Church Plant Spotlight: Valley Church
As we embrace being BOLDLY FORWARD, NEVER ALONE as Fellowship Pacific, one of the key ways we live this out is through church planting and we are excited to share more stories from our church plants this year! This month we want to introduce you to Valley Church in Duncan, BC!
It all started when Christy woke up in the middle of the night in January 2022 with the Spirit telling her that we needed to move our family from Langley and start a church in Duncan. Despite my (Wes) fear of returning to a city I grew up in where people knew my non-churched self very well, I decided I should at least pray about it. As I began praying about church planting, Ben Laird said to me, “If you ever want to plant a church in Duncan, Melissa and I are in.” Coincidental conversation? I wasn’t sure at this point.
Christy and I met with David Horita who told us that if we wanted to church plant, the Fellowship would help us, but the real question was if I believed in myself, that I felt like I could do it. I wasn’t convinced yet that I really could be a church planter. But hearing David speak boldly with endorsement, it started to sink in a bit and helped me explore whether I really did believe we could plant a church in Duncan.
We took our family to pray in Duncan for a day in February. We returned to Langley and agreed that if this is Jesus moving us, all six of the Lindes needed to feel called. As we prayed together as a family every night, one by one all of the kids became convinced they were called to go except one child, which made us think, “Ok, so I guess we don’t have to do this!”
After a business meeting one week, someone came up to me at Southridge and said, “This might sound strange but I have to ask you something. What does the Cowichan Valley mean to you?” The first thing I said was, “What do you know about us?” They didn’t know the journey we were on, but that was the confirmation our last child needed to also feel called to church planting. We felt that there were three other things (fleeces) we needed to lay out to see if this was a calling from God. We learned that housing was affordable even with interest rates rising, people might actually come and join us, and in the end we were convinced that we would be disobedient if we said no to church planting in Duncan.
We moved in the summer of 2022 and started with a small group of 41 people on October 16th. The following week we had 44 and by the final week of October, we had 72 people in our living room. We quickly realized that this was clearly not going to be enough room to grow from there, so we moved into the local movie theatre on November 6th, 2022. We officially launched to the public on January 8th, 2023 and we continue to be a growing church of 140 regularly attending people with an average of 100 people in attendance each week. People are finding belonging, hearing from the Holy Spirit, choosing to follow Jesus and reaching out to others who don’t know Jesus in our city!
Through all of this, what has been really special has been the encouragement, support, and partnership that we’ve experienced through Fellowship Pacific, not only from other churches, but from Camp Qwanoes who have given leadership to key roles in worship and kids ministry along with hosting our initial interest gathering, our Valley Youth all school year, our Launch Sunday Potluck, and will be hosting our five beach baptisms on June 11, 2023 at Qwanoes Beach!
Would you join us in praying along with Valley Church?
Duncan/North Cowichan is a very unchristian city, with new age beliefs, superstition, astrology, First Nations spirituality, and liberal lifestyles. Please be praying for the unbelievers in our gatherings who are exploring a life with Jesus and having to give up these things to follow Him.
Please pray for more volunteers in our church to think like missionaries, specifically that Jesus would call people to help in our children’s ministry on Sundays and teach kids how to know Jesus personally.
Please pray as we enter discussions with First Nations people. We will be volunteering in the community for the Reconciliation Walk on September 30th, which saw 10,000 people in attendance last year.