Bright City Church
Launching - Jan 2025 | Location - Sunbury, Ohio | Planters - Josh & Sarah Taylor | Website - brightcitysunbury.com
Residency
Church planting has been on our hearts for a long time.
After several years of being in full-time ministry, our passion for church planting grew to the point we started having more conversations with others. That’s when we met Mark Artrip through our affiliation with the Charis Fellowship. He was incredibly helpful, available, and understanding as we asked questions and explored this calling for ourselves.
Finally in 2023, we accepted the invitation to do a one-year residency with Movement Church. We never wanted to church plant alone, and we were so grateful to have people behind us.
It’s hard to explain all the ways that MCN has been there for us. But here are some of the most tangible ways in the last year:
We received practical help fundraising over $100,000 of financial support for our residency.
Mark, his family, and people from Movement helped us move (more than once).
Movement let us use their office storage space to store everything from selling our home in Akron. Movement and Three Creeks also found families that let us live in their homes while we waited to close on our new home (not easy with three young kids!). This took us three months, and it absolutely blew our minds the support we received.
Movement patiently helped us find a location in Columbus with need for greater gospel-presence that fit our family’s life stage and ministry approach (Sunbury).
We already have several families committed to our launch team from Movement and Three Creeks, with several more individuals and families considering our launch team.
MCN has also given us so many connections with people in Northeast Columbus that has made our work much easier.
MCN has given us countless training, tools, systems, templates, demographic research, and ideas.
MCN has given us direct access to their staffs, churches, resources, and Sunday teaching opportunities.
MCN has prioritized our family and spiritual health more than any other church or organization in our experience.
We are still in this first year of residency, but we are quickly approaching to our launch team phase. We could not have done this on our own. We are so grateful to have a team and family supporting us along the way for Bright City Church.
Current Church Status
We already have a community group that meets in our home, and a separate men’s and women’s Bible study. We also have been getting involved in Sunbury by being involved in our boys school, coaching soccer, and serving our neighbors.
We will start having interest meetings and launch team commitments for Bright City Church in Spring 2024. We are thrilled to see the people God is already bringing together for our launch team—dozens from our network moving here with us and dozens already living locally who need a church. We are still exploring possible meeting locations and looking for a full-time worship leader. Starting in September 2024, our launch team will begin having weekly meetings. We will also launch more community groups and start having local impact events. In January 2025, we plan to have preview gatherings and our public launch.
We are obviously still getting started as a church. But we will start saving 5% of our budget from day one for the purpose of supporting a future resident church planter near us. We have amazing opportunities through MCN in the greater Columbus area to partner together to reach other communities near us.