2012-2013

Our story probably starts before 2012 but there were some major foundational relationships being built in that time. This will be a quick summary of the major events that were key to the formation of where we are today.

In the summer of 2012, we started attending a bible study that met every other week at Katy’s house.  There would be any number of people there from 6-26 and often very different people.  We occasionally met at a coffee house to accommodate some of the travelers.

One week in the fall of that year, it was only four of us, Katy and her husband Jon and me and Jarred.  We sat down and talked out how we could get people coming more consistently and we prayed for guidance.  We decided that in the New Year we would start meeting every week to help with the consistency.  We also named the group, Common Ground, to give it a little identity.

After that things started booming.  We met at Katy’s house and before long, we had too many people to conduct one bible study so we had one group upstairs and one group downstairs.  By the fall we outgrew that formation because the house was in the city so there was not much parking so we started meeting in two separate houses.  We were drawing in people from several churches and even from across the river in Illinois. 

In order to keep continuity between the groups, we met once a month to do worship and share testimonies and sometimes take communion and have someone share a message with us.  When the four of us look back, we say “That’s the time we accidentally planted a church.”




The church building that let us have our monthly "service".

We were having a blast and people loved what we were putting on for them.  We felt like we were really growing as leaders, too.  We were always very careful because although we did not have a specific church affiliation, we wanted to be accountable to people wiser than us since we realized we had a place of authority over many people.

Towards the end of 2013, in one of our regular “leader meetings” as we were talking we realized that our group was growing in number but not quite in depth.  We decided at the next worship night, we would challenge people to seek accountability from someone above them and to have someone they hold accountable as well.  We handed out sheets so they could write down the names of those people.  Everyone filled out the papers and at the next leader meeting we were going to sort through them all and hold the group accountable to their accountability partners.

The following leader meeting took quite some time.  By the end, each person in our 50+ person group had at least one person that was going to hold them accountable.  Each leader had at least three people that they were going to start holding accountable.  We decided we were going to roll this out in the New Year.  And this is where our story begins.