we’re moving!, part one.

By now many of you know that we are moving next week.  We signed our lease and got the keys on Monday.  Here’s our new apartment building:

I have decided to tell you about our move by answering some frequently asked questions, which I’ll spread out over this week while we’re cleaning and organizing and meeting with painters and movers.

“Why are you moving?”

This may seem sudden, but we’ve been talking about moving for months now.  We just weren’t sure where.  We weren’t even sure what city.  We’re learning that’s what happens when you join a brand-new team.  It takes a long time to figure out exactly what the needs are and exactly what we can do to help meet those needs.  So this has been a year of adjusting, of asking questions, of listening, of lots and lots of conversations and research and ideas.

Spending a whole year not knowing what we’re doing or where we’ll end up living has felt like an eternity.  But friends who have done this kind of thing before tell us it’s perfectly normal.

We are here in South Asia to help plant churches.  For us, as outsiders, that looks like working alongside South Asian pastors who’ve invited us to come encourage, dream, serve and train others together.  Most of the pastors we are working with live and work in rural, poor areas.  So part of our job, and one of the purposes of the business we’re starting, is to help them support themselves and their families financially.

This year our team has seen a great need to help the pastors in this way; we’ve also seen a need for churches to be planted in urban, English-speaking, middle-to-upper-class areas.  And the exciting thing about this is that these city churches can then partner with rural churches and share money and resources and fellowship.  So David is in the process of talking with the national pastor we work closely with about starting the first of these city churches.

The very first step of this process is for our family to move into the area we hope to plant a church.  By doing this, we can start becoming apart of that community, making contacts and friends, asking tons of questions, and learning what the unique personality and needs of the community are.

And about this, I want to say one more thing.  When I was twenty years old and on winter break from school, I went to Philadelphia for the first time with my friends David Gentino and Nick Dentel.  We hung out in the city and stayed with David’s amazingly cool older sister in her amazingly cool Philly apartment.  And from that trip on I thought, “City life is for me.”

Tim Keller says that a requirement for planting churches in a city is having a love for the city for it’s own sake.  Not just for ministry’s sake.  That kind of love has grown, inexplicably, in our hearts over the years.  A big piece was New City Fellowship in Lancaster City, PA.  And another piece was living and falling in love with Manhattan last year during our month there.

So yes, in the crudest of terms, we are moving for David’s job.   But we are also moving because we want to.  We love the hustle and bustle, the energy, the ease of meeting people in big cities, the diversity, the restaurants and the parks, the bright lights and the shopping.  We love the city.  And it is a dream come true to be living in one now and moving even closer to its center.

I think that’s what I’m most excited about right now, that we seem to be reaching a season of life where what we love to do and want to do converge with what God is calling us to do.  I have often struggled in my life with knowing where I fit into ministry.  But I can think of nothing I’d love more than living right downtown in a diverse area, walking to the supermarket and the bakery and Judah’s school, meeting people, hanging out with my neighbors, having friends over for dinner, dropping by a neighbor’s house for tea, starting a book club, learning to cook South Asian food, having meaningful conversations about life and family and Jesus.

And, the biggest surprise is, it seems like right now, that is what’s needed.

A perfect fit.