There is an element of church planting that is so vital that your effort is doomed to failure without it. I am of course talking about faith. Faith to see God move in your area and to see people saved, faith to grow your church and envision the future, and faith to take on activities and goals that are challenging and seemingly impossible without this belief in God’s power.

I would argue that every church starts with a small seed of faith and if you talk to any leader or founding member in ourManchester churches they will tell you that it began with faith. A small amount of faith can see great things happen and ‘mountains move’ according to scripture. Faith is something that we need to persevere with over the life of our church in order to see it continuously grow and develop.

If we look at the most famous description of faith in the New Testament we can see how this is true of the Christian life. Hebrews 11 begins: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” A church that does not exist but has someone who has been given the faith to see it happen can envision and wholeheartedly believe in its future existence. This faith will then motivate their actions, hopefully, for the duration of the church planting phase. Further on in the chapter we see how Abraham, Moses, David, the Israelites, Jacob and Joseph all saw things “far off” and were convinced that what God had promised was true and would happen.

We can see things in our future here at CCM in faith that we believe will happen. We also have examples of things we had faith for that have already happened. These things include CCM:City that we talked about in the last post, and believing God for a congregation large enough to warrant moving to a new venue. We believe that God will make CCM a large church with multiple congregations meeting all over Manchester from the east side inwards. We have already begun to see these things occur.