What is up with Harbour City joining the Family of Churches?

When we planted the first Restored church in Uptown, San Diego, we always dreamed of not just starting 1 church but a family of churches. We wanted to see multiplication happen because it is at the heart of both the mandate given to humanity in Genesis and the Great Commission given to the disciples by Jesus after his resurrection. 

God has honored our desire to multiply disciples by planting churches where healthy disciples can be raised up in a spiritual family (the church) with qualified leaders; by his His grace, we have seen not one, not two, but three more churches planted throughout Southern California!

Philosophically, our desire was to make disciples, who are raised into leaders, who are then sent out to plant churches. We wanted to “grow from within,” with no desire to recruit from the outside. We wanted to start a family, not just build an organization. In the same way that it would be foolish to look for a “son” or  “daughter” on Offerup, we felt it would be foolish to look for church planters outside of our spiritual family.

We wanted to grow organically and relationally, not mechanically or pragmatically. By and large, we have stayed consistent with this philosophy and have not recruited anyone from the outside to plant a church, nor have we planted any churches that were led by someone who wasn’t embedded in a Restored church before they went out.

Over time though, we did realize that there are some limits to this approach. What if there is a church out there with like minded leaders, who are on the same page as we are theologically and philosophically, but have no “home” relationally? What about churches who aren’t connected to anything bigger than themselves but want to be? What if people actually ask to formally be apart of our family of churches? Should we shut them out? What should the standards be for churches who want to connect with us?

We didn’t give this idea much thought until I met Grant and Michelle Clark. I was ministering at a conference in Johannesburg, South Africa some years ago and while I was there, as cheesy as it sounds, I believe I heard the Holy Spirit say to me, ‘Work with that man.” So I awkwardly walked up to Grant like a 10th grade boy asking a girl to a dance and said something like, “Can I have your number? Would you be interested in coming out to visit San Diego? I believe God wants us to partner together in some way.”

Grant and Michelle graciously accepted, and have since then made a yearly visit to Southern California. Throughout the years, we have been a part of many special moments together. We have preached in each other’s churches, built up each other’s churches in various ways (both individually and with teams), and shared our lives with each other. To be honest though, I never thought that Harbour City would join the Restored Family officially, primarily because we hadn’t planted them out, but the other reason had to do with geography. We loved them and they shared most of the same values with us but Durban is SO far from Southern California, how would this even work?

So I never brought it up. Fast forward to last year’s Family of Churches retreat, Grant looked out at everyone worshipping at our combined Sunday morning gathering and felt God say to him, “this is your tribe.” He asked me what it would look like to formally join the Restored Family of Churches, and it was then that we began prayerfully exploring with his elders and ours what formal partnership might look like. Over the last few months, it has become increasingly clear that Jesus is calling us to “make it official.”

Now the geographic barrier still exists, and though it may be difficult at times, I’ve come to realize over the years that the distance is not as problematic as originally thought.

We see the Apostle Paul forming deep partnerships in the Gospel even though he was quite far away from the people he ministered with and to. Though the totality of the Roman Empire was geographically smaller than the sphere of our family of churches, it took a considerably longer amount of time to travel across it. We can travel back and forth between Northern Africa, Durban and South Africa in 30 hours or less. That might seem like a long time, but if you consider that it took 30-50 days of travel on foot to get across the Roman Empire, we are actually able to see each other much easier. Not to mention day to day communication. Letters needed to be hand delivered along the routes when Paul couldn’t visit a church in person which would take dozens of days on average. Now with email, letters can go back and forth in seconds.

So in the end, partnership will look the same with Harbour City as it does with the rest of the churches- the sharing of our prayers, our financial resources and the sending of gifted men and women to build up Gospel work wherever the Holy Spirit calls us to make disciples and plant churches.