Recently, I was flipping through some photos, and noticed these gems from one year ago. These were taken in Aaron & Amy’s living room, back when the church was newborn and still meeting in the Grahams’ house. I don’t even remember whether we’d settled on The District Church as our name, at that point—my inclination is that we hadn’t yet. We were just a bunch of friends who felt called to plant a church in Columbia Heights, and were trying to figure out what that might look like, where and how God might be leading.
Here, in these pictures, you can see what I like to call “Post-It Sunday,” the day when we articulated the things that were necessary to church as well as the things that we could do without and still be church. These post-its eventually developed into some of our core values—including worship, community, and justice.
Twelve months later, we’re still trying to figure out what it looks like to be a church in our neighborhood; we’re still trying to be attentive to each other and to the movement of the Spirit—some things will never change. But much has changed: for the last nine months, we’ve been meeting in a school; we’ve grown more than tenfold from a dozen people to almost a hundred and fifty; we’ve gone from just one small group to five; we’ve gone from being a disparate group of people from around the Columbia Heights neighborhood toward a fuller expression of Christ’s love in our area—through ministering in local high schools, serving at neighborhood events, putting on kids’ festivals and educational movie screenings and more.
What a year it’s been. And, based on the testimony and evidence of the last year, what a year—indeed, what years!—we have to come. I’m simultaneously both completely clueless as to what God’s going to do in and with and through our church in the coming months and years … and so unbelievably excited.