“This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: ‘… Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper’” (Jeremiah 29:4-7 NIV84).
When we first moved to the city of Wilson, North Carolina, we thought we would only live here for a couple of years. I was transferred here from Roanoke, Virginia in late 1987 by my employer. They had moved me before, so I figured it was only a matter of time before they asked me to move again. After all, if you wanted to be on the corporate fast track and make V.P. by age 35, then you had to be mobile.
But that’s not what happened. December of this year we will have lived in Wilson for 25 years.
We didn’t choose to stay. We thought a job brought us here until we tried to leave. In January of 1991 I got off the corporate fast track. I quit my job and started seminary. I had my house for sale for over two years, but we didn’t get a single offer. We were stuck in Wilson it seemed. So I commuted to seminary and eventually planted Wilson Community Church (The first church meetings were in our house that wouldn’t sell).
While other church planters did their demographic studies and moved their families to large unreached cities, we planted in Wilson because of an apparent real estate downturn. In the early days of WCC, I felt very insecure about this, especially since planting a contemporary, community church in Eastern North Carolina in the early ’90s was unheard of. Starting a church in Wilson was very hard work and the results were extremely slow.
It took a while before I recognized God’s call to the city of Wilson. The message that the Lord gave the prophet Jeremiah for the Jews exiled in Babylon, actually helped me work through my own sense of “exile.” God told the Jews that it was He that had “carried them” to the city of Babylon, not King Nebuchadnezzer. He also told them to stop living in limbo and to start being a blessing to this pagan city of Babylon because they weren’t leaving anytime soon.
Apparently, they had been huddling in a city ghetto to themselves, not investing, not growing, just surviving. But God told them to increase, to build, to plant, to be a blessing to the city to which they had been called. God called them to stop just surviving, He called them to thrive!
Looking back, I now believe it was God who “carried” me to Wilson (not my employer). And I believe it was God who kept me here (not the poor housing market). God wanted us to plant a church in Wilson, a church that would “seek the peace and prosperity” of the city.
WCC is now approaching its 21st anniversary. We meet in a former movie theater across the street from the hospital on the main, 5-lane highway that goes through downtown. We live in a county of 82,000 people where 56% say they don’t attend church. That’s 46,000 unreached people. We are also experiencing a huge population growth in the Eastern part of our state that includes Wilson.
Over the next 10 years it is predicted that Eastern North Carolina will grow at a rate faster than the rest of the state. While Charlotte, Winston Salem, and Greensboro and the Western part of the state will continue to grow, it is the Eastern part of North Carolina that is predicted to grow the fastest. Raleigh-Durham, Greenville, Wilmington and Fayetteville are the new magnets for NC growth trends. These Eastern NC cities will drive the population to the nearby cities like Wilson (Which is half way between Raleigh and Greenville making it a 40 minute commute to either).
As it turns out, it looks like God did His own demographic study on Wilson. That’s why we’re ready to put in another 20 years “seeking the peace and prosperity” of the city to which we’ve been carried.