Faith Ery Cho, a church planter with ARC (Association of Related Churches), fondly reflects on her time building a faith community in northern New Jersey with her husband. She reminisces on how, after a year-and-a-half of doing everything imaginable, she believed nothing was working.
That included coordinating block parties, vision nights, coffee meetings, and even strategies for the town overall. At times, it felt to Faith Ery Cho that it was all a pipe dream. Yet, six months later, it all came together, and the dream became a reality.
The difference, she says, was that it was a miracle of God. But how do you ensure that your ARC church community experiences this same miracle?
Labor with God
Faith Ery Cho says that her small church community of believers sat in an upper room of the church to become the burgeoning spiritual family it is today. God isn’t stagnant, she says, so when you dwell with Him, He takes you places.
To people from the outside, the time spent in that room might’ve looked like just praying and waiting, yet it was a genuine process of labor. The presence of God was what birthed the church.
Christian leadership is different from other leadership forms in that its leaders are called to produce results that Jesus can only produce. This puts a higher standard than any other type of leadership because success is marked when impossible things are accomplished.
God is the Greatest Resource
Faith Ery Cho, ARC church planter, points out that Jesus said we are meant to do greater things than He did. For her, that meant that if building a church was to be God’s work, then just having His presence there was the greatest resource they could have.
She says that having a deep friendship with Jesus is the biggest resource ARC church planters can have when they want to engage in the business of miracles. This means being authentically, joyfully, and intimately walking with Jesus all along.
Back to the Basics
The personal experience for Faith Ery Cho was realizing she and her husband had come to the end of their previous relationship with God, which was built from a Korean American immigrant church. That brought them back to the basics of what they knew from Scripture.
God is the one who split the sea, after all; it wasn’t the leadership skills that Moses portrayed. Jesus was the one who created multiple loaves of bread and fish; it wasn’t how the food was distributed.
As such, Faith Ery Cho, a church planter with ARC (Association of Related Churches), said they prioritized spending time with Jesus before anything else. They leaned into his guidance for everything before making any decisions — big or small.
Jesus guarantees companionship to his followers, from Jeremiah and Moses to modern-day ones. Faith Ery Cho says the way to build unshakable faith is to lean into God’s miracles.
About ARC (Association of Related Churches)
ARC (Association of Related Churches) is a cooperative of independent churches from different denominations, networks, and backgrounds who strategically resource church planters and pastors to help them reach people with the message of Jesus. ARC exists to see a thriving church in every community, reaching people with the message of Jesus. Since its beginning in 2001, ARC has grown into a global organization and has helped plant more than 1,000 churches.
