A Brief History: Ten Years of Setting Up Chairs
A Brief History: Ten Years of Setting Up Chairs
In December 2015, Cynthia and I moved to Lake Nona with a desire to reach a new community. We had two toddlers with our third on the way, and a handful of friends. Nine months later, in September 2016, we held our first Sunday service on a Sunday evening in an elementary school cafeteria.
In the last ten years, a lot has changed. But the meaningful mundane of setting up those chairs in a school cafeteria hasn’t. And I’ve come to believe there’s something symbolic in that.
At that time, Lake Nona was a place with enormous ambitions and relatively few people. Medical City was still taking shape. Neighborhoods were still being built. And most of the people who would eventually call Trinity home hadn’t moved here yet.
That’s still very true, by the way. A significant part of our church’s future is made up of people who haven’t arrived in Lake Nona yet. In that sense, we have always been a church called to believe in people we haven’t met.
The last ten years have held more than I ever could have imagined or planned.
In 2017, we moved to a new school, began meeting on Sunday mornings, and welcomed our fourth child. In June 2018, after a long season of prayer, our leaders unanimously sensed God leading us to become an independent congregation. A few months later in November, we ratified our church covenant, installed our first elders, welcomed our first covenant members, and officially became Trinity Church of Lake Nona.
Then 2020 came. The whole world adapted to COVID.
Like every church, we had to learn how to be a church when we couldn’t gather in person, and learn how to gather online. After 9 long months, we gratefully regathered in our cafeteria in January 2021. Many of you know the depth of what the “recovery years” required at Trinity: reshaping Sunday mornings, restarting ministries and groups, launching a Discipleship Hour, bringing on new staff, and rebuilding our leadership and membership. We asked the Lord to heal and restore.
None of it was glamorous. All of it was faithful work sacrificially given by people who could have quietly stepped away — and didn’t — and the faithful work of our God who could have sovereignly waited to provide — but didn’t.
I think often about the Lake Nona logo. Its waves run horizontally, and that’s a fitting picture of this place: forward, ambitious, always building, always moving.
Trinity’s logo desires to take those same waves and turn them upward. Heavenward.
Augustine famously wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Ten years in, that is still the point.
The aspirations that bring people to Lake Nona aren’t wrong. They’re just incomplete. Our calling has been, and remains, to be a God-centered, grace-saturated anchor church in this community for generations to come.
“Anchor” may sound like a strange word for a church that packs itself into a trailer every week.
But I’ve learned that an anchor isn’t about having a building. It’s about staying. It is about faithfulness. In a community where people are constantly coming and going, faithfulness looks like people who keep showing up. People who haul equipment before sunrise. People who set up the chairs. People who faithfully teach children, lead groups, pray for one another, and make room at their tables for the new family that moved in last month. People who take steps towards faithfulness, and trust God to do the rest.
Ultimately, the gift I’m most grateful for isn’t anything on the timeline. It’s the grace. God has been patient with us, and with me, in more ways than I can count. Honestly, in more ways than I could possibly know or see. And over ten years, I’ve watched that same grace become the air by which this church breathes, and by which it is sustained.
People who know they’ve been forgiven much tend to make a pretty good church family.
So this Sunday, we’re going to do what God’s people have done all throughout church history to celebrate when God has been kind to them:
We’re going to eat together and give thanks.
Join us for our Ten-Year Potluck Lunch this Sunday, September 27, immediately after the service. I’ll be smoking the barbecue, and the church is providing drinks and cake. We’d love for you to bring a side dish or dessert to share.
If you’ve been here ten years or ten days, there’s a seat for you.
Bring your kids. Bring your neighbors. Bring a story about what God has done.
And before we eat, we’ll hopefully have to set up a few more chairs; we have become pretty good at it these last ten years.
“The Lord has done great things for us; we are glad.” — Psalm 126:3
See you Sunday!
Ben
