the Lord took our dream and matured it from communal, missional living to full-fledged church planting.

The people who came to these post-college gatherings were different than the ones you’d have found on the porch 5 years prior: We were grown up, cleaner, supporting ourselves, and most of us (read: everyone but D.O.) were married, and as such there were girls in the group now. And it cannot be overstated what an invaluable addition these women were to our group. We’d also picked up a sister and brother-in-law of one of the Roommates. We were nine.

Sometime between graduating and meeting as a Group in 2009′s Summer, we became aware of a church in Washington state called Resonate. Some of us had friends on staff at Resonate and upon hearing about our Group, those friends thought it would be beneficial for our two parties to meet up. On a trip to Washington for a wedding in early August, two of our nine met with a couple pastors from Resonate and began talking about the possibility of our Group spending a season in Pullman, training under Resonate in the ways of church planting.

The next nine months were full of meetings with our Group, meetings with Resonate’s leaders, and meetings with the Good Shepherd. As time went on, it became more and more evident that this was in fact something that the Lord was sovereignly orchestrating: Resonate’s desire to help equip our team, while simultaneously giving us the freedom to execute the church planting however we feel led; the brilliance with which our groups’ personalities meshed; the countless “random” interactions that led to our two groups connecting… it’s a very small glimpse of divine beauty.

Earlier this month, I spent a week in Pullman (and not just me, but seven of our nine) to iron out various last-minute details and to make sure that everything was in fact as good a fit as it seemed to be. Turns out, it was. We applied for a lease on a house, applied for jobs, shared countless quality conversations with Resonate’s staff and leadership, and flew back home with more anticipation for what was to come than we’d felt before.

If you’ve made it this far in the post, you’re probably wondering what happens next. Well let me tell you:

Five of our nine (including yours truly) will be quitting our jobs, not renewing our leases, being sent by our churches, having good-bye parties and moving to Pullman this June. The remaining four have commitments that will keep them in Texas for a little while longer, and they’ll come up and join us once said commitments are satisfied. We will train in Pullman under Resonate for an indefinite amount of time (approximately a year), and from there we’ll be sent out to plant somewhere else in the northwest.

So it looks like I’ll be knocking out two of the seven things I may or may not have committed to doing in 2010, which is exciting.

Stay tuned… your friends might start talking about this blog after all*.

*Highly unlikely